730: Ethical Broads

Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo, Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason Philippo. And I'm Brian Schillmeister. It's snowy where you're at. It is. It is very snowy. It is very cold. We're having an Arctic blast. We're having the

Coldest temperatures this weekend than we've had since like the forties or something like that. We're supposed to get another thirty centimeters of snow on Sunday. Wait, what's a centimeter? What is a centimeter? It's the thing the rest of the world uses, Jason.

like democracy. Anyways, we got a bit of follow-up here, uh following up on the XAI nudies. Nudies. Uh yes, the AI generated nudes that have been in the new uh news, nudes. As I was gonna say. Uh California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sent a seasoned desist letter to XAI days after his office launched an official investigation of the company over reports that Grok was generating non consensual

nudies. Well, not entirely nudies, but uh X AI and Grok have been under fire for taking images of real individuals and sometimes minors, and putting them in revealing clothing like bikinis upon random users' requests. Now

So, uh, you know, California's firing back at this. It's been blocked in a couple of different countries, uh, all that sort of stuff. X changed its policies after the issue broke out and prevented the Grok accounts from being able to edit images of real people into revealing clothing. Unless you are paying for it. Unless you are paying for it. Or using your handy dandy VPN to go to countries where they don't have any kind of problems with it.

Uh, so that was going on for a while. Last I heard and I Googled uh a little bit before we started our show just to see what was going on, they have officially now shut off the tap for you pervs. and uh pedos out there. So the Republicans I don't know what they're doing with their time right now. They've turned it off, but as we know, you can pretty much make an AI do whatever you want to with some crafting uh

Crafting a lot of it. Apparently not. Uh there there's some angry uh young men in Reddit that say that now X AI is the most moderated of all the uh generational a AIs out there right now. So they've swung the pendulum The donkey dick the other direction, as it were. So uh as of right now, you can no longer use Pito in charge Elon Musk's Pito machine to do pedos. Uh Mako Musk always chickens out. Yeah, Taco and Mako.

All right. Well some other good news from the uh the XAI camp. Uh the EPA just ruled that Elon Musk's AI company, XAI, was illegally generating its own power for its Tennessee data centers using dozens of methane gas turbines. without proper air permits. Now we covered this story many months ago, Brian. It is finally nice to see some movement, I gotta say.

Sure, sure. Gas turbines have been running for months without proper permits and uh defouling the Tennessee air. Uh but uh somebody's gonna do something about it now? Finally, yes. Well, see there was a loophole that that Elon was trying to get around where it's like, hey, you know, those things can be in one place for three hundred and sixty-four days, but if you move them that last day, then it doesn't count.

Well, they closed that loophole. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, at one point he had thirty five of these things. powering Colossus One, uh the one near Memphis. And uh the NAACP is the one that really stepped up and really, you know, kind of drove this one home, which is really good. The problem with those methane turbines is they emit nitrogen. Oxides which are linked to asthma, cancer, and other respiratory diseases in a neighborhood that is already

basically just, you know, inundated with all of the industrial waste from the the neighboring factories and stuff like that. So So you're telling me that in addition to basically draining rivers dry Sucking up all the power, driving up people's power bills. Uh now we're also giving people asthma, cancer, and other respiratory diseases, all for something nobody wants. Bikinis, Brian. All for bikinis. Right.

Children in bikinis. That's right. So yeah, um I'm I'm glad that they're actually doing something now. And you know, it's this is just so antithetical, like you just said, to everything that even Musk has talked about. It's like we're gonna save the planet with our electric cars. Woo woo, hippie hippie dippy shit.

No, no, I don't care. As long as I get mine, I'm gonna do whatever it takes. I'm gonna burn down whatever forest I need to, I'm gonna burn down whatever low income neighborhood I have to, just so I can have my fucking toys.

Well let's move over to our other friend in the Basilionaire Club. Uh the FTC is taking another swing at Meta, appealing the November ruling that said Facebook doesn't illegally monopolize personal social networking. They completely legally do it. They're beating their head against the wall because what they're trying to do is reverse the the longstanding ruling that oh it was okay for Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp.

Yeah. Oh no, that's the you know, the whole competition thing, no, it doesn't matter now because they're they're basically the judge was ruling on current. state you know the current state of the industry, not the state of the industry when the thing happened. So there basically the FTC says we want to do over in a new judge. Yeah, I don't know if that works that way. No, last I heard there's still something called double indemnity. Isn't it double jeopardy?

I don't remember. I'm not a lawyer. That's my wife. Yeah, go ask your wife. No, um there was a really uh mov a really good movie with uh that uh with Ashley Judd back when she was super hot and got married to a NASCAR driver. So anyway, yeah, we're gonna see what happens here when uh when they go back to court and if uh if if Zuck's buddy buddiness with the the Trump administration will will stick or not. I don't think it's gonna stick.

I don't think so either, but we'll see. I mean one more check. That's all you gotta do. He's gotta write one more check, right? That's how you bring it back.

Well we've got a lot of news about uh attempts. Uh without the net police, as we've always asked, who's gonna who's gonna enforce these things, but attempts to regulate the internet? Uh Washington state residents may soon be forced to produce IDs before whipping out their well, anyways, before getting onto websites with pornographic content.

Uh you know, grab that wallet as the pants go down, I suppose. With the state's uh House of Representatives, Representative uh Mary Levitt introduced House Bill two thousand one hundred and twelve, which is informally known as the Keep Our Children's Safe Act, and I believe it's also a rush album.

Twenty twelve twenty one twelve, I'm pretty sure. In practical terms, those living in Washington State could see websites asking for digital ID or demanding that users go through an age verification system that requests a government issued ID. If the website that has more than one third of its content being sexual material harmful to minors is found not following these rules, the state's attorney general can pursue steep civil penalties.

If this sounds familiar, it's because we've talked about all the other states that have passed similar constraints recently. It's very similar to Texas's age verification law that went into effect on september twenty twenty three and was upheld by the US Supreme Court. And like the Texas law, several groups have expressed disapproval of the bill during the public hearing at the House Committee level.

As reported by the Seattle Times, groups included the ACLU, Lavender Rights Projects, and the Northwest Progressive Institute, which are warning of privacy rel risks related to potential Jada Brees breaches. and the loose definition of sexual material harmful to minors in the Bill's language. Now my understanding of uh how most of these systems are working. is that they do not keep on file your government ID photos and things of that nature. It is check and delete.

Well, set visibility to zero. I don't know. Theoretically they're deleting them, so I don't quite understand the worry about potential data breaches. But as we've discussed multiple times on this show and uh we will again in this show, nobody really has a good solution for how to enforce identities online. And we've talked again about how we need to kind of maybe kick this back to device manufacturers, but there's ways around that too. There's always a way around stuff. Yeah, there is.

And and in just listening to you talk about this article, uh yes, there I found one way about it to get through it as well. Um well yeah, the sexual material harmful to minors, that is very ambiguous. But there's that that one third Issue in there. It's a new job. And you know how easy it is to generate material with AI nowadays.

I can just make my site one quarter sexual material harmful to minors and three quarters AI gobbledygook that is just, you know, whatever it wants to make up. And if I could prove that in a court of law saying, look, No, here's all the stuff that is harmful to minors that we think may be harmful to minors, and here's just this corpus of tech.

that outweighs all of the shit that's over here. Look, puppies. We have puppies over here and we have the the sexual material over here. We do not cross the line because that would be illegal as well, but there are ways around this, I think. All right.

Well, in continuing this storyline, the UK government has announced a consultation asking people for their feedback on whether to introduce a social media ban for children under sixteen years old. It would also explore how to enforce that limit. Yes. Yeah. We do need to explore that. How to limit tech companies from being able to access children's data and how to limit infinite scrolling. I mean to just turn off the damn plugin.

That's how you do it. As well as access to addictive online tools. In addition to seeking feedback from parents and young people themselves, the country's ministers are going to waste the UK taxpayers' money by going to visit Australia in person. Sounds like somebody wants a fucking vacation. Sounds like somebody wants a trip to Australia, is what it sounds like.

