688: Why, Combinator?

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason, I am back from my Canadian adventure. Okay, I thought that was every day since you live in Canada. I do live in Toronto, yes. But we had a March break and we decided to go on a Canadian trip, a road trip. Went, drove up to Ottawa, capital of Canada, and then went up to Quebec City, capital of Quebec, one of the provinces, soon to be 51st state.

Then drove down to Montreal, also in Quebec, and then came home. And I'm only relaying this information because A, it was fun. B, Canada's beautiful. C, absolutely does not want to be a state and are really fucking pissed off at the president. Not just the president, also Elon.

Yeah. And just kind of the general zeitgeist. I saw punch Nazis spray painted all over places. Fuck Elon, spray painted all over the place. Quite a few people have Teslas. Snowballs were being thrown at them. Okay, now here's a question.

Yes. This is a legitimate question. When they spray paint fuck Elon, do they have to spray paint it in English and French at the same time or do they get a ticket? Well, they would probably get a ticket in Quebec. Actually, it's French first. So if they did not do it French first, they would be in trouble.

Yes. Quebecois. Yeah, Quebecois. It was wonderful, actually. It was a beautiful city. That was definitely the highlight of my trip. But anyways, I'm tired. I haven't driven like that since pre-COVID when we took a big old trip out to Phoenix from Los Angeles.

That's not a big old trip. That's a day trip, dude. Five hour drive, dude. It's five hours, man. That's the same as going to Vegas. Come on. Yeah, I didn't drive to Vegas. I flew. What are you talking about? I'm glad you made it and you weren't killed by any mooses on the road. No, but they had signs everywhere. We saw some deer on the side of the road and never saw a moose, which I guess is a good thing because once you see one, you're screwed.

Yeah, it's like a tiger. You don't want to see it. If you see it, it's too close. Well, you said you went on a road trip to Arizona pre-COVID because happy birthday, COVID. It's been five years since they announced. It's been five years since we hoarded toilet paper. Remember the mountains of White Claw that I had in my garage?

I do. Literally. I do. The Great Pyramid of White Claw was in my garage. Now we're hoarding eggs. Well, here's a trick here, at least in Los Angeles. Go to Trader Joe's first thing in the morning. They're only five bucks a dozen. Only one per family, though.

Not one egg, one dozen per family. If it gets down to one egg per family, then we're really fucked. Oh, God. Oh, that was the other really funny thing is we do not have any egg issues here. And boy, are they advertising the hell out of that. Come to Tim Hortons and get as many eggs as you want on your Sammy.

Yes. Would you like double egg? No problem. No charge. Oh, well, how's your pie up there? Because it's pie day. Well, actually, funnily enough, there is a roadside attraction between Toronto and Ottawa, which is called The Big Apple.

Okay. There's a Big Apple that you take pictures with. But they also make pies on premises and apple blossoms and apple tarts and everything. And we brought home a pie. And we will be digging into it today. Okay. Well, yes, it is March 14th as we record this.

3.14. I do remember going to House of Pies here in Los Angeles and then walking over to see Danzig's house in the pile of bricks in his yard. I think there were more than 3.14 bricks. And it wasn't a square. Actually, a cube. So I guess it wouldn't really matter that much. But yes, happy pie day.

And tomorrow, the Ides of March. So beware. Yes, beware. The Ides of March. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Who's supposed to beware? Oh, the leaders. That's right. Yes. That's when Brutus and his clan, they dressed up in pink and stood around Caesar to protest his evil doings.

Well, actually, I was just reading through your show notes here for Pie Day. What I find hard to believe, and this could be a Berenstain Bear moment, this didn't start until 1988. I was going to get to that. Yes. I was very shocked. In fact, the celebration started in 1988, when a physicist at San Francisco's Exploratorium noticed the date matched the first digits of pie.

Now, people worldwide mark the occasion with trivia, math challenges, and, of course, eating pie. 1988. Now, I have memories of this much younger. I have to say that that sentence was not written by me. That could be a rounding error from the AI that ScienceAlert.com uses to actually do it here.

Yeah, because they are saying that Larry Shaw was the staff. On his staff retreat, he came up with the Pie Day. Okay. Well, I did go back and ask ChatGPT, and it said that Larry Shaw gets credit for it. And in 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives officially recognized March 14th as National Pie Day.

All right. So, I don't know. If the oracle of ChatGPT say it so, I guess that's what we have to take as fact nowadays. I mean, we're all getting older at this point. Our memories are starting to fade, but I could have sworn I'm much younger. Anyways, whatever. Wrong timeline, Brian.

Wrong fucking timeline. Well, we did get shifted about, what, five years ago. Yeah, that's about it. I did learn a new term this week, though. Godal! Is that something like perhaps Brazilian announcers do during the World Cup?

Godal! No? Don't. No, it's apparently taken from people who like to hodl their cryptocurrencies. Now that they've moved to gold, as the world is falling apart, they're all buying gold and screwing everything up.

Well, those gold bars will be very useful to throw at the people that are coming at your house. Yeah. That's about it. Because you can't wipe your ass with them. We learned that in COVID, too. Yeah. I mean, I've seen the panic. There's a little bit going on in our Discord as well, and certainly online people are freaking out because, you know, bad policies are making the stock market crash.

Shocking there, I know. But everybody's like having a cow, and I'm just like, you know what? At the end of the day, if everything crashes, we've got bigger problems than gold bricks. Yeah, teepee. Eggs. Eggs. Food. The thing is, you can use physical money to wipe your ass with pretty soon.

Those gold bars hurt. Yeah, they do. They're not very absorbent, I've heard. Good way to keep them, though. Brown bars. Ain't nobody stealing those. Ain't nobody stealing that. Nope. Nope. That's a feature, not a bug, my friend.

That's a feature, not a bug. And a hat tip over to Retox on Discord who sent me this, or not me, personally. I know it was meant for me personally because that's the way Discord is. You all write to me personally and then talk amongst yourselves when I leave the room. But he posted a video called The Man Behind the American Oligarchy.

Oh, he's gone now? Good. We can make fun of him. Yeah. Seriously. The Man Behind the American Oligarchy. The rise of Peter Thiel and his step into political life. Now, for a long, long time, I kept telling everybody, I'm like, Peter Thiel is the scary one.

He's the one to watch out for. He's the puppet master. Yeah. Has been. Always has been because he's the smart one of the group. If you haven't been able to tell by what's happening. Yeah. No, he's one of the PayPal mafia. But there's a great video that kind of describes the history of the Thiels, going back to his grandfather, who was an actual fucking Nazi, who left Germany to go to South Africa with the rest of the fucking Nazis.

He started a uranium mine on slave labor, and it just gets better from there. So if you've ever heard me talk about Peter Thiel and why I think he's the actual antichrist, go watch the video, because it does a really good job of breaking down where all of his tendrils are eking into our society.

Period. It's everywhere. Sounds great. Even in Hulk Hogan's pants. Yeah. It's fun to laugh into the void. It really is. And they can hear you, too, now. So did you watch the little bit in there about the new surveillance system that they're building?

Oh, yeah. I saw that. Yeah. I saw that. Yeah. It's great. In the news.

Deliveroo! Brian is in the news. Uh-huh. Deliveroo! Deliveroo! has posted its first-ever annual profit, reporting a net gain of 2.9 million pounds compared to a 31.8 million pounds loss of last year. Deliveroo!

credited increased customer spending and a stronger push into grocery and retail partnerships with brands like Screwfix, sounds fucking fake, and The Perfume Shop. It also announced a $100 million pound share buyback. Thanks to Adam D. over on Blue Sky for pointing this one out to me.

But I got to say, Deliveroo! Again! CEO Will Shue warned that weak customer sentiment was dragging on growth, and the company pushed back its 2026 earnings margin target and now says it will hit its 4% goal in the medium term. Investors weren't pleased and shares dropped as much as 8% on the news.

Doing a bit of an Uber there? One profitable year? That's about it. The accountant from Uber got let go and just moved over the pond to Deliveroo so they could get that one good year. Let's shuffle these numbers around a bit so we can actually have a positive year and try to get more people to invest. Whoop, didn't work.