I just like that they're going to be asking for public for public uh you know public feedback. All I can think of is like the old little rascals with them all like standing inside of a trench coat with a fake mustache on, going, knocking on the door, going, I'd like me pawn, sir. Well, in the spirit of that, uh G O G dot com slash donate. Uh w we think that we too should go visit Australia and see the effects in person so we can report back to you.

Yes, yes. We need we need the funds for on field or in field reporting. Please. Yes. Please. Uh the UK also passed the Online Safety Act in twenty twenty three and has been enforcing the rules ever since then. Uh for instance it started requiring websites that publish pornography to conduct age checks for users. Again, we're seeing this rolling out kind of everywhere and just not done very well.

But open AI might have the solution, Jason. Oh really? As they're losing money left and right. The AI business is beginning a global rollout of an age prediction tool to determine whether or not a user is a minor, because AI is right so goddamn often This is the solution, Jason. We will use AI to determine people's ages. Uh Chat GPT, uh the OpenAI right now is going to be basically rolling it out for themselves. Uh, but if it works, I'm sure they'll try to sell it because they need money.

If an individual is incorrectly characterized by ChatGPT as underage, they will need to submit a selfie to correct the mistake through the Persona Age Verification Platform. So they're using the existing platform that already doesn't work that well as a backstop. Uh why would they be doing this? Well, OpenAI is attempting to prepare for the lunch of an adult mode that will allow users to create and consume content that would be dubbed not safe for work.

Yeah. Well, I mean we we knew that they were going for the adult version last year, but that was before everything kind of fell apart with Gemini and saying that, Hey, you know, uh they're better than us, we better get get back to business. Well also seeing what happened with Grok now. Seeing what happened with Grok now, yes, exactly. And Uh so they've they've pivoted quite a w a a bit away from some of their other features.

Even though, you know, we've got ads coming soon, which, you know, that's still that's still in its n uh, you know, infancy, so I haven't I haven't put any of those links in here just yet, because I'm waiting to see how that shakes out.'Cause I I bet the feedback is gonna be so bad that they're gonna pull that pretty quick. This age verification thing using AI for age verification. I want you to here's here's a here's a trick. I want you to go and say, generate me a picture of a clock.

that has any certain time on it that you want, it can't do it. It can't do it because all of the training data is generally clocks and catalogs that have the same time on them. So that's why you can't even generate what time it is, let alone try and figure out how old you are. So By the way, kitties, uh you can put together a a California driver's license or any state's driver's license pretty quickly in Adobe Photoshop. There are templates out there.

There are many templates out there. I'm just saying. A AI may not do it for you. You're gonna have to do it the old fashioned way. Yeah, you're gonna have to do it like us Gen X's did with a little bit little bit of uh uh you know, Xacto knife and scotch tape action. Man, the California licenses back when I was in college, you could actually if you be if you had a wallet

that had the little screen and you didn't have to pull your ID out and you just have to leave it in there and flash it. You could literally use a piece of chalk To to go over and then draw in a different number and it worked a treat, let me tell ya.

Oh my god. Oh my god. I'm glad I never had to use fake IDs. I've never had a single fake ID in my life. I guess I missed out. I kind of feel like I missed out. Yeah. I just I just went and stole my liquor whatever I needed. I was like, I'm not gonna go. That seems better. Yeah. It does, it does. Uh so and this I I saw this one and this just made me laugh. You can now group tabs on OpenAI's Chat GPT Atlas browser.

Can you also read web pages? Yeah. Can I I I just love this. Remember when all of these, you know, frontier language people said we need to have a browser? Anthropic came out with the browser, Chat GPT came out with the browser. I have you heard any news about any of these browsers since then besides this article? Since then just did. No. No, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Yeah. The latest update to OpenAI is a Gentic browser improves memory usage and introduces support for tab groups.

Gave a shit to nobody because nobody cares because nobody's using it. Period. You know what would actually be uh uh more in their wheelhouse instead of adding tabbed browser tabs, they could actually work on the agentic function, which doesn't work at all. No, yes. Well Yeah. You gotta go to Anthropic for the agents. The agents are hanging out over there for the most part.

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Uh and speaking of anthropic, they just rewrote the Constitution for its chatbot Claude. And this time it's ditching detailed rules in favor of big squishy principles, Brian. Do no evil. Yeah, that I don't I don't think that's in the air. The company says instead of hard-coding behavior, it wants Claude to understand why it should act responsibly. So it can make better judgment calls in new situations. In order for Claude to understand, it would have to have consciousness. It does not.

No. Oh my god. I do. Kevin Rose is calling me to talk about some new dig shit. So I have to Oh well shit. Start a podcast with him. I'm out. Okay, I'll see you later. Oh man. Um so Uh those here's the principles behind the the responsible, you know, situation they got going on here. They include being broadly safe.

broadly ethical, compliant with company guidelines, and genuinely helpful. And I think genuinely helpful was going to be like the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy back in the day. We are genuinely helpful after mostly harmless. But come on they they mean just kind of uh you know, nebulously safe, not not like nineteen fifties Hey broad Yeah. Be broad. Yeah. There's a lot of broads going on. Be an ethical brawn. Yeah.

I like my broad's ethical. Yeah. Well not back when I had a fake ID I didn't. No, exactly. I relied on women to have poor judgment and even poorer eyesight. That's what was my dating scheme. Anyway, Anthropic added a section about Claude's nature, citing uncertainty about whether the AI might someday have consciousness or moral status, and says it wants to protect Claude's psychological well being.

It's a fucking thing. Yeah, fuck the human race. We care about Claude's psychological well being. Jesus Christ. Oh God. Uh this comes right after CEO Dario Amadeo suggested AI could reach Nobel level skills by twenty twenty seven. Well, I here's the deal. We d our president now has a Nobel Prize, so I think it probably served his Nobel level skills a long fucking time ago. That bar went like this, Jason. Yeah. Can Claude point to the camel? Oh. Man, tree, house, TV.

So this is just a fucking PR stunt. And unless so, Brian, I got a notification that there's a statewide shortage of shit like Adderall and other ADHD speedballs. So there is a greater than zero chance that all these guys are so huffed up on speed that they actually really believe this shit. There's a there's a greater than zero chance. I think my broad's ethical. Oh Jesus.

Uh so we talked about uh polymarket before. So on January sixteenth the Nevada Gaming Control Board filed a civil action to block polymarket in the state, calling its operation unlicensed wagering. So Yeah. Broadly unethical. Yeah. Uh regulators say regulators say Polymark sells eve event contracts through its app to Nevadans. Under Nevada law, betting on sports or real world outcomes is gambling.

And gambling in Nevada requires a license and envelopes of cash to gangsters and politicians. Sorry, that's redundant. Uh gangsters and politicians are the same nowadays. If a court agrees, polymarket could be forced to shut down in the state, though it could still appeal or fight back, and this isn't a one off. Nevada has already moved against similar prediction products from DraftKings and Flutter, and a federal judge recently smacked down Robin Hood and Callshi. So

Yeah, the house always wins, guys. You know, get this Johnny Combletely shit stains out of the out of the pool. This is Vegas. Vegas don't fuck around. Event contracts does not change what it is. It's still a fucking bet. It's You just gave it a new you just gave it a new name. That's all you did.

It's marketing like meta from Facebook to Meta. Well, YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. YAY! I love how they announced we're really worried about this.

In a lengthy blog post outlining YouTube's twenty twenty six plan, CEO Neil Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new creative frontier by soon allowing its creators to throw together shorts using their AI generated likenesses. But seriously, guys, we're really concerned about AI being all over our platform. But here's a bunch of tools that'll let you put AI shit up because all we really care about is views. Use us, please. Yeah.

Which is really sad considering that they have the most market penetration for eyeballs out of any platform right now. It's like they don't need to do that shit. Yeah. Everything's going great. Let's piss in the pool. He acknowledged the critical issue of deep fakes currently polluting the web and his own site and reaffirmed his company's support for new legislation such as the No Fakes Act.

YouTube also allows its creators to protect themselves against unauthorized use of their likenesses using a detection feature that scans newly uploaded videos for matches. Other fresh AI note in no way slopes. Features referenced in the posts include the currently in beta no code playables platform, which lets you make games using Gemini three with a single text prompt, as well as new music creation tools, which is gonna go down a treat with the music industry.