Always beware when those companies start doing stock buybacks. Always, always beware. Somebody's planning to exit stage left. No, no, Brian, it's Brexit stage left. Oh, Brexit. Sorry. My bad. Pounds. Yes. Medicines back across the pond lost a staggering $12.5 billion to scams in 2024, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Wait, they're still around? Drop in the bucket compared to what you all lost in your retirement accounts. Yep. That's a five-fold increase from 2023. About 2.6 million people reported fraud with social media, AI, and cryptocurrency scams, leading the charge. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

The most common scams involved imposters posing as family members, romantic partners, government officials, or tech support. Tech support and government officials. Haven't I seen a guy wearing a tech support t-shirt on the news who pretends to be a government official?

What were those letters again? Yeah. Scandio. Something like that. Some frauds reached absurd levels, like a French woman losing $800,000 to a fake Brad Pitt. I wonder what Edward Norton's doing with that $800,000.

If you get it, you get it. Even financially savvy victims can get caught off guard, like a journalist who handed $50,000 in cash to a stranger in a shoebox. Surprisingly, younger people 20 to 29 reported scams more often than seniors, though older victims lost more money.

And seniors can't figure out how to report a scam, which is why they don't report it. They're also embarrassed. So they have more money than people 20 to 29 these days. Oh, shit. And eggs. And eggs. The biggest money drain are bank transfers at $2 billion.

But crypto wasn't far behind, of course, with $1.4 billion. And thanks to AI Deep Fake Tech, voice cloning scams are on the rise, meaning that distressed calls from your grandson may be a bot trying to rob you. Speaking of AI Deep Face voice cloning tech, Consumer Reports has found that most popular voice cloning tools on the market lack meaningful safeguards to prevent fraud and abuse.

They didn't even have to say voice cloning tools. They could have just said most things on the internet lack meaningful safeguards to prevent fraud and abuse. True that. True that. In a new study, Consumer Reports examined six AI voice cloning services, Descript 11 Labs, Lovo, PlayHT, Resemble AI, and Speechify, and found that only Descript and Resemble AI had any real measures in place to combat misuse.

Of course, the one that I pay for the most has the most safeguards and makes it the hardest to use. Thanks. For the other four, users only had to check a box or make a simple self-attestation claiming they had the right to clone a voice, no actual verification required. And I will definitely back that up because 11 Labs, I have made many a celebrity voice on 11 Labs and they're so much fun.

Are you a criminal? No. No. No, I am not. Who is going to say this means that bad actors could easily create AI generated voice defects with little effort. It takes a little, it takes some effort, a little, a little more than a little, but only that's because you have to go find the clips.

That's the only effort that it takes. Consumer Reports policy analyst Grace Getty warns that without stronger protections, voice cloning could supercharge impersonation scams, making it easier than ever to deceive people over the phone or online. Yeah, that's already happened.

Horses left the barn. Yeah. Too late. Too late. Well, the FCC said yesterday that it's creating a new Council for National Security within the agency. This announcement doesn't go into much detail, much like most announcements coming out of this administration about what the group will do, but it does list its broader goals, focusing on U.S.

competition with China, including in AI and other tech sectors. There is a three-part agenda. Reduce the American technology and telecommunications sectors, trade and supply chain dependencies on foreign adversaries. Mitigate America's vulnerabilities, cyber attacks, espionage, and surveillance by foreign adversaries.

And there's supposed to be three, but I only see two. Problem with the article? Perhaps. The person got fired. He was writing in mid-sentence. Got fired halfway through. The Council will include representatives from eight bureaus and offices within the FCC. An arrangement, the agency says, will foster cross-agency collaboration and information sharing.

No word on how many people have been fired from all these bureaus and agencies, but probably not that many, the current FCC chair, Carr, has been aggressive, controversial, and aligned with President Donald Trump's goals. Not surprising, given he wrote the Project 2025's chapter on the agency.

His first, not even full two months of the administration have included investigating media outlets, notably not foreign adversaries, probing Comcast, also not a foreign adversary, over its DEI practices, and seeking public opinion on which regulations the agency should delete, delete, delete.

Yeah. I don't know if you've read the 2025 playbook. Oh! Spoiler alert! Why read it? It's unfolding in real time. That's what I'm saying. It's just spoiler alerts is all it is. Yeah. You know, they should have just called it spoiler alert. 2025 spoiler alerts. Rare case where the book is not better than the movie.

They both suck. Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero.

Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Cleaver Colon, BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN.

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The Department of Government Efficiency has fired more than 100 employees from U.S. Cybersecurity Agency. CISA! So the FCC is trying to pick up where CISA is being fired. Yes. And just for those who don't know who CISA is, CISA stands for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

It's a U.S. federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security responsible for protecting the nation's critical infrastructure from cyber threats and other security risks, including key red team staffers got fired who test government networks for security vulnerabilities.

The layoffs happened without warning in late February and early March, with affected employees losing network access immediately. Among those let go were members of CISA's Cyber Incident Response Team, responsible for penetration testing and monitoring federal government networks. Of course, because they would get in the way of the Doge people messing around with federal government networks.

This marks the third wave of CISA job cuts since January 20, with over 130 employees already let go earlier this year. And some of those previously affected worked on election security and were placed on leave. Huh. Yeah. Yep. Interesting.

Yeah. Wonder why they'd get rid of those people. I wonder why the people who, yeah, let's just not go down that road. It's too early and I've got too many, too many tendrils in that one right now. One laid off employee described Doge's approach as a ballistic missile with no guidance systems.

Why does this matter, Brian? Because these cuts could weaken the government's ability to detect and respond to cyber threats, making U.S. networks more vulnerable to Putin. I mean, Trump's friend. I mean, attacks within the cybersecurity. Within. Fucking Christ. I can't even talk this morning because it's such a mess.

With cybersecurity risks at an all time high, firing those responsible for protecting critical infrastructure raises serious national security concerns. No shit, Sherlock. Well, that's that's the new that's the new department of the NSS. We're going to call it that.

Well, we'll see how many of these people remain out of a job because we do have the pushback that is continuing on Thursday. Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said that the firing of tens of thousands of federal probationary workers had been based on a lie and that the government had conducted the expulsions illegally, further calling the initiative a sham.

This man is a national hero. Alsup ordered that the workers be reinstated immediately. Government executive reports that some 24,000 employees would regain their jobs as a result of the judge's decision. The government's firing of the employees was illegitimate because the agencies impacted by the cuts were directed by the Office of Personnel Management to do so.

Also, they do not have the authority to make such orders as those orders can only be made by the agencies themselves, the judge concluded. Alsup, who is a Clinton employee, had harsh words for the Trump administration's conduct, claiming that the attorneys working for the government had attempted to mislead him.

The government, I believe, has tried to frustrate the judge's ability to get at the truth of what happened here and then set forth sham declarations. He said, that's not the way it works in the U.S. district court. Outlets report that he became visibly upset with Trump Justice Department lawyers at various points throughout the hearing.

Come on, that's a sham. Go ahead. It upsets me. I want you to know that. I've been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how we get at the truth. Alsup said, and you're not helping me get at the truth. You're giving me press releases and sham documents. It's a sad, sad day, he continued.

Our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance. When they know good and well, that's a lie, he continued. This should not have been done in our country. It was a sham order in order to try to avoid statutory requirements. He also ordered discovery and deposition in the case to provide greater transparency about the government's activities.

He further dissuaded the government from trying to paint him as some sort of leftist radical, which is what immediately everybody thinks when they see San Francisco and Clinton. The words that I give you today should not be taken as some kind of wild and crazy judge in San Francisco has said that the administration cannot engage in a reduction in force.

I'm not saying that at all, Alsup said. He noted that the government could not break the law or violate the Constitution while working on such an agenda. Of course, if it does, it has to comply with the statutory requirements, the Reduction in Force Act, the Civil Service Act, the Constitution, maybe other statuettes, Alsup said.

Good. Push back, motherfuckers. Some heroes wear robes. Did it do anything? Has everybody been rehired yet? Well, that's going to be the question, right? We'll see. Are they just going to ignore the judges in the courts? We'll see. Speaking of San Francisco, Brian, this week marks 20 years of Y Combinator.

Y. Y. Yes, they put the Y in Y Combinator. The startup accelerator that's given us some of the most innovative and, frankly, frustrating companies of the modern age. From turning food delivery into a financial and logistical nightmare with DoorDash, to making housing scarcer with Airbnb, YC has disrupted industry in ways we all have to live with, whether we like it or not.