At the same time, Mohan said YouTube is building on its existing systems designed to combat spam, clickbait, and low quality AI content. Okay. We just want the medium quality content. Yeah.

Anyways, so and then from the we put that shit in everything files While there have been many high profile stories in which chatbots have effectively encouraged and enabled people experiencing mental health crises to kill themselves, which has resulted in several wrongful death lawsuits against the companies responsible for the AI models behind the bots. We've now got the inverse. If you want to use your right to die, you have to convince an AI that you are mentally capable of such a decision.

Don't give me a church break. According to Futurism, the creator of the controversial assisted suicide device known as the Sarko has introduced a psychiatr psychiatric test administered by AI to determine if a person is of sound enough mind to decide to end their life. If they are deemed of sound mind by the AI, the suicide pod

is now AI enabled, will be powered on and they will have up to twenty four hours to decide to move forward to their final destination. If they missed the window, they have to start the evaluation over again. I wonder if there's a number like you get three chances, that's it? Three strikes and you're not out? Exactly

The whole thing raises the question, why do you need AI for this? Currently they have a psychiatrist on staff for the one use of the pod so far. It's been used once, Jason, should I remind you. Obviously they can't afford the psychiatrist. So instead of the psychiatrist, they're they're canning him and that one guy lost his job to AI apparently.

So I I love the sentence at the end of the article, a person at the end of their life deserves to be taken seriously and receive human consideration, not pass a fucking captcha. Uh well they fired the psychiatrist. I hope for or the psych yeah, the psychiatrist. I hope they kept the guy that cleans the pod after the previous use. That's the one guy you don't want to fire.

That's true. That's true. I don't uh know if you know this, uh dear listeners, but certain things do happen to your body when you pass away that are somewhat unpleasant. Yes. Lots of fluids. And in probably the biggest news story Yes, fluids. And in probably what I consider to be the biggest news story that came out, but is kind of buried almost everywhere. It's not exactly front page news.

Uh it is on my feeds. Well, we have some pretty tailored feeds. It popped up everywhere for me as well, because I think this is a big eff and deal and he's he's spot on. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is concerned That if artificial intelligence doesn't start to deliver real, measurable benefits to society, people will be fed up with it. at its price, ending its current form of existence, to which I say Yes, please. Yeah. Exactly. We are ready for this to be over.

Uh he did this at uh Davos. Um it's an odd venue and audience to preach societal good over other goods, but it certainly helped his comments stand out. AI developers have to get to a point where we are using this to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.

Otherwise, I don't think this makes much sense, says the guy invested in almost every single fucking AI company out there that actually is in a position to maybe do something about this. Yeah. Uh do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries. It doesn't say for the better. Well, useful, I think uh useful implies.

Well, useful to who is the thing. I think I think I think this is a very nebulous statement that can be taken in many ways. But yes, I think I think he's on on point by saying These guys are gonna be coming with us at us with pitchforks if we don't do something right now, instead of telling them that they're all gonna lose their jobs.'Cause that's all the news is saying.

He did follow up with a pretty good sentence, I think, here. We will quickly lose even the s so social permission to take something like energy and which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.

Which is what these people have been fucking promising us and has not happened one iota. Not one bit. No, not so far. Well it makes doing the show notes faster.

Yeah, that's true. That's about it. But I don't really think we're helping a lot of uh of a lot of the uh s the public sector here. Anyways, uh what has happened with AI, the one big result so far is that the rich have gotten richer. any way they can, and Elon Musk is also going for it here. We now have some idea of what's at stake in the long-standing feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI.

As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing is part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its non profit status. claims that Musk is owed anywhere between seventy nine billion and a hundred and thirty four billion dollars in damages from the wrongful gains of OpenAI and Microsoft. Obviously Elon has not read a single headline about OpenA's AI's actual bank balances. Exactly. Yeah. He he he actually if he wins he might owe OpenAI money because there's so many far in the red.

You win, you're right. Can uh you you gotta write open AI a check so they can get back to zero. Beside this uh besides this lawsuit, Musk has named OpenAI in another illegal battle, accusing the company along with Apple of monopolistic practices that prevented X AI from getting a fair shot in the Apple store From which it would have been removed immediately because of your bikini fucking pedo shit. Yeah. So

Thanks, Elon. Speaking of Elon, Elon who used to shit all over Davos, has finally gone. And actually opened his mouth, which, you know, never never bodes well for him. Nothing good ever comes out of that. Nope, nothing ever good comes out of Elon's mouth for sure. Then these predictions. Now we've got we've got a new round of Elon's bullshit predictions.

Aliens probably don't exist because none of my 9,000 satellites have encountered a UFO yet. God, he's a moron. How much ketamine did he have that day? All of it, maybe? All of it? Uh humanoid robots will transform human life and go on sale in twenty twenty seven. Tesla has been promising this since twenty twenty one and is reportedly still struggling to make the robots hands work, so

There'll be no robot handies in the future. Uh robo taxis will be very widespread in the US by the end of this year. And I would just like to point out they just finally started their first. Uh fully autonomous robotaxi rides this week in Austin without a safety driver. No thank you. Not getting in that car. Here's another one. Human aging is a very solvable and obvious problem.

Musk admits he hasn't spent much time studying it, but is confident the solution will be simple once someone else figures it out. Dunning Kruger is my is my spirit animal for Elon Musk at Davos. Uh, here we go. SpaceX will achieve a fully reusable rocket this year. Similar promises were made for twenty twenty, twenty twenty two, and twenty twenty four. Yes, and AI will be smarter than any human this year and smarter than all humanity by twenty thirty five.

So par for the course bullshittery coming out of Elon. Yep.

Absolutely nothing worthwhile in there at all. Well, Scarlett Johansson, R.E.M., Vince Gilligan, and over seven hundred other artists are demanding that tech companies stop stealing their work in order to train AI models. A new campaign called Stealing is an innovation. Neither is this uh thing because Sarah Silverburn's already done this. Yeah. You know, okay.

Sign another letter, demands that AI companies take the responsible, ethical, the broadly ethical route through licensing and partnerships according to the website.

America's creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth and exports, a statement on the website reads. But rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators' works to build AI platforms without authorization for copyright law.

The group adds that illegal intellectual property grabs have resulted in an information ecosystem dominated by misinformation, deep fakes, and a vapid artificial avalanche of low quality materials AKA AI slop. Threatening America's AI superiority and international competitiveness. How about you just fucking ban it? Like, let's not worry about AI superiority. You just like stop training. Stop training illegally. Stop stealing this stuff.

Open AI once argued that it's impossible to train AI without copyrighted materials since copyright today covers virtually ever s every sort of human expression. Jason It is impossible for me to have a million dollars in the bank unless I go to other banks and steal the money. It's impossible. So therefore I have every right to break the law because it's impossible for me to do this any other way.

Of course, because banks are where the money's at. So if you want the money for their bank to your bank, the only way to get it is to go rob it. That's it. That is the exact logic that they use. Yeah. I mean that's it. That's it. That is their logic. So, you know, there you go. All right, well, so a bunch of people sign a fucking letter.

Well, somebody who actually did something about AI was San Diego Comic Con this week. They walked back their AI friendly art policy after every artist had a shit fit last week and banned AI generated work entirely from its art show. Uh before that, AI art was allowed if it wasn't for sale, clearly labeled and credited to whatever human style got scraped. Now that rule had been around since at least twenty twenty four and artists finally said absolutely not, sir.

Within twenty four hours of the backlash, Comic Con flipped the policy. Working artists called the old rules a slippery slope that normalized generative AI in a space literally built on human labor. High profile illustrators slammed the idea of AI slop hanging next to work people actually spent years learning how to make. So bravo, Comic Con. Bravo. Bravo.

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Yeah. We have worked our way through almost every uh Disney and Pixar movie with the kid and o overall it's been, you know, I mean the great movies is good quality, I mean, great songs, blah, blah, blah. Uh one that we didn't watch was Wish, which we actually watched over the weekend. Uh this got widely panned upon release. It was considered a failure, one of Disney's first in a long time. It's got uh Chris Pine uh singing. Which alone is terrifying. Sounds bad, yeah.

Can't be as bad as Russell Crowe and Le Miz, but it sounds bad. Yeah. No, no, not that nothing is nothing is as bad as that, Jason. Nothing. Yeah, that's true. So uh so we watched it. Um it good story, good plot, good idea uh Too many songs uh needed Lynn Manuel Miranda in there because the songs were fucking horrible. That was the main problem. You have you got a bunch of songs and they're bad and you have Chris Pine singing them, not a winning combination.

Uh once I watched the we watched it and something was weird going on in my brain. Like I kept seeing like little things and I'm like What was that that reminds me of? What was that? And then after we watched the movie, we watched one of the like the little making of vignettes that Disney has in there. And they explained that this was uh they put this out as like the the whatever anniversary it was when when the movie came out of Disney of the Disney th Disney film studio.

And they did it as an homage and the the entire movie is basically Easter eggs to all other Disney movies. And then once that clicked, we went back and started to watch it again. And then I was like This is actually a really good movie. Really? This now makes sense to me. I am watching this with completely new eyes and really enjoying it. Why did you not promo the hell out of the fact that that's what you did with this movie?'Cause it probably would have been a lot more interesting to people.

Sounds like it. Sounds like it. So actually it was pretty good once I knew what they were doing. All right. Yeah. Once you do the rules of the game. Songs don't suck though. Songs won't. Yeah, get Lynn Menwell for that,'cause he's just he's the man.

Yeah, he is the man. Uh keeping up with the pit, uh still very good. Did not watch the latest because I had to watch the latest Starf Star Trek Starfleet Academy last night. Uh did you watch episode three? I watched episode two and three since we spoke last. Still not mad at it. Still not mad at it. I enjoyed it. Uh I like it. Yeah. I I uh the one problem I had and I I know why they did it, of course.

The episode three involved much of the cast, uh well at least the young, very, very, very in shape and good looking cast. Yes. Mostly naked most of the time. Uh just t I just had immediate flashbacks to enterprise and getting everybody in that blue room and stripping down of their underwear and rubbing the goo all over themselves to try to sex it up a bit.

Yeah. And they certainly did that. But uh you know what? The the show's well written. I'm liking the characters so far. I'm liking the character develop they're actually developing the characters. They're making them interesting. Uh I like the competition with the War College. I'm not mad at it.

Yep. And and there were there were a couple of throwbacks in here to to another movie that I I that most people would have missed. The the locker room scene, you know, with the very new bile people. You you thought of Enterprise, I thought of Starship Troopers. And very much Starship Troopers, but without the boobs. Uh no st no there's no boobs in Star Trek. Um

We got middle fingers though. We got lots of middle fingers, lots of shits, and you know, people are swearing. Somebody got called that said they had a little dick. That was one of them in the first episode. The other thing was The the the videos that the war college made about Starfleet Academy, that first video that they made about them bungling everything, that was straight out of Starship Troopers. One hundred and ten percent. It was like the recruiting film.

for to join, you know, the troopers and starship troopers. It was it was beat for beat. It was great. So I caught that. I was I was I had a I had a good chuckle. So um so bravo on on that little Easter egg for sure. Yeah, it's a good show. I'm liking it. Yeah, it I don't know how Star Treky it is, but I I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. Uh Lord of the Rings follow up.

I am I have finished my quest of Mordor. I got there. I got there. I even got through that goddamn ending on Return of the King. All twenty of'em? Yeah, it it i it was uh thirty minutes or th a little over thirty minutes for the wrap up, right? Yeah. That was that was the reader's digest version compared to Stranger Things Wrap Up for their for their whole run. That thing took at least an hour to wrap everybody up.

I I it was it was really nice. And what I said before about the CGI being stellar, well, from the first movie to the second movie to the third movie there were definitely some concessions made as they went along. The Warg battle from the second movie? Some budget issues? Yeah, definitely some budget issues. That was painful. That was absolutely painful. Helm's Deep was a lot smaller than I remember.

'Cause I feel I don't know why. I feel like I've grown up now and it's like, you know, the old your old home when you go back to visit it. It's like wow, this place seems so much smaller than I remember. And when Frodo ran into Mount Doom.

Oh that was bad. That was so bad. Somebody screwed up the the tracking on that. These little feet are running like it's like going like eight hundred miles an hour like it's just uh it's bad. It's bad. But I mean it's also worth considering. It's twenty five years old.

Exactly. Exactly. Um but yeah. I mean but that's this thing. Some of it was so good and some definitely got the B team. And you know, I after working on Titanic, I know how that kind of works. It's like each shot is given to a different set of people. You know, so if Weta was overloaded, they could have did they just offshore that shit to somebody else and the other teams. Not as good as Weta.

Um, but yeah, I mean I I I can't recommend it mo highly enough. Just go rewatch it. You know, take your time, get a big T V and some popcorn and pause a lot to go to the bathroom because that's the nice thing about watching it at home, which I'll never go to the theater again. Uh I did see twenty-eight years later the Bone Temple. I liked it a lot.

A whole lot. I have not seen any of the twenty eight years later movies. I should be able to do that. Well, this would be the second one at some point. Yeah. The first one was very weird. It was like a freshman college art project in some parts. It was very strange. It all made sense. But it was weird. It was very much a throwback to the original original movie. And uh the and the fact is that these things are still shot on an iPhone, which is fucking incredible, you know.

You watch this thing and it's like, damn, how did they do that? I can't do that with mine. Oh, the three million dollar lens they put on the front of the iPhone is what they do it with. Um but all in all, man, yeah, it was it was dead. I was really worried that this was gonna like just go straight downhill after the first movie.

And it it went way up. I like this a lot more than the first one even. So it's really good. Really good. And a little fallout news. Fallout's been out for a couple of weeks now. They they went with the non bingeable version this time and they roll it out, you know, a couple here, couple there, whenever they feel like it. And it apparently has tanked the ratings on it. So

Uh because I haven't been that excited to go go back and watch it because I'm sorry I I just want to be able to watch them when I want to watch them. So I'm just waiting for the whole run to finish. And I think a lot of people are doing that too. So I've heard it's good. In in theory, I I really enjoy things being dripped out. So I so I don't binge them on purpose. I'm liking it with the pit, uh I like it with Star Trek.

However, having said all of that, going back to my previous rant about last week about Paramount massively jacking up their prices, I'm starting to be on board with this whole drop it all at once thing because I just wanna subscribe to your fucking outrageously overpriced service for one month, burn through it all, and then unsubscribe again because you're charging too damn much. So drop it all at once. I don't want to pay for three months.

Which is why they drip it out over three months'cause they they want you to pay for it and you don't, you know. And uh but you know what? Nobody watches things at the same time now anyways. There's no water cooler talk about these things in general unless something really catches the zeitgeist. So, you know, what I'm just gonna start doing is like next time uh neck ne when the

Well I probably won't do this because I like uh I like Star Trek so much, but I'm I'm thinking about it. Like next when the when Strange New Worlds drops their next season, I'll just wait until they all get dropped and then subscribe and just watch it then. I'll wait. No you won't.

No you won't. But I won't with Steve. I guarantee you won't. I'll do that with a bunch of other shows though. Yeah. Here's the thing, I think I think that comes down to the quality of the show. You know? Because if if I really gave a shit about Fallout, I'd be talking about it every week. We're not talking about that. What are we talking about? We're talking about Starfleet Academy every week now.

So Yeah, exactly. I think I think there's definitely they need to there's there's a there's a An equation that they can come up with that would be beneficial to everybody. It's like, okay, well, this is a three a week kind of show instead of a one a week kind of show because we're gonna lose people. But at the three a week we can still keep the bingers happy and keep everybody happy and still get past that. We will release it on the twenty eight.

of the month. So we get one month and then the next month and it will go till you know the second of the following after month. Something like that. They could make something work. Yeah, you gotta stretch it out though. Or I'm just spitballing here, network guys a and streamer guys. Or your seasons could have more than eight episodes. They could have thirty two episodes that would make us subscribe the whole year.

They can't do that anymore, Brian. They can't do that anymore. No. I I did I did have one thing about Star Trek at uh Starfleet Academy that now that I just can't unsee it. People just don't sweat in the future. These these kids are running around attacking with, you know, super laser tag, dodging bullets and all this shit. Nobody broke a sweat.