Then there's Twitch, where internet personalities grind themselves into burnout for an algorithm. And Sam Altman, who left YC to lead OpenAI, ensuring we all get to hear about AI's world-changing potential every fucking day. While it mostly writes lazy PowerPoint slides and helps kids cheat on homework.

And let's not forget, give us wrong information. YC has also fueled the appification of life, Brian, making basic tasks require an app, a login, and your personal data. And let's not forget Reddit, a YC-backed platform that birthed both useful discussions and some of the most painfully online people you'll ever meet.

Oh, remember NFTs? OpenSea, a YC-backed company, helped that dumpster fire burn even brighter before the market collapsed. Even more troubling, though, Brian, YC has played a role in military tech, backing Ares Industries, a startup building low-cost cruise missiles.

Which is just what you want, low-cost cruise missiles. You know the problem with cruise missiles, Jason? The average person just can't afford one. You can't get eggs and a cruise missile. Come on. You've got to pick one or the other. Oh, and Optify.ai, which promises to bring AI-powered worker surveillance to factories, because what factory jobs really needed was more Big Brother.

Oh, the hits just keep on coming with YC, because for every YC innovation that improves life, another erodes it, whether by making things more expensive, removing human jobs, or fueling tech's growing hostility toward regulation and accountability. In the next 20 years, expect YC to keep making waves.

Just don't expect all of them to be good ones, Brian, because they're not going to be. Well, hopefully some of the scientists that have been over there helping apify our entire lives and making them worse won't be there in the future. Scientists in the U.S. under the Trump regime are facing a sudden loss of funding and stricter regulations on speech in areas of research.

Enter the French. Oui, oui. Avantgarde. Marseille University in France has said that 40 U.S. scientists have answered the call it put out earlier this month offering safe harbor to fleeing Americans. Jesus fucking Christ, Jason.

Safe harbor to fleeing Americans is not something that should be in the fucking news. In a press release about its Safe Space for Science initiative, the university announced that 40 U.S. scientists, including people from Stanford, Yale, NASA, the National Institute for Health, and George Washington University, are moving over to France, Jason, because they can ply their trades there in a non-stupid way.

Moving on, lay up. We are witnessing a new brain drain, Brenton said on March 12th. We will do everything possible to help as many scientists as possible continue their research, but we cannot meet all their requests alone. He then called on the French and European governments for help.

Yes, the French and European governments will be helping American scientists continue their important work because you can't do it in America anymore. Just be careful of GDPR, guys. Since you can't do LGBTQ over here, you got to do GDPR over there.

Yes. Offering safe harbor to fleeing Americans. Not really something that you'd hear because they're not fleeing from like Mozambique embassies where they're being overrun. No, they're fleeing. They're fleeing from American universities. Yes.

That's fucked up. Not the only place, too. I know Canada. I don't have a link in the show notes for this, but it's all over the news here as well. We are fast-tracking applications for doctors, nurses, et cetera, because there's been not enough here because the U.S. pays better. But now that everything is going on, an awful lot of doctors and nurses are moving here.

Can you please talk to somebody up there and have podcasters added to that list? Jesus fucking Christ. There's too many fucking podcasters already. There's just one that matters. God damn it. Well, you know, French first, man. We can get you up to Quebec.

Get on that Duolingo. Did that come out of YC? I hope not. Elon Musk is blaming Ukraine for the latest cyber attack that repeatedly took down X. Of course he fucking is. But experts aren't buying it. In an interview with Fox News, Musk claims that IP addresses behind the attack traced back to Ukraine.

However, security experts told Wired that IP data alone doesn't prove the identity or intent of the attackers. No shit. One researcher even said that Ukraine wasn't even in the top 20 sources of the attack. Now, here's the real funny part. A pro-Palestinian hacking group called Dark Storm Team has claimed a responsibility.

And Musk still says, no, it was Ukraine. Of course it was. And to make matters worse, the attack was made embarrassingly easy. Security analysts found that several X servers weren't even protected by Cloudflare, the basic tool for mitigating these kinds of DDoS attacks, which everybody knows about.

It's the best people, Jason. It's the best people. A botnet of hacked security cameras in DVRs overwhelmed X's unsecured infrastructure, exposing a major oversight in the platform security. I hope cat turds okay. Despite Musk's claims of a state-sponsored attack, experts say the crude, highly visible nature of this hack makes it unlikely to have been carried out by an intelligence agency because cybersecurity analysts told the AP that state actors usually prefer stealthier operations.

No shit. I think we just need to rebrand our fucking show to no shit. I'm telling you, NSS, baby. No shit, Sherlock. Today's Tech Genius of the Year award goes to Davis Liu, a 55-year-old software developer who just got convicted for throwing the ultimate IT temper tantrum.

After more than a decade at power management company Eaton Corp, Liu got his ego bruised when a 2018 corporate reshuffle put him in the digital corner. Instead of updating his LinkedIn like a normal person, he decided to go full villain. Over the next year, he sprinkled sabotage throughout the company's network, deleting user profiles, causing endless system crashes, and basically turning Eaton's IT department into a scene from office space.

The cherry on top, a kill switch designed to nuke the system the second he got the boot. And because subtlety isn't his strong suit, he named it after himself. Is DL enabled in AD, is the name of the program?

Translation, is Davis Liu still in the system? Well, Davis, you're definitely in the system now, the prison system. He's facing up to 10 years in jail for what the DOJ calls intentional damage to protected computers. He plans to appeal, but something tells me the court isn't going to reboot this decision.

Oh, but he may get a pardon and a new job at DOJ. Yeah, he just might. He just might. This is something that I had thought about so many times in my career. Oh, this is something that I can't believe you didn't get busted for at some point. Oh, there was, there was, there, I don't know if they're still out there.

There were several companies and several websites that I worked on. If you just did slash butthead, or no, no, I'm sorry, not slash butthead, slash cornholio in the URLs, it would just pull up a picture of cornholio saying, I am cornholio. I need teepee for my bunghole.

That was my, that was, that was as far as I went with my subversion. I'm impressed actually at your lack of, at your total restraint. That's pretty good. I know. You're not going to jail for that. You're just going to get a few chuckles. No, I'm not going to jail for teepee and for my bunghole, but, you know, cornholio was always my, my backdoor, no pun intended.

Nice. Now, coffee, literally, Brian, blew out my nose when I saw the headline here. Pinterest to train AI models on user content. Which isn't actually even their content. Their content. Pinterest is updating its privacy policy on April 30th, 2025, allowing the company to use all past and future user content to train its AI models.

While users can opt out in their settings, the change formalizes what Pinterest was already doing. Now, it's ironic because Pinterest built its platform by encouraging users to share and curate visual content, often emphasizing creativity, inspiration, and originality. Now, it's using that same user-generated content without explicit prior permission to train AI models, potentially undermining the very creators who made Pinterest valuable in the first place.

Now, as you and I, Brian, know, and we've talked about for decades now, it seems, hundreds of years, thousands of eons we've talked about this, a huge chunk of Pinterest content is already in copyright violation because users regularly pin images they don't own, often without credit or permission.

And now, Pinterest is taking that already dubious content and using it to train AI models, potentially embedding copyright violations into more machine learning systems. Potentially? Potentially, yes, I know. Potentially? Definitely. Should we just say definitely? A hundred percent, yeah.

So, not only is Pinterest leveraging user-generated content without direct consent, but it's also feeding AI with a massive pool of stolen work. They put possibly in the article, by the way. Fuck you. I know, I know. I just, I'm not going down the possibly road anymore. Let's just call a fucking spade a spade.

And then to top it off, it's adding AI-generated content labels. This somehow fixes the problem. The perfect storm of hypocrisy in the AI era, Brian. Oh, God. I'm telling, I'm like, I fucking coughed out my nose.

Like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Also in Are You Kidding Me news, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering using blockchain and possibly stablecoins to track grant spending. Critics within the HUD are calling it a reckless move, with one official comparing it to monopoly money.

But the push is reportedly coming from, wait for it, Trump-aligned officials, including a former Ernst & Young executive. It aligns with the administration's broader crypto-friendly stance. Skeptics warn this could introduce financial instability into housing programs. Right. And again, possibly.

Possibly. Yeah. God damn it. The fuck. Now, here's a fun one. Waymo's fleet of over 300 driverless taxis in San Francisco may follow traffic laws, but they sure as shit can't park. According to city records, these autonomous rides racked up 589 parking tickets in 2023 alone, costing the company over $65,000 in fines.