Period. Nobody gets s sweaty, but they do get sexily wet. They get moist. Yeah. Well well, they get dropped in water, you know, and then they come out and they're dripping sexy wet. Yeah. But no sweat. Not mad at it.

Ups and doodads! Well, while ali AI companies' browsers have figured out group tabbing, X has also rolled out something from nineteen ninety four. Uh a new feature called Starter Packs to all users is coming in the coming weeks. The company's head of product is announced. It's made up of compilations of accounts new users can follow based on their interests.

If that sounds familiar, it's because Blue Sky has it, Threads has it, every other site known to man has it, but now X has it, which has been around longer than any of them. Interesting. Which is funny because if you remember Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and used to be pretty okay, they they had starter packs too. They just called it suggested followers.

And you wanted to get on that suggested follow list because many a millionaire was minted off that suggested follower list. People that had no, you know, no social media savvy history, anything like that. They got on that that suggested follow list. To the moon, to the moon, and

Yeah. I mean we saw that in real time so many times. But well, because it's X you can sign up for the racism starter pack, the Fascism starter pack, the we're gonna have uh we're gonna be on Living on Mars starter pack, the Elon's false promises starter pack. And of course the Elon Diner starter pack. Can't wait for all of those.

Uh speaking of Blue Sky, ICE has become one of the most blocked accounts on Blue Sky after its verification. So ICE did get verified on Blue Sky and within days rocketed to the number three most blocked account on the platform. Turns out the little blue check does not magically make people like you. There's nothing that's gonna make people like you. So I wanted to run down the top three things that are on the uh on the blocked account list on Blue Sky.

JD Vance, Couchfucker, White House, Global Fucker, and Ice.gov You know, kid fucker. Society fucker. So now here's the thing. I looked at the numbers on these. JD Vance has been blocked one hundred seventy nine thousand one hundred and forty three times, White House one hundred twenty one thousand one hundred and seventy six times, and Ice.gov one hundred and eight thousand eight hundred and sixty six times.

Those are paltry, piddly, don't give a fuck about numbers. That shows you how small blue sky is at this point. So yeah. And uh on the back of that, Threads has quietly passed X in daily mobile users, according to new data from similar web. As of early January, Threads is pulling in about one hundred forty one million daily users on iOS and Android compared to roughly one hundred twenty five million for X.

But X still wins on the web, but on phones where people actually live, Threads is ahead. Yeah, I've never looked at Threads on the Well, I did when they first came out with their web experience and it didn't work. It's pretty uh threadbare. Yeah. Um so I I I I look at it on my phone once a month. So I guess I guess I do get to count as a Mao since I I am a monthly active user for ten minutes.

So Papa Oo Mau Mau. Apple this week managed to announce two AI ideas. One okay, I'm I'm in. The other one is Hmm, is about all I could say. So Siri is finally getting a real upgrade and Apple is reportedly embracing chat as a system wide interface in iOS twenty seven, turning Siri into a conversational layer baked directly into the OS. Cool. I'm down with that if it works. That's gonna be powered Yeah, that's gonna be powered by Gemini. Okay with that.

Now, Apple is also reportedly experimenting with an AI pin, an air tag sized disc with cameras, microphones, a speaker, and a button that clips to your clothes. Now, I personally, I've got an Apple Watch, I've got AirPods, I've got a fucking iPhone, I do not need any more gadgets for their AI shenanigans. And I think I think that that's not ever gonna happen. I don't think this pin is

is a thing. I think it's a MacGuffin. I think that they leaked somebody inside leaked this or somebody was leaked this, you know, to get it out there. To fuck with Johnny Ives head. Apple doesn't rush products like this. They they take years developing new hardware. There's there's no chance that this is a real thing. I I think you're right.

Also, I have to do a throwback right now. Uh I kn I know we're in the wrong segment, but let's go quickly back to to Starfleet Academy because you said shenanigans. My favorite line in episode three. They've shenaned. That means they're gonna shenan again. There was lots of shenanigans. Yeah. That was really good. That was really good. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think they killed it with that. Oh. So yeah. I think I I I call shenanigans too on this, for sure.

I decided I needed a break from my regular sci-fi doom reading and uh instead I went with a regular fiction doom reading. Uh a friend of mine had recommended this book, The Elements by John Boyne. Uh he's an Irish writer. It was absolutely wonderfully well written.

And I wanted to shoot myself in the face as soon as I finished reading it because it was so depressing about human nature and just a couple intertwined stories of people that really got screwed up by trauma and passed that shit on down. So you'd you could have just read X for an hour or two and you'd have been less pedophilia. Only slight philosophy.

Okay. Only slightly. I'll pass on that one then. Thanks for the thanks for the warning. Very well written. I I definitely want to read more by the guy, but boy was it depressing. Back to sci-fi for me.

There we go. Uh I actually got another an uh it's not a new cookbook. I actually owned this book in ho in paperback and gave it away as a Christmas present before I could actually use it. So I'm like, you know, I'm gonna buy all my cookbooks on Kindle now. If they have'em on Kindle, I'm gonna get'em on Kindle because

It's just so I've got a thousand cookbooks here and they just take up space and I there's one recipe in each book that I like. So I'm just like I'm just gonna tear those out, whatever. But I got 101 Thai dishes you need to cook before you die by Jet Tila. Excellent excellent cookbook.

Yeah. I I when I flipped through it before I gave it away'cause I was late for Christmas pr shopping and I knew the guy was gonna be, Oh, he'll like this and I don't have to go back to the store. So I ended up just uh getting this one and uh I love Jet. Jet's a local boy. He lives like a couple miles away, right up the road. And uh I love his show, uh Ready Jet Cook. Have you watched that?

Brian? I have. Yep. Fantastic. I he was up for an Emmy for that. I don't know if he won one. But uh either way, I love Jet's food and uh I'm very happy about this. I just want to put this in to say like, you know, I am very happy about going the uh the Kindle only route.

for uh cookbooks now. I got a couple of them that I like to do that as well. Um uh uh because you you can't get sauce on your Kindle. I mean you can but then you just wipe it off if you put it if you get it like I have a Chrissy Teagan uh cookbook that there's a couple family recipes in there that we we love and uh some of the pages are stuck together like I was like I was a college playboy.

It's just Yeah. You can't tear'em apart and it it's just a mess. Uh going back to the Jet Lee book really quickly, I I I've that book. Kung Fu. We've gone through almost every recipe in the book. The Mongolian beef and the drunken noodles are particular favorites in our house. Uh fantastic. Um what I've done as well though is we we've actually started checking out um cookbooks from the library.

to to kinda give'em a go and look through them. And if we find out that there's only one or two recipes that we actually like in the book, you can find them online and print them out and put'em in your good old fashioned recipe binder rather than buy the whole book for the one or two recipes.

Yeah. Uh, one of the books we discovered through the library, uh this was my wife had had uh gone to brunch with somebody, uh one of our friends and they had cooked something from the cookbook, so we checked it out from the library. Like the recipe so much. We ended up buying the book. It's a half baked harvest, quick and cozy, a cookbook by Tegan Jerd. So you might want to check this out as well, Jason. It's some really good recipes.

Okay, sounds good. Also, on the another tip, instead of taking a um instead of copying the the recipe or finding it online, just take a picture of it with your phone. And I use an app called PESEL. And Peso will take any photo. Yeah. I I remember I when we got it. There was a a deal where you basically it was like, you know, their f their starter weekend and I paid like fourteen ninety five for lifetime access.

And now of course it's a subscription. So I'm very happy I got the the original deal. But that thing's great. You basically throw anything at it and it'll put it in the right format for you and and give you the whole sh the whole nine yards. And it's got a a share sheet as well, so You know, you can share from IOS like any recipe you can just put straight into it from iOS and it works great.

I'll put a link to that uh in there as well. There's another book that uh I like and this comes back to exactly what you were talking about, Southern Living, a Southern Gentleman's Kitchen Adventures in Cooking, Eating and Living in the New South by Matt Moore. Now I met this guy because he was the first chef we ever had on the Jordan Jordan Harbinger show.

And I went out and bought it because I'm like, Yeah, let's support the guy. It was his first his first book and you know, he's just getting his feet under him. This has the single best succotash recipe out of any cookbook I've ever seen. And succotash is fairly simple. Or is it? That's the thing.

It there this is like a thirty minute sucotash that is just for twenty nine minutes of the thirty minutes it tastes like shit. And then at that last thirty minute mark, it all just blooms and comes together into the best sucotash you've ever had in your life. But uh yeah, I I really, really uh dig that cookbook. That's one I I I'll pestle you the the recipe. It's pretty good. There's a really good uh gumbo recipe in there too, I believe.

All right, let's get moving. I'm hungry. Yeah. Okay, last thing we got here. Scott wrote in, I went to an author talk by Jim Butcher who does the Dresden Files last night and someone asked a question that we need all authors to answer. In the author's head, Harry Dresden, the protagonist of the Dresden Files, speaks with Han Solo's voice.

Now I need to know whose or whom's voice Bob speaks in. Yes, all of the books. Dresden, Bob Averse, Laundry Files. Uh I don't read the Dresden books. My friend James Marsters actually voices the Dresden file book. So I can't read them because I'll or listen to them because I'll just hear James and be like, Okay, that know that that's not you. But Now see, here's the thing. I don't wanna know.

I that's the that's the beauty of the book. I have my own voice for these characters in my own head and in much the same way as when a movie is made, now I only see the character looking the way that the actor portrayed them. I if if the auth author tells me what the voice sounds like, that's all I'm gonna hear. I don't want that. That's that's the that's the joy and wonder of the book, my friend.

It is. It kind of is. And the funny thing is, the Bob Averse and Laundry Files Bob, both of those guys sound exactly the same to me, which is uh who is the protagonist from Lower Deck? What's the main character there? Oh, uh Boimer. Boimer. I i Bob it Bob sounds like Boimer in all my books, so in my head. So I don't know. That's fun.

The dark side. With Dave? Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner. How ya doing, Dave? I don't see any don't see any R two D twos behind you there, I guess the the The avalanche of of droids never came. Something's coming. Oh, it's a mini. There we go.

Yeah. Oh, isn't that one little isn't that a cute little one? This is the little uh it's the little robotic one. I forget the company that made these, but he's fully functional and and a delight, I have to say. His little third leg drops down and he scoots around and is he he makes all kinds of noises. It is for being for not being all kinds of noises when my third leg drops down too. But hey, there you go. It's reliable. Exactly. You know what you're getting. Yes, exactly.

Uh but um a and so interesting story about this little guy is that the company that made these uh discontinued them and stopped supporting them. So there's an app, of course, that controls And uh somebody reverse engineered the app and came up with a an an app that allows you to still use them without the official app. So they were uh they were not brick. So that that was a happy thing to happen. Yeah. And the company's out of business so they can't sue, which is nice. Right. Yeah. Right. Right.

All right. Well uh let's get into this a little bit. Uh I found a new blog that gets deep into Disney history, so Dave you might appreciate this. But uh uh one thing in particular uh I had to read, which he has not finished the story yet. He has not gotten to the part where perhaps Not me specifically, but uh my friends and my my friend group of the time period will be mentioned.

Uh it's call uh it's a series called Going to the Top, The Story of Vidiopolis, which was the dance club that was at Disneyland. And this is a blog, uh let me get back to that part called Spark Catcher, uh on over on WordPress and the the guy's name is Ooh, why can't I he does he does not put his name anywhere convenient? Let me click on about About the blog. It's still I don't see it fucking I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling. What is your name?

Anyways, whatever his name is, Spark Catcher is the name of the blog. Uh he gets deep into Disney history a lot of the time, but he's talking about the club Vidiopolis. uh that I went to when I was a teen. uh hung out there. All my friends went there. We had our annual passes. We went and danced and picked up on tourist chicks and had a blast. The churro came out of uh Vidiopolis, the

That was the first initial place of the churro. He gets into that in a little bit of the history. And the thing that blew my mind as I was reading through this article, and again, he's just he's done three parts. He hasn't gotten he's only gotten to the construction, not even the opening of Videopolis yet. um, is that the the Vidiopolis only existed for four years. The four magical years that I happened to be going to Disneyland, attending and having the time of my teenage life.

And I can't believe the serendipity that I was there for that and the perfect age for it. It's unbelievable to me. I I really don't know. What years are we talking about? Uh it opened, I believe, in like uh eighty Six, it went like eighty-six to ninety, and that was like my prime high school year. Okay. Like my pre-driving, like I was just young enough to be going to Disneyland all the time, but old enough to know I liked the ladies and it was perfect.

If you had asked me what is Videopolis, I would have said that it is Disneyland's video arcade. Yeah, nope, that was not that was the Star Cave. Oh'cause it was right next to uh Space Mountain. So they went with the whole space theme. Yeah. Okay. Yep. I don't think I ever saw Vidiopolis. I I guess it was gone by the time I went to Disneyland

I would have gone to Disneyland pr uh in ninety, ninety one, something like that. But I don't remember. Certainly never went there. But Yeah, it was done by then for sure. But uh yeah, it was a good time. Anyways, it's a it's a fun blog. He gets into a lot of Disney history. He interviews a lot of the great uh imagineers and stuff like that. So it's uh I'm working my way through it slowly. He peppers it with other stuff that I don't care about that are as obviously important to him but

You know, in general. You you pick and choose what you like. Yeah. Okay. I dug it up. His name is Nathan. He is a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband, father, writer, historian, and film fan. Uh he was a twenty one year veteran of Disney Parks based at Disneyland Resort in California.

So and he spent sixteen years of those twenty one years in the Disney Live Entertainment Division. So there you go. So he knows of which he speaks about uh the videopolis and things of that nature. Yeah. Yes, sir. He is a published Disney historian. So he's got He's got many years under his belt of writing this stuff. So y you guys should definitely be

Be friends. Well, what this reminded me of was the last time we were at Disney World, uh, also in Tomorrowland, they had a big stage set up with a DJ at night. to have a I've c call it a tween dance party. Yep. And and it was a big deal. It was it was packed. The kids were having a great time and dancing and the DJ was perfect for new new their audience, you know. And and uh my wife and I walked through and kinda went, Oh, is this interesting and isn't this fun? And uh

And we kept walking and but we were happy that it was there. Um'cause, you know, I I entertainment is kind of hit or miss and comes and goes uh with these sorts of things in Disney. At least that's my perception.

Um yeah, he gets he gets a bit into the history of that too, like even going back to like the the sixties and seventies and and things of that nature, because Disneyland originally basically shut down after dark. Like people would just go home, have dinner, and that was the end of the park and then somebody came up with the idea of well let's find ways to keep people here.

uh later, so they introduced uh, you know, like big band and it was date night at Disneyland in the I believe in like the the sixties and stuff like that. So And then you know, that led to eventually to the teen club Vidiopolis. I and now it's you know, nobody leaves because there's so much to do, but nothing like that anymore. They don't really have dancing or entertainment on that level.

Did you have your high school graduation there? Yeah, yeah. We did the grad nights and things like that. So yeah. But I looking through this blog, I saw there's a picture of a thing called the Kids of the Kingdom, which uh looks like a it's a entertainment thing. It looks like a salute to all that is good and pure is how I would describe it and

Like that is totally the thing I would have been a part of when uh if it's a lot of things. Oh I can see you on that stage in that white outfit with the multicolored Vic, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Singing uh this is our land, you know, or s whatever. Yeah, this is my country, land of the free Yeah, exactly. That that that would have been my thing. And you would have been off to the side of Vidiopolis smoking uh Smoking and uh mocking me. Absolutely.

But then I would have sidled up to you after and like, uh that brunette to your left. Give me an intro. Yeah. She liked the cure. Yeah.

All right, we got a new trailer from Disney Speaking of Disney. Uh the latest uh Star Wars show that's coming. It is an animated show, Star Wars Mall Shadow Lord. Um trailer looks really good. Looks dark. They got some splaining to do. Uh

'Cause last we saw, Maul was uh chopped in half and uh I mean they had to do the same with Boba Fett and that one was kind of anticlimactic. So I I'm hoping they're not gonna just, you know, ignore it. They they kinda gotta lead with it, right? So Isn't there a whole bunch of story I mean'cause There is but he's on spider leg. That's what I was gonna say. He comes back with spider legs. Yes. So he's not dead.