The violations ranged from blocking traffic to ignoring street cleaning rules and parking in restricted zones. I had a girlfriend like that once. She ignored the street cleaning rules? Oh, just, I mean, I've never seen so many parking tickets. I think half her salary went to fucking parking tickets.

Seriously? Oh, man. I'm like, read the sign. Waymo says it's working on the issue, but in a city that handed out 1.2 million tickets last year, good luck with that. The real issue, these self-driving cars park like humans, stopping in loading zones, waiting between rides, except there's no driver to argue with, the meter made.

San Francisco is a bitch to park in. I think I had like 300 tickets at some point because they make the little letters so small in the street cleaning. That was the thing. It's like, if you're not up there, every morning it was the shuffle.

Everybody would move their car from one side of the street to the other, like in synchronicity. It was like that scene in Edward Scissorhands where everybody's getting up in the morning and getting in their car to go to work. Everybody just runs out in their bathrooms with their coffee in their hands to move their car to the other side of the street.

It's a self-driving car. It should know the rules. That's kind of the funny part, I guess. I agree. Yeah. I agree. Well, I've got a bit of good news since we unfortunately lost the chance of the asteroid coming and saving us all from this ridiculous shit show that we're all stuck in right now. One researcher's analysis of the web space telescope images could indicate that we're all stuck in a black hole, according to research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

I can't talk either. Okay. Too much Quebecois, but we're all in a black hole. No shit Sherlock.

No shit Sherlock Holmes.

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Media Candy. Bjorn writes in, you are way too soft on severance. The new statesman calls the show an insult and a scam. I hope your democracy kicks into gear soon. Greetings from Denmark. Bjorn, Bjorn, Bjorn. I thought this died down.

Now it's all going to come back. We're going to have so many people yelling at us about not watching Severance again now. Thanks. The article is titled Severance is Laughing at You. And then I saw this one. Somehow Severance season two cost an enormous $20 million per episode.

What? A million dollars for every boring second. That's more than the most expensive Game of Thrones episodes, which doesn't surprise me because they forgot to pay the writers and get a script on that one. Also, a few episodes forgot the lighting. Yeah.

And they left the Starbucks coffees in. Starbucks coffee. Oh, yeah. And also the story at the end. Oh, that too. That too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a link in here to an ADQ and Ben Stiller interview. If you give a shit about Severance anymore. I talked to my friend John Sylvain the other day and he's like, yeah, you should go back and watch the first season before you watch the second season.

He said it's good. And I'm like, oh. As you do with most shows. But then he said, nah, don't worry about it because if you're not clicking, don't watch it. I'm like, okay, thank you. That's the best thing I've heard all day. Life's too short. Here comes the hate mail. It's coming.

It's coming. Paradise on Hulu. Eight-part miniseries. There's definitely going to be a season two starring Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, and James Marsden. I loved it. See, this is, it was, it's another eight-part doom and gloom.

It's basically silo, you know, the old trapped in a post-apocalyptic bunker scenario type of thing. But I thought it was a good one. I thought it was, I thought it was very well written, moved very, very quickly. There was no, there was no being stuck in a fucking office building for six episodes before you got to any semblance of a plot.

Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I actually stayed up last night to finish it so I could comment on it on the show, which is why I'm stuttering to finish my sentences. Yeah, when I got, I got in for my road trip last night, I watched The White Lotus because I thought we might be talking about that.

But I'll just. Did you finish? Are you? I'm caught up. I'm caught up. Okay. So I just wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to see Lucius Malfoy's penis, you're in luck. You're in luck. There you go. See, that's the thing. Everybody's Johnson is at the beginning of every episode or every season of White Lotus.

Yeah, there's always a penis. Yeah, we went back to, we started to rewatch one and two because we completely forgot everything that was in them to see if we could pick up all the clues in season three. And of course, yes, first scene there is a set of balls and it's like an Easter egg. It is.

Two Easter eggs, actually, in season one. I don't know why they feel like they need to do that, but they do. Hey, turn about's fair play. We get boobs. The trailer drop for Black Mirror Season 7. Oh, one of those other shows we apparently hate, according to one of our listeners. I love this so much.

I can't wait for this. It looks so great and evil. I just, I need it right now. I need it. I need something more evil than the news that we have to trail through every day to write this show. So please, please get here sooner. April 10th is only going to take six more years, so.

Well, the nice thing about Black Mirror is I don't have to go back and watch the rest of the seasons in order because I'm woefully behind. Due to my aversion to watching Black Mirror when the world is Black Mirror. There's one episode, though, that you're going to, you're probably going to want to go back and check out because it is.

There is a continuance. Oh, the Star Trek thing. No, I've seen that Black Mirror. It's great. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah. There's going to be a follow-up to that one because that was apparently the most, the most highly rated one of all time. Right. Well, unfortunately, another show seems to be returning, and I got a very bad feeling about this one, Jason.

Okay. Ted Lasso is officially returning for season four, despite previous claims that the third season of Ted Lasso would be the last in the fact that they wrapped up the story incredibly nicely. Apple TV Plus has confirmed reports that they claim sports comedy will return for season four.

Jason Sudeikis is set to reprise his role as the American football coach, struggling to make sense of the sport he originally knew as soccer. Apple TV has yet to confirm who, aside from Sudeikis, may be returning from the original cast. And Sudeikis himself offered a possible clue of what's to come during an appearance on the podcast New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelsey on Friday, revealing—see, there's too many podcasters, Jason—revealing that Ted is coaching a woman's team in the new season.

Okay. That's kind of what we heard before. I think this is going to land with a thud. I really like that conspiracy theory that Ted's plane went down when he was going home, and that was just all like an afterlife death sequence. They're losting it?

Yeah, that was, you know—I thought that was like the best possible ending for the series. So, okay, guess not. Nope. Well, we talked about Apple Music Classical before, and how fantastic it is, and why the hell is it a separate app, and then how difficult it is to classify everything, and why Shazam does not work with the classical music.

Anyway, they now have a web view, so you can play it in your browser at work. That's all. That's nice. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. So, there you go. But I didn't even realize—I have to go check, because it didn't come out on CarPlay when it originally came out, but it was apparently out in CarPlay.

Now, I never scrolled that far in the menus, so I never found it. I have to go scroll a little bit more. I've got Overcast, which I unfortunately had to go back to, and Audible in my first page, so I never get to see anything else. So, check it out.

Well, I've got news from one of my favorite artists, the Aphex Twin, who has written some of the best electronic music out there. Particularly some of the best ambient electronica music out there. I love his ambient music. He has teamed up with Supreme for a new merchandise line in classic fashion for the—now, this is why I put this in the show notes in particular.

There's 12 hours and 40 minutes of a great playlist of different artists, ranging from Herbie Hancock to synth pioneers and classical composers. It's a pretty cool playlist. I have not made it through the 12 hours. I've skipped around a little bit. Link is in the show notes. But here's what the article says over at Consequence.

In classic fashion for the acclaimed rap producer. What? What? Huh? Yeah. He's marked the occasion by creating a dense playlist of nearly 200 songs. He's not a rap producer.

Yeah. At all. Ever. Okay. In any way, shape, or form. Okay. Okay. Anyways, in other news, former MTV host— Wait, which AI wrote that one, I wonder? I don't know. I suppose if you put in—what kind of music does Aphex Twin into Google?

You'll get the Google AI will come back. He's a rap artist. Actually, the Google AI probably would because it is so terrible. Yes. It is so—I've been doing comparisons between all four of them this week, between Chad GPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.

And every time you put something into all—you get four wildly different fucking answers, almost all of them wrong. We'll just have to wait for Pinterest's generative AI to come out, Jason. I know. That's it. That's it. Once Pinterest comes to the rescue, maybe we'll get something new.

All right. Go on. Well, a little bit of news about somebody who absolutely knows that Aphex Twin is not a rap artist. Former MTV host Matt Pinfield has come out of a coma after suffering a massive stroke back in January. Oh, shit. Hosted MTV's influential alternative rock program 120 minutes back in the 90s, and I watched basically every week.

And again, during a revival in the early 2010s, when I did not, has been in a coma for roughly two months. He has been released from ICU and is currently rehabbing at a facility in Los Angeles. So I hope for the best for him. Yeah. No, I did not know that he had—that's bad.