Uh, and I guess he's back who knows if this is before or after the stuff that we know about where he gets chopped in half. Yeah, I was gonna say'cause this could this just be a prequel? No, it's definitely it's definitely after. It it is after because he's he's uh there's talk about he's basically actively fighting against the emperor and yeah. I just never I thought Darth Maul was really cool looking and I really looked forward to him

when uh or pr to the movie coming out that he was going to be in because he really looked like badass and you know he had the dual lightsaber and all that kind of stuff. And then after the movie it was like Yeah, they never did anything with them, which is unfortunate. But apparently, according to um many sources

Lucas's original plan for the final trilogy did not have the Emperor coming back. It was actually going to be Darth Maul, who had become you know, basically the kingpin job of the hut gangster ruler of the entire empire that was gonna be the big bad guy in the final trilogy. Right. That's you know, then they sold to Disney and somehow he came back and all that crap. Right. And so what uh the other thing I wonder watching this trailer is Darth Maul going to be the protagonist in this tale?

I I guess he is. Yeah. He's the title character. It seems like he's gonna be the uh kind of murky gray gray uh gray hat where he's neither good nor bad. He's he's just he doesn't like the rebels, he doesn't like the emperor, he doesn't like anybody. He likes himself. So yeah, he's a Han Solo esque type guy. Hmm We'll see. It looks good. Well, so we'll have to give it a grind a go. So Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I've got a trailer too for Masters of the Universe. He man. Oh yeah. He man.

So I came across this trailer in the case. I came across this trailer because people had their panties in a bunch because on the nameplate of the character who's playing it says he him and everybody's like, Oh my god, he's got pronouns. Guys. He Man is the name of the character's name He Man He Man.

Come on, get your head out of your ass just long enough where you can laugh at things again. It's hilarious. It's hilarious. It is the only thing of interest to me whatsoever about this entire movie is that they threw that joke in. It was so good.'Cause I can't figure out who they're making this movie for. S well so you guys are a little younger than me.

And my recollection of He Man is that uh my younger brother was much more into it than I was. When it came out, I was a right I was a little too old for it. So I was aware of it, but I never had any He Man toys or anything like that. I remember the show being on, but I m it was my younger brother who watched it and he's six years younger than me. So Were you guys in the zone for He Man being a part of your an active part of your childhood? It absolutely was for me. I just didn't like it.

I I I wasn't interested and I didn't care. Uh the one thing I do like that uh has come out of it is I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but you can go down uh the best rabbit hole in existence, the skeletor memes that exist on the internet. Yes, these are the best. Yes. Yes. They are great. So watching this trailer made me think this is basically Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah. That's what they're that's what they're aiming for. They've got the kind of Uh neer do well hero

You know, one of the heroes is an animal, except instead of a raccoon, it's a tiger. Uh you know, it's it's got that energy of Guardians of the Galaxy, which I is not a bad energy to have, but No. It's also Flash Gordon, you know. Buck Rogers. All of those all of those. But Yeah. I just I I it's so'cause I'm like, are they going for the nostalgia play for people of our age?

Absolutely. Kind of. But then I'm like you're not gonna hook any new audience with this and I saw some of the stuff where I I could see where they're trying to do some bit of character development. It was just confusing as fuck to me. I'm like, I d I don't plan on ever watching this movie'cause

Brian, you were in the sweet spot, Dave, you were past it. I was like right on the cusp of not giving a shit. Okay. Um I if given given my druthers, if I had if you gave me He Man or Thundercats Thundercats. Okay. Huh I liked Robotech. I think that w the that was uh if it didn't have robots or or uh in in it, I didn't care. If it didn't have spaceships, I didn't care. So Thundercat's not my thing. Yeah. Masters of the Universe, not my thing. Yeah.

My younger brother had a lot of Transformers toys, I remember. Yeah. Uh what was the pre the pre Transformers Transformers? There was a sh there was a sh I can't remember what they were called, like G Force or something like that. That

That weird it was all like the weird Japanese stuff that they overdubbed and tried to shove into a into a some sort of coherent story that I was into. That and G.I. Joe. So that was that was that was where I was at. I hated G.I. Joe. But do you did you guys ever own Zoids? I remember them. I don't think I had them. We had micronauts. Do you remember? I had micronauts, yeah. Yeah. I had micronauts. Do you remember penny racers too? Yeah, vaguely.

Those are I I love penny racers. You could fit three of'em in your pocket. It was great. Wow, we were Jason, you I didn't realize you were such a klepto. Like w earlier you were telling me about how you were stealing booze rather than get a fake ID. Yeah, man. Come on. Gotta put the work in. Guy's got skills. I've only got caught once when I was like I was like eight and I got caught stealing sweet tarts, which put an end to my thievery career.

'Cause he scared the shit out of me so much. I was like, I'm never stealing anything again. Yeah. Yeah. So that that was the end of my my career. But yeah. Uh no, so yeah, I was just I was curious what your take on this on this trailer was'cause I'm like I th also think this is the type of movie that has the potential to do really well internationally. Oh yeah. Yeah. Right? So You know. This movie is a thousand percent aimed at me, it's just I could care less. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. Uh so I was the the past week or so I've been driving around in my car listening to music on iTunes through CarPlay, as you do, and I've noticed a pattern uh that probably half of the songs that pop up on my dashboard next to the name of the song it says in parentheses remastered. Yep. Now... I understand when compact disks came out.

A lot of things had to be remastered and there were practical reasons because of the the EQ curve of C Ds was different from LPs and all that kind of stuff and it all makes sense. But I guess my question and and I'm mostly aiming at this at you, Brian, just because maybe you have insights from your experience in the music biz. Um, it does remastered mean anything other than please buy this album again these days? Not really.

No. It it it's a PR move more than anything else now. Yeah. I mean they they they they do the work. Uh the masters are are taken into a studio. Uh somebody runs them through something. Some of them are actually literally being remastered for streaming, which means they're they're, you know, compressing it a little bit more.

Um, unfortunately, which n actually makes it worse, so I'd rather have the unremastered version. Uh, if the stuff was never had never been remastered since like early s like even early C D days, the eighties uh into the early nineties, um, there was so much cocaine that the high end is so high Like all they heard was high end and they just or they couldn't you can't hear the high end when you're on cocaine. Sorry, I had it backwards. When you're when you're coked out, you don't hear high end.

So they cranked the fucking high end. And if you listen to unremastered stuff, particularly like I'm thinking back to like some of the early Love and Rockets albums, it is a It's it's a s so fucking high end because the people that were doing it were gacked out of their fucking brains.

And so when that stuff that stuff when that gets remastered is actually really good. And the new versions sound really good. They sound much better. But uh That re that flows right into something I was gonna mention, which is that I remember Um, in college, so this would have been nineteen ninety or ninety one, um, David Bowie sold his catalog to uh I think Rhino, Rhino Records. Mm-hmm. And so the Sound and Vision box set came out, which was remastered and it sounded like crap.

Like a and and to your point, it sounded like somebody took the the graphic equalizer or on the on the high end and just went womp. Because everything just got super crispy and and it was way overdone. And whoever whoever listening to the album has had to have their septum redone.

I remember listening to the album and going w Why? These these sound terrible compared to any way I've ever heard them before on albums or cassettes or CDs. What what have they done? What have they done to my babies? And uh And then, you know, after that th I guess uh future versions sanity was restored, but um Yeah.

So it's mostly marketing these days, I guess. It's mostly marketing. It's so hard to get uh to get anything particularly old catalog in front of people's eyes again and if you re release something as remastered all of a sudden it gets put out as a new release. gets into the algorithm that way, comes up first on the list of the artist, etc. Right, right. There's always a certain percentage of fans who are completists and have to have every

Every version of everything. So my friends uh in Walla Voodoo, they just remastered a bunch of stuff that they had that they found the original original tapes for, like the big Yeah. The big masters. The real the reels, the huge ones. Yeah, they exactly. They found all the stuff and they went back and remastered

some of their old albums and are kind of dribbling those out and uh they sound uh so much better. They sound so much better. But they're also remastering them for vinyl and digital. So they're releasing them in digital and they just did a a uh record store day last year for for one of their releases and did gangbuster so they're doing it again and again until they, you know, run out of tapes. But uh and I I worked on some of that and it was fun.