He's kind of dropped out of, you know, the public eye. He hosts a few radio programs and things of that nature. So he's still out there. He's one of the most knowledgeable people about music that you will ever hear in your life. So— Yeah. I just never liked him as the host. Yeah, me either. But, you know, we were snotty back then.

Like, why are they—who's this old fuck telling us about the alternative music we like? He's probably three years older than us. Yeah, probably. No, that's why I'm lucky. He heard a—I see massive stroke and coma. You know, I get a little—I get triggered. So, yeah. Well, I hope he—I hope he recovers soon.

Me too. Apps and doodads! Here's a fun one, Brian. Audio Shake, the leader in AI sound separation, has launched MultiSpeaker, a cutting-edge model that isolates an unlimited number of voices into individual audio tracks.

This breakthrough tackles one of audio's toughest problems, overlapping speech, making it a game-changer for podcasts, film, TV, and voice AI applications. I'll finally be able to split up Bohemian Rhapsody into separate tracks. Exactly. I watched some of the demos, and it's kind of okay, except for the parts, I don't know, where they talk over each other, and the AI fills it in gibberish.

You mean the one thing that they claim they can do? Exactly. Oh, okay. Just checking. Exactly. I just—I put the—I didn't know if you've heard of these guys, because apparently they're really big into, you know, splitting into stem—like, you know, splitting music into stems. That's their bread and butter. Right. And I always— You know how you actually get music split into stems?

Go to the studio with the recording artist and get them from the store? You ask the fucking artist, and you get permission. That's how you do it. Yeah, that's kind of how you do it. Although, I have to say, I've been working with my friend Andy, who's going through all of his old stuff from back when he was, like, you know, in his 20s.

And it's thoroughly helping him recreate those old songs, because they don't have those original tracks. Yeah, and you had to—there's only so many, you know, tracks that you had to work with, so you had to bounce things down. That's the reason that it took so long for the Beatles stuff, because John Lennon's voice was tracked over piano, and they had to separate the two, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Mm-hmm. So there are legitimate uses, but there's also a lot of illegitimate uses while we have 125,000 songs a day being released to Spotify. Yeah, I'm sure they're making their beans off legitimate uses. Mm-hmm. I saw a new piece of gear this week, and I'm putting it in here, because this is one of those things that, man, I wish I'd have had when I started this fucking racket.

The Zoom PodTrack P2 Podcast Recorder. Oh, I thought you were going to say a million dollars, because that helps, too. That would have been nice. Yeah. That would have been really nice. Cost about that and shit that I had to buy so far. This is a $99 device from Zoom, where you can plug in two mics in a room.

It's just a, you know, it's a remote recorder, a field recorder. Like, I've got half a dozen of them in the other room. Some of them cost like $1,500, and this one is $99. Here's the thing about this one, which is why I'm putting it in here, because I've gotten some people who are interested in getting into podcasting, dear God, why, lately.

Do you like to lose money? Yeah, how much money would you like to lose today? Do you think everybody needs to hear your opinions about everything? Do you hate severance? Start a podcast today. Do you hate severance? Don't podcast about severance, for fuck's sake. The interesting thing about this is, most field recorders, you have to have an XLR microphone to plug in, which is, you know, the expensive mics, like the ones we're talking on.

Actually, that I'm talking on, you're talking on a USB mic. Actually, you're talking on a hybrid mic. You have an MV7, correct? I do. Yes, you're on an MV7, which is a hybrid mic, XLR and USB. I'm on an ElectroVoice RE20, which is an XLR-only mic, which won't work with the Zoom PodTrack, because the PodTrack P2 is for USB-only mics.

You can always get an adapter. No, here's the problem, Brian. Well, I did get that adapter, and it ruined my tracks when I was recording schmackters, and I have to go back and retrack all my schmacks, because that little $200 Shure device, the bit rate on it sucked, and everything came out crackly. Are you sure AudioShake can't fix that?

Yeah, I won't do that. I didn't talk over myself, but this lets you plug in two cheaper USB mics and go out in the field with it, and it can record to an SD card, but it also works as a computer interface, too. So if you wanted to use it as a plug-in and then use something like Riverside that we use to record this show with two people in one room and somebody remote, you can do something like that, too.

It's $99. That is a rounding error for most podcasting gear. So it's like, go check it out. I mean, and Zoom makes decent stuff. There's Zoom, the H4n was like a staple of ours for a long time. The H6, people still use.

It sounds okay. It's not the best. The thing about Zoom is you can fix everything in post now. So if you have a subscription to Adobe's Creative Suite, you can use their podcast tools to zhuzh up any track nowadays, or you can spend thousands of dollars like I did, like a big dummy on iZotope software and plug-ins for Logic and all sorts of stuff.

But nowadays, yeah, it's cheap. But this thing just caught my eye because it's dual USB, which I think is actually really cool. Well, Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is going to be adding a live translate feature to AirPods later this year as part of an upcoming software update. The feature sounds like it would work in a similar way to the translation feature on the Pixel Buds, only without the need to ask Google Assistant, or in this case Siri, to start listening for a specific language first.

Apple's feature would reportedly automatically detect that something other than your native language is being spoken and start converting what you're hearing into a language you understand. We're veering into Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy territory here. My problem with this is there better be an on and off switch for this shit because I don't want it just leaping in and doing it no matter what.

I'm sure it's Apple. Yeah. Just turn it off. But this will rapidly accelerate my move to Quebecois. I just hope it does Gen Z so I can know what the kids are speaking nowadays. That would be nice.

I don't think they can translate that yet. Skibidoo. Okay. And speaking about the kids, I've gone off at great length about the lack of protection on most of these multiplayer games that are out there for kids and various, all the technology for kids. And we've talked a lot about how people who create this technology absolutely refuse to let their kids use it.

I just want to read this headline. Don't let your kids be on Roblox, Roblox CEO tells parents before comparing himself to Walt Disney and declaring the platform the future of communication. Wait, what? Would you please break that down for me?

Because I know it's early. I haven't had enough coffee. But that just didn't make any fucking sense. Okay. Roblox Corporation co-founder and CEO Dave Buzuski has said that if parents are worried about their kids using Roblox, they have a fairly simple option open to them. My first message would be, if you're not comfortable, don't let your kids be on Roblox.

Roblox, which makes sense to me because they don't fucking police the damn thing. I guess that makes sense, yeah. Yeah. This message is a bit of a get out, said Ellie Gibson of Scummy Mummies. It's much easier said than done, especially when all their friends are playing it. Things get slightly crazy later in the interview as he compares the experience of building Roblox to how Walt Disney must have felt when building Disney into what it is.

The job is a little like having the opportunity he had a long time ago when he was designing the Magic Kingdom. And if that isn't grandoise enough for you, when asked to describe Roblox in three words, he goes for four. The future of communication. Okay, buddy.

Back the fuck up. He goes on these people.

At the library. New book came out this week, Brian. Careless People, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynne Williams. Now, Sarah Wynne Williams, she served as Facebook's vice president of public policy from 2011 to 2018.

And this is a book about she's basically whistleblowing from what it was like behind the scenes for seven years. Yeah, I'm fairly well into it at this point. And the most interesting thing is her story about getting attacked by a shark when she was a kid and almost dying. That was fascinating and quite gripping.

The rest of it so far, moving into the rest of the story, is kind of textbook. Yeah, we know Mark Zuckerberg's a shithead. We know Sheryl Sandberg's an asshole. We know everybody that worked there are just garbage humans. And you wanted to save the world, of course.

Well, except for those years 2011 to 2018 when she didn't seem to care about the fact that they were horrible people. No, she did. She tried. But, you know, whatever. So Meta, of course, said, yeah, these are bad optics for us.

We don't want her to talk about this. So they're citing a non-disparagement agreement that she signed on her way out the door and then basically got an injunction against her to not be able to talk about the book. So I don't know if anybody has ever heard of the Streisand syndrome over at Meta.

But by calling out the fact that she shouldn't talk about this, everybody wants to buy it and read it now. And everybody's talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. Yeah. If you don't know some of the inside stories of Facebook back in the day, check it out.

It's fairly well written. She reads the audio version of it and she's pretty good at it. And, yeah, it's not a bad book. It's not a bad book. Unfortunately for people like us who have been, you know, nuts deep in this for so goddamn long, there's nothing new here that really is shocking or surprising.