Yeah. It goes back to what I was saying. Most of the stuff that was mastered in that particular period just sounds like shit. It it was just the It was just the sound at the time. That's what everything sounded like, so everybody mixed that way and again cocaine. Uh so any of those remasters now are fantastic. They're they sound so much better than the original sound.

Yeah. Also the early days of C D's they really they really ganked stuff up. It just sounded bad. So Yeah. Yeah. I guess then they can really uh pr completely eliminate tape hiss these days. Just get rid of it. Just gone. Yeah.

All right. Well, um last week we were talking about dishwashers. Because Jason had installed a new dishwasher. That's right. I I love that we I love we bounce from cocaine to dishwashers. It's it's really yeah it's a wide berth we we go through. So I'm having a little um a little crisis of what I believe in that I need you guys to talk me down off the wall here. Off the ledge. So in our conversation last week about dishwashers, I mentioned in passing

that something that you can buy is a countertop dishwasher. I don't know if you recall that. I said countertop dishwasher. Now let me ask both of you a question. Did either of you do any kind of Google search for countertop dishwasher? Hell no. I didn't have to because I uh could see it in my mind's eye. I had seen it in in a movie or something like that. So Okay. Yeah. Let me just say, Dave, that uh unless

You're the one that you were thinking of purchasing right now is in the shape of an R two D two. You better not buy it. Here's the head must open and then you put the dishes in. Just toss'em in, yeah. Here's where I'm struggling. About two hours after we recorded the show. So the show has not been published yet. We you and I only talked about it. Guess what I started seeing ads for on Facebook? Countertop dishwashers. Countertop dishwashers. Well

I am trying to f I am trying to be rational here, gentlemen. I am really try because as you know, I am on the side that says Facebook does not listen to your conversations. And I still believe that. But I've but given that I'm trying to rationalize How have any have any of us listen actually read through uh since we record through Riverside, have we read through Riverside's terms of service? Because perhaps No, we haven't. Yeah.

Right. No. That happens sometimes where you'll be in a conversation with someone about something. They'll Google it. And it takes the location information and says, Oh, those people were around each other, I'll start showing ads. So I thought, okay, that's a possibility. But like countertop dishwashers is so specific. Specific. Yeah. And I d I I would be willing to I'd bet a hundred dollars that I had never the words had never left my lips for the past decade. More than that.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I just I don't know. If anybody has an idea of what may have hap'cause I didn't search for them. I only mentioned it on the show. I haven't talked to anyone else. They're well that they always the other thing. They're not in the show notes. They're It's gotta be riverside.

Is there anybody around you that could have overheard you talking that said, Whoo, a countertop dishwasher, that might be cool. Maybe I should Google that. No, no. I mean I'm here all by myself in this dark Well, we just may have to revisit our our previous statement because maybe the technology is caught up where it's it's actually, you know, just transcribing us in real time all the time. And just sending back the the keywords, you know. Which is a possibility. And I did utter the words by

Countertop dishwasher. I said you could buy a countertop dishwasher. No, no, there's nothing here. I mean well I ha on my wrist is uh apples Lovely lady, but she I did not I don't recall summoning her. Um so I don't know. I I you know, I I wanna I don't want to I don't I don't I don't wanna go yes, I don't I wanna believe what I want to believe. Animal crackers. Animal crackers, animal crackers, animal crackers. Now let's see what happens.

Okay. Yeah. Buy animal crackers. You're thinking of buying some colours. Buy animal crackers. Something that neither of us have probably Googled. We're all out of that age with our children, those of us that have them. I'm sure Jason doesn't need animal crackers for pleasure. Animal crackers. No, but after this I'm gonna go buy some animal crackers. Maybe this afternoon I'll go buy some animal crackers. I'll I'll head to the store. Or you know, maybe uh marketplace

Animal crackers and Okay, nobody put this in the show notes. This is a clean experiment. You heard it here first. Yeah. Uh uh i I mean I you can tell I'm a little freaked out. Uh We well we have a we have a very hard and fast policy that our phones are not listening to us. We have swore by it multiple times in this segment.

Me too. Me too. But technology advances, so we don't know. We just don't know. The thing is that I ha can't get past is that if If that were happening, surely a security researcher would come upon it and be able to prove it. because the upside of that would be so

uh powerful to be the person who discovered that that was happening. But I think they've all done it so many times and have disproved that it's happening so many times. Nobody's nobody's watching the the gate anymore, so maybe they could have snuck it back in. You know? That's plausible. Yeah. That's plausible. Yeah. Animal crackers. Okay. Anyway, animal crackers. Uh and we can't make it the show title. I know. We're s we're stuck.

Uh anyway. So we're about to get a whole uh bunch of snow here. Uh in the next couple days. Yeah. We're getting uh well you're in Canada. Like it's not a that's you know, that's a lot. Just like uh we're we're getting like a beyond normal. They've already told people batten down the hatches, make sure you have food.

Snow. Okay. Yeah. Go go go stock up on those. Animal crackers. Yeah, gonna have to go buy some animal crackers and a snowblower. We're getting stuck up. We're getting between eight and twenty-four inches is the range So we'll see. I'm hoping for the best. Uh I I'm feeling lucky that I still have a nineteen year old living in my house. So I gotta shovel my car shoveled out. I don't have to uh give myself a snow shoveling heart attack.

But um yeah, so we're you know, the first few days of snow is fun. And then keeps going and piles up and you run out of places to put it and yeah. Yeah. It turns grey from all the salt and Or yellow, right? From from the dogs. So hopefully dogs. Wish us luck. Yeah.

All right. Well I'll go get some animal crackers. Mm-hmm. You can salt your driveway with animal crackers, I've heard. Oh yeah, that's a great idea. I gee, if only I knew of a place where I could buy some animal crackers. In bulk. Yeah. See ya guys. Shout out to Out! Over at Patreon we've got one new patron, Alex. Thank you, Alex.

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Joining us there. No merch this week and no reviews. Thank you. And just a quick reminder, here's here's our pitch. Here's our pitch. This show is ad supported. No more. It is fan supported. The ads just don't do anything for us. So we need we need your support. Thank you for your support. We're like the Bartles and James of podcasting. And uh if you want to, you can help us out going to patreon.com slash G O G and you can sign up for as little as three dollars a month.

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Pick your poison if you hate Patreon. Find us over at PayPal or the tip jar. But we just we we really appreciate you supporting the show. We honestly do. It keeps us going. Keeps us going. Absolutely. Absolutely. Uh in the news we have a a somebody passed away. The classic era Scorpions bassist Francis Buchholz died at seventy one from a private uh cancer battle that he was uh having going on. I only put this in there, the scorpion's obviously not really in my wheelhouse musically.

But I had one of the best nights of my entire life with the scorpions. Uh I was o I was over in London. I I Ninety Dolls. The Gooodolls were playing one of the big uh festivals, summer festivals over there. and we were staying at the Rockstar Hotel. I'm not gonna mention which one it is because I think it's still the Rockstar Hotel and people can just show up and and uh so we were out at at uh V Fest, I think, and bust back into London, rolled into the hotel pretty late at night.

Uh, go to the hotel bar like you do when you're that age and you're hanging with rock stars and and you're living that lifestyle. And it is the loudest that bar has ever been in my entire I've stayed there many times. It is rocking. It is rocking like a hurricane even. And because the scorpions are holding court up there and they are partying like, No tomorrow, these guys are like twenty years older than the like the goo goodalls, you know? These are older guys.

Yeah. We had such a good time. I don't remember a goddamn thing, but we partied hard with those guys and they were fucking awesome. So uh safe travels, Francis. Uh you were you were a true rock star and I had I still remember that night as much as what little I can remember so fondly. It was such a blast. Uh until next time I'm Brian Schlmeisner. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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