It's kind of par for the course. They're horrible people. They did horrible things. They're kids who got too much money and too much power and didn't really care. And it just continues on into adulthood. So just read the news if you want to see how the story ends, because, yeah, that's about it.

But, yeah, it's a worthwhile book to pick up if you want to hear more from the inside of horrible people's telling their story at Facebook. Not enough of that in the news. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action. The lineup reveals coming soon.

Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com. 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 day. Exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, occasionally. Dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat, every now and again. And breaks down industrial cyber security on control loop, when he damn well feels like it.

And even brings the laughs on only malware in the building once a month. Hello, Dave. Hi. He only brings one laugh a month? Yeah. Yeah. If I'm lucky. And I have two co-hosts to pick up the slack, so, you know, you just never know.

Yeah, a lot of expectations, baby. Right. I just want to say, first off, of course, it's good to have you back, Dave. We have missed you. We've missed you. Thank you. Yes. And I wanted to thank you for your recommendation that you gave me before you left, actually a little bit before, for the show Gravity Falls.

She's on Disney+. Since we last spoke, my son has watched the entire two seasons three times. Wow. As eight-year-old boys want to do, we are constantly playing the soundtrack around the house when not watching.

Right. Over the three watches, I have now seen every single episode, at least almost all of it. It is truly a wonderful show. It is great fun. And your son is exactly the same age that my son was the first time he made his way through it. Right.

I'm curious, has he done any of the decoding of things, like their little codes at the end of episodes and things? Has he gotten into any of that? Yes. By the second run-through, it was like, can I please see my iPad? I want to Google something. Ah. So he's trying to figure all the bits out and make sure he's not missed anything.

Right. Yeah. It was a blast. I was a little sad that it was only two seasons long. There are, I don't know if you were aware of this, there are a series of shorts, like two to three minutes. So there's probably about 15 of them. Yeah. Of course, we've seen all of those about 200 million times. And man, just about everybody in the world has played a voice character on that show as well.

Right. So it was a lot of fun for me as an adult, like going, who is that? Right. Yeah. I had one of those reasons, because we're making our way through it. And we're, I don't know, probably three quarters of the way through season one right now. And there's one where I went, wait, is that John Oliver?

That is John Oliver. It is. You know. Weird how? Okay. Right. How did that come to pass? Yeah. There also, there's coming up soon, there's an episode of another show where they're doing a segment with Mabel and it's called like a dream date with Mabel.

Right. So they're making new content, short form, and it's, I think it's just going to focus on Mabel, but we'll, we'll definitely be checking that out. Did you, did your son have any of the books? No. Oh, great. Guess what I'm doing this weekend.

So you can get the, the, uh, the book, you know, the journal, I guess it's called. You can get the journal. Okay. And, uh, yeah. And my son has the journal. Now at the time, I don't know how it's played out now, but at the time there were two versions of the journal.

There was the bargain price, probably $50 version of the journal, right? Bargain price. Yes. Yeah. Well, it's, it's very nice. It's a very nice book and it's true to the show, but then there's the $200 deluxe version of the journal that I think glows in the dark and has, well, we did not go that way.

Right. Exactly. We do not have that. This show will be forgotten about within six months when something else comes along. I do believe that, uh, you know, Ninjago, this new season comes out next month. So by that point, uh, I think the $50 one will have to cover it. If not a library version, if I can find it, there you go.

Even better. Yeah. I got to save all that money for the Harry Potter Legos next season. Right. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah. I think it's a genuinely delightful show, uh, for a lot of different reasons. And so I'm happy that, uh, we were able to spread it around and that you and your son are enjoying it together.

That doesn't get much better than that. No, it really doesn't. So again, thank you. You're welcome. Um, so I, as you mentioned, I have been away for a few weeks. I was traveling, uh, one week for work and then traveled for about a week and a half, took a family vacation that, uh, crossed over two of our usual recording days.

So I missed a couple of weeks there. Uh, and it was a big Disney vacation year this year. So it was, uh, my wife and I and our two sons, um, went down to the house of mouse, uh, spent like say about nine, nine days down there.

But, um, we did have a very good time. Um, you know, going that time of year, the crowds aren't that bad. Uh, weather is typically good, but kind of hit or miss. Like you may or may not be able to go to a water park, uh, and this trip, we did not go to a water park cause it was in the mid seventies all week.

And the, I'm sure the water in the water parks was in the sixties, you know, at best. But, um, we had a lot of fun. And, uh, one of the things that we focused on was restaurants this time around, which is something we had never really done before.

Uh, and I was curious, uh, if either of you guys had had any. Deliberate experiences, enjoying any of the higher level restaurants at any of these types of theme parks. Medieval times! I said high end.

Hey, when I went there, that was high end. Yeah. We were poor and that was literally the highlight of our trip. I believe you. Always vote for the green night. Always, always root for the green night. Yeah. As I mentioned to you all, we have a medieval times spitting distance from where I live.

Uh, so I have had the pleasure of taking not one, but two school field trips to medieval times. I've been to medieval times over 20 times. Wow. Okay. We have one in Chicago too. I've been to the one in, in Kissimmee. I've been to the one in Chicago and I've been to the one here in Southern California.

The Buena Park one, which I too have been to. Yes. Yes. I've been to, I've been to the Buena Park one four times. Once was enough. I've been to Kissimmee once. I still have my cup. I have my pewter cup that I got from the first trip there. Uh, I still, my goblet, um, still have that.

They don't, they don't sell those anymore. I think cause you could probably kill another patron. Oh, you could clunk somebody over the head. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's actually more dangerous than the fake swords that they sell. So, cause it's real. Throw it at a horse. Yeah.

And for every birthday for myself and my brother, I think up until he was like 17, we, we always went to medieval times in Chicago because three dudes going and getting their, their turkey leg on was just too much fun. Yeah. I loved it. It was a good turkey leg. Continue. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry to, to, to, to interrupt your Michelin tour of my big fat Disney credit card adventure. Go ahead. But you know, I'm curious though, you said turkey leg because the times that I went with the school groups, they were chicken.

Yeah. Oh, you got, uh, yeah. Cheaped out on. Yeah. No, no. It was like the, um, it was kind of like, yeah, it was just chicken legs. I think, or they kind of, I think they were, they, they might've said they were cornish game hens, but they were just a little tiny chicken. Right. They were cheap. They're very cheap.

They're runt. Runt. Let me transition back to Disneyland then, because you can get a full on turkey leg at Disneyland and it is delicious. Right. I would not consider it high end dining. Um, so I have not been to Disney world since I was quite young. So I have to only go off kind of Disneyland and California adventure and all of that.

Uh, I ate at the blue Bayou once the, the original kind of high end, uh, restaurant in Disneyland and kind of the only one in Disneyland in terms of like high end food. Um, I have not ate at any, I think there's like one or two kind of higher end restaurant type places in California adventure.

Um, they have San Fran Sokio, uh, square in Disney California adventure, which is not high end, but the food is unbelievably excellent. Like fantastic Asian food. And okay. I was going to say San Fran Sokio, like a San Francisco water park or Asian fusion.

Asian fusion. Yes. Okay. Based on if you get soaked while you ate or from the movie big hero six, that's kind of what it came from. Oh, got it. It does sound like a water park. If it's not, it should be. It sounds like a water park on an episode of the Simpsons.

Yeah. Or black mirror. We just go to San Francisco and the homeless people pee on you as you go down the street on the dashboard. Most of the nicer restaurants are in downtown Disney, which is the out, uh, outside of either park. You can just go there, uh, air walking district.

Uh, that's part of the area. So, uh, we've ate at some of those, which is a very nice, but for me, for me, the, the, the, the fun and eating at, uh, at the parks, either California adventure or Disneyland is kind of more the, the lower end, uh, lower end, but incredibly expensive stuff.

Like I swear to God, Disneyland has the best corn dog in the entire world. It's stunningly good. I love the turkey leg. I'll back you up on that. I'll back you up on the corn dog. Absolutely. Back you up. You will never get a better corn dog ever. You want, it will ruin you for corn dog. You will never go to a state fair again.

Honestly. Yeah. So, and foods are the, you know, I, I, I can't go without getting a churro. I need the dual whip. Right. Yeah. Churro. Absolutely. Dole whip. We did that. Yeah. Yeah. All that sort of stuff. So the, uh, the sourdough, uh, bowl clam chowder that they do at Disneyland is wonderful.

So yeah, I just like the crappy food. Yeah. That's fair. I did eat in the castle when they, when you could do that. Uh, and we had, we had steak when, and this is the, in Disney world, um, on that same trip, we, we did eat in the castle and it was a very expensive steak.

That was the best steak I've ever had, but I was 18. So it might not have been that good, but I remember. So it was a little bit better than sizzler. Yeah. It was, could have been, could have been a little less, a little less gristle. Yeah. But that's where the flavor is, Dave. Right.

Well, I mean, you get your money's worth just because it takes so long to chew. Yeah. That's kind of it. Kind of it. Yeah. They did make us wear pants. God damn it. I remember that. Yeah. You mean instead of shorts, not just in general. No. Yeah. Cause you had to dress up.

You had to wear a collared shirt and pants. Okay. Cause it was, it was the middle of summer in, in Florida. So normally I'm running around the park in my underwear. So yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to make my way to San Fran Sokio to cool off. Come on. It's good enough for Donald Duck. Why not? Yeah. So we did, there were four restaurants that we visited that were all new to us this time.

And some of them, I had no idea they even existed. So the first one was called the Jungle Navigation Company Limited Skipper Canteen. Say that 10 times fast. Yeah. Uh, and that is, as you would expect right near the Jungle Cruise and it just, I like, it's this nondescript little entryway with a little awning and you think what could be back there.

But back there is a really nice restaurant themed after Jungle Cruise, um, delightfully so, uh, upscale, delicious food. So we had lunch there one day. Um, the next one we did was the Roundup Rodeo Barbecue at the Hollywood Studios, which is a, a toy story themed family style barbecue restaurant.

So they basically just bring you a crap ton of barbecue food. Uh, just, it's like comfort food, you know, so, uh, cornbread, beans, cornbread, yeah, potatoes. I mean, and, and it's, it's wonderful. Uh, it's decorated with all sorts of toy story kind of things.

The, the gag about this place is that once or twice, I don't know, every 15 minutes or so, uh, an announcement comes over the loudspeaker. System in the voice of one of the toy story characters that here comes Andy.

So everybody in the restaurant freezes, everybody freezes until Andy leaves. And then you continue eating. And I don't know why that's fun, but it is. You know, I, I am generally all in on all things Disney, but I think that would annoy the hell out of me.

You'd think it would, but I'm just telling you when you're there and everyone else is doing it. The peer pressure is pretty strong and, uh, you know, and you also don't want to ruin it for the kids sitting at the table next to you. Don't go with Jason then. Shut up, dick.

Come on, Jason. You would totally be like, fuck this. No, I wouldn't. I'm picturing Jason. I would get into it. I, I, I, I am, I am subject to peer pressure just like everyone else. Actually, that's true. Proven by your love of medieval times. I can, I can see that now. Yeah. Don't be dicking around with medieval times, bro.

I'll take you out back. I'm picturing Jason cosplaying as one of the blues brothers and being like, how much for the girl? Could be. Yep. Could be. Uh, let's see the other two restaurants we went to.

We went to Ohana, which is in the, um, uh, Polynesian resort. And that was a character place is excellent. It was a character brunch, I guess by the time we got there, it was no longer breakfast, but it was breakfast food again, family style. So they just bring you just a crap ton of waffles and eggs and sausage and bacon and juice and all that kind of stuff.

And the highlight of that is that characters come around and I will tell you that my 26 and 18 year old boys were giddy when Stitch came around to have Stitch's picture taken. And with them, they were once again, you know, nine years old, both of them.

Uh, so that was delightful. Uh, and then the last one and probably the fanciest and best one was the, I'm going to butcher this, Le Cellier steakhouse, which is in Canada at Epcot. Uh, very nice steakhouse, uh, inside the castle in Canada.

Uh, delicious. And, uh, yeah, yeah. So all of these were quite pricey. Um, but. I don't know why. The corn dog's 12 bucks. Well, yeah, right, right. Yeah. Enjoy your $8 churro. Yes.

Um, I'll say on the other end though, I think our other go-to really fun place that we like to have a meal is, um, uh, Cosmic Ray's, uh, cafe. Um, where there's like an animatronic lounge singer who's like an alien from another planet.

And he just, he, it's probably a two hour loop of him doing classic, like Sinatra style. Right. Uh, songs, but they're full of puns and, and he tells jokes and it's just stupid funny.

And again, my youngest son, Jack, uh, just loves Cosmic Ray's cafe. It's over in Tomorrowland. Uh, I guess it's not in Disneyland. It's just in Disney world. Right. Yeah. Just Disney world. Yeah. So that was our dining experience.

The other thing, uh, that I think is worth sharing is that, um, we had one member of our party who was, uh, handicapped while we were there. So my wife broke her ankle a couple of months ago on some, just slipped on some ice and broke her ankle.

Uh, wasn't a serious break, no surgery required. But by the time we got to Disney world, she was just in a boot, no more cast, just in a boot. So we took one for the team. So you had got easy access to everything. Well, this is where I'm going.

We didn't know what to expect. Uh, we rented a scooter, uh, you know, a little mobility scooter, which was fun. Uh, you go, when you go to Florida, you call up one of the scooter companies and they deliver the scooter to your hotel or your resort.

And they break down into a bunch of little pieces and you put them in the back of the car and you get where you're going. And because we had a handicapped parking tag, you just pull right up to the front of the park, uh, which is great.

Um, and then, um, my wife, uh, very quickly got accustomed to the scooter, but, uh, I'd say probably half of the rides, there is a distinct advantage of having a member of your party be on a scooter or have some kind of handicap.

Like there were rides where we probably saved 20 minutes of wait time. Right. Because there's part of the line that you just skip. They're like, Oh, come right this way. Here, come take this elevator. And then it'll, and, or we're going to take you in the back door and no fuss, no muss.

They just take you around and you're on the ride quicker than you otherwise would have been. Uh, yeah, some of them, there's no difference, but, um, on, on many of them there are. So of course this led us to the, uh, to the question, you know, which one of us is going to wear the boot each time we go?

Uh, do we rotate or, uh, you know, we're actually not going to do that, but, uh, cause we're not horrible people, but plenty of people do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think also it works with a party of four because that's manageable, you know, when you go in with a party of 10 and one person is in a wheelchair, I think they give you a little more side eye than they would otherwise.

Um, but, uh, no, we had a really good time. New rides this time were the Tron ride, um, which was a lot of fun, but I thought too short. Have you ridden Tron? That's only at Disney World. They don't have it at Disneyland, so no. Oh, okay. Well, it'll come there eventually.

Yeah, eventually we'll get it. Um, yeah. The thing about Tron is it's kind of like Space Mountain 2.0. Um, but when it came to the part, the end where you kind of pull into the station, my initial thought was, oh, it's time for the second launch and the second half of the ride.

No, that was the end. GTFO, motherfuckers. Yeah. So, uh, it's a lot of fun. It's really cool. But I, my opinion is too short. Um, we rode the new Tiana ride, which is the rebranded, uh, Splash Mountain, which was excellent.

It was a lot of fun to see it completely refurbed and new and all the lights working and shiny and colorful. And I, I thought it was great. I thought they did a great job with it. It was a lot of fun. The music was great. I don't know the Tiana movie the same way I know, um, all the stuff from Song of the South, but.

Yeah. Cause you're a racist. Pretty much. Yeah. Um, and, uh, but it was a lot of fun. It was, it was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to that one. It was, uh, unfortunately had just opened. So they were still having all kinds of problems with it. So it was broken down the day we were there, but I'm hoping to get on it this summer.

Right. And then the, the last one that I'll note is, um, sort of the opposite of the Tron ride was the Hagrid's motorbike ride at universal, which gave you way more than you expected it to. Oh yeah.

That was fun. They have that at our universal and California as well. I had a blast on that ride. Yeah. Yeah. It's just fun. Just, just really fun. Um, so yeah, it was a great trip and, uh, felt, uh, recharged. Um, but also physically tired when I got home because we just go and go and go.

But, you know, it's just nice to be able to do it. And, uh, cause you just never know how many of these you're going to get with your kids. And, uh, you know, that window is closing for us. So that's a constant discussion with, uh, with my wife. Cause she's always like, I don't, I don't have, we can't do Disneyland again.

And I was like, I, I remind her like we've, we've got like maybe five more summers. Right. We will not want to do this with us ever again. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. And they go, they go fast. So, all right. I, a couple other things I wanted to just touch on, uh, there's an article, uh, called my scammer girlfriend baiting a romance fraudster.

Uh, we don't have time to go into all the details, but the thing about this article is there are a lot of details. It just keeps scrolling, man. It does. It is, but it's fascinating because this person really dug in and basically did a B testing against romance scammers to try to figure out how it works.

What's the cadence? How often did things happen? What are the psychological tricks that they're trying to use on you? Um, I find, I thought it was a fascinating long read as someone who knows a good bit about these scams. This was the first time I think I'd seen someone really do this kind of, uh, depth on a romance scammer.

And again, the AB testing I thought was fascinating. So, um, we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Interesting read. And then last but not least, um, one of my colleagues, uh, shared with me the thing I did not know existed.

And now I'm just so happy to learn that it does. And that is that hermit crabs, before I get to this, either of you guys ever had a pet hermit crab? I did. My mother thought it was creepy. And one day when I was at school, let it go into the woods saying that it escaped.

Oh, someday we'll get a really happy story from Jason. Not from my childhood, you won't. Oh, man. She didn't even say it went to a farm upstate. It's just, uh, threw it in the woods.

No, there was a, it was in the tank with the, the, with a stack of books on top. And she said that it had overpowered it and gotten away and ran away. Ferocious readers. Hermit crabs. Not, not, not well known. And, and the strength of 10 men, because there was, there was a lot of books on top of that thing.

Cause she was creeped out that it would escape. So I put a, I put a stack, like a, about a foot tall stack of very thick books on top of it. And she said that it was, uh, it had overpowered it and gotten out. Well, sorry. What, what led to this, uh, realization that we're going to get to, uh, was a conversation I had in a meeting with some of my colleagues and I, cause last night as we're recording this, uh, was a, uh, lunar eclipse.

I saw part of that taking the dog had to pee at two in the morning. Thanks, Dino. So I don't, here on the East coast, it was a full lunar eclipse. Uh, so you basically have a red moon, a dim red moon. Um, and I described this to my coworkers as the, uh, second most disappointing, uh, thing I ever stayed up late to do.

Um, I just set up something for that, didn't I? Uh, uh, slide. Well, when I was in high school, I stayed up late one night to see a lunar eclipse and I, uh, it wasn't, I just didn't, it didn't impress me.

Okay. That's cool. But yeah, the shadow goes across the moon. Okay. Yeah. It's not very exciting. No, not like a solar eclipse. Um, but the most disappointing was I had a pet hermit crab and he was in his little 10 gallon tank.

And I had a handful of spare shells in there and I noticed over the course of a day or two that this crab had been trying on new shells and I thought to myself, here's my chance to see a naked hermit crab.

Uh, now you got to remember, I was to spend my nights differently. It's an acquired taste. Uh, I mean, everybody has their kink. So I, this was before the internet when you could just Google naked hermit crab and, you know, see as many naked hermit crabs as you wanted to see.

Um, I don't recommend you do that on a work computer, but, uh, so I sat up and then it's fine. That's right. So I sat up, I said, I put, set up a comfy chair next to the tank and I sat up waiting because I was going to see this hermit crab change shells.

And sure enough, the hermit crab came out and started walking around and, and was going to different shells and kind of feeling them out with his little crabby claws. And then all of a sudden he went, boop, boop. That was it.

Out of one. He made the noise. Boop, boop. Well, in my head, he did for sure. Okay. But that was like, it was, it was so quick. And I was like, well, I'm going to bed because it was not totally not worth it.

Totally not worth it. Quick and straight to bed. Now that does sound a bit more like my night. Yeah. Right. And people's responses being that was totally not worth it. Yeah. I also went, boop, boop. Yeah, that's right. Sounds like my wedding night. So one of my coworkers informed me that when you don't have a lone hermit crab, when you

have a bunch of hermit crabs, that they will congregate and they will arrange themselves in order of size based on their shells in a conga line and all at once they will swap shells.

This is the kind of stupid shit that's always in my brain. Like I knew this. Did you? I don't know where I knew it from. I think it came out of like my kids watched Wild Kratts for a while. I don't know if your kids. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it came from one of those episodes, but this has been, I have been aware of this and it is pretty awesome. So when, when my, my coworker sent me this link and I was looking through it and I saw there was a video, what I was saying in my head was, please let it be David Attenborough.

Please let it be, let it be David. And it was, it was, it's David Attenborough. It's perfect. This is nature documentary perfection because it is something delightful that I never would have guessed was possible. And it is beautifully shot and beautifully narrated and just fun.

And you're rooting for these hermit crabs, uh, to do something you didn't imagine they are capable of doing, but of course they can do this. So we'll have a link in the show notes. It is. I just watched this while you guys were talking about it and I've never seen a naked hermit crab. And this was my first, uh, my first experience watching a naked hermit crab.

It is disturbing. Seeing the naked hermit crab is actually quite disturbing. It's not for everybody. It's not, it's not for everybody. No, no. You obviously have never been to a real Chinese restaurant and walked past the tanks. No.

No, it's fine. Look, I, I, I'm all good with, it's just not what I expected. Not what I expected at all. It's like a little shrimp tail, basically. It kind of is. It's kind of gross. Yeah. It is. It's making me kind of hungry. But the conga line is worth the price of admission.

So. I think I need it with David Attenborough. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta go rewatch it. Definitely, definitely palate cleanser. I need it with the garlic sauce. He classes it, he classes it. Not a lot of meat on those hermit crabs. No, it takes a lot. It makes the, it makes the meat sweeter.

It's like chicken feet. Mm-hmm. Oh boy. All right, gents. Well, I think that's a good place to, uh, wrap things up. Good to have you back, Dave. Yeah, we had a lot of, we had a lot of pent up things to talk about, didn't we? There was a lot of pent up energy. So, got it out of our systems.

And, uh, I'll see you guys next time. Closing shout outs! Over at Patreon, we've got Graham. Welcome, Graham. And Graham Wright's been listening for a while now and hope everyone who enjoys your shows can chip in to keep the lights on.

Really appreciate your insight, humor, and consistently grumpy outlook. Well, we hope everyone can chip in too. So, thanks, Graham. Appreciate that. And we got a note from Count Squeakula. LOL. When you guys responded to the criticism of your entertainment preferences, I laughed because for a split second, I thought you guys would take a gentle approach.

How foolish I was, gentlemen. I thought we did. That was gentle for us. That was gentle. We really appreciated the email. And we just made a few notes. Because we do like Black Mirror. Corrections. I do love Black Mirror.

You know? Yeah. And, yeah. I mean, the goats are a MacGuffin. What are you going to say? Jesus. And Jody writes, and y'all were extra grumpy this week. Ha ha. I know, Brian. Noche is night. And I looked it up and I'm like, you did say no. You said Noche de Crystal. See, I tell you, people have completely different memories of what we actually say on the show.

I think they're on a different timeline. We're just kidding. Berenstain. Berenstain. Berenstain. Steen. Stein. Stein. Stein. Stein. Stein. When Berenstein's money. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Over at PayPal, we've got Ralph, Miles, Shari, Natalie, Arcadio, William with a big $50 donation, and Anthony, who gave us $120.

That gets you exactly 10 churros. All right, Anthony. Thank you. And William, thank you. And everybody else, thank you. And over at the tip jar, we've got Theodore. The Theodore stands alone. The Theodore stands alone. And over at the merch table, we've got Roger, Tony, and Jeffrey.

So don't forget, three bucks a month. I'm sorry, as little as three bucks a month. We don't want to cap that in any way, shape, or form. We'll get you the show early, ad-free, and in high definition. Just go to patreon.com slash GOG, and there'll be other ways to donate in a second.

And, oh, yeah. Go ahead, Brian. What do we got? We got a five-star review. The title is Pleasant Find, and obviously, this is somebody who's into hermit crabs. It's from OX. Beep boop. For those of us who are tired of the unbridled ambitions of the Magnificent Seven, hoping to fleece billions of dollars in capital for garbage products and the unmitigated disaster that is the existence of Gen AI, let it all burn.

Get grumpy, people. Thank you, beep boop. Thank you. Beep boop. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schilmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 688. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate.

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Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Cullen.

KFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.