704: I’m Lovin’ It

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 Colon.

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister coming to you from lovely Southern California. Welcome back, Brian. Are you going to stay? Do you want to stay? Uh, no. Uh, we'll see. I mean, it feels like a bit of a, a war is brewing between, uh, between Trumpia and California and, uh, you can definitely feel it here. It's a bit weird, but it is. I told you it was

weird here. It is weird. Traffic's not as bad. Uh, actually it is Jason. I don't, I don't think you leave Woodland Hills all that often. I go to Sherman Oaks every week. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah. You don't, you don't cross over from the Valley. So, uh, Mondays and Fridays are not bad, but Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I guess that's the new norm for people going into offices, uh, are pretty brutal.

Okay. Okay. Well, I travel on Wednesdays. I, I, I, it's, it's, it's, it's, nobody cares about California traffic. Anyway. So what else is going on? Well, not too much. Uh, um, the fire festival's back in the news, Jason. Oh, yes it is. If you've ever dreamed of owning a piece of the fire festival brand is now is your chance. Again, uh, owner and convicted fraudster, Billy McFarland shared the news via Instagram on Monday after a planned sale of the brand fell through. If you recall back in April of this

year, documentarian Sean wreck announced he had acquired some of the fire festival brands, IP and revealed plans to launch a new music focus subscription video on demand platform. That's right. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. And we, and we all laughed hilariously, apparently the deal fell through. No, now, according to Billy, we had a seven figure deal. I don't think that includes the decimal points in the two zeros after it, maybe three or four zeros after that

decimal point. Yeah. So for the complete fire brand and IP package, it fell through this morning. He explained in the post, but now the opportunity to own the fire brand is back on the table, Jason. All right. Well, it was on the table for about 30 seconds when he realized nobody wants the fire.

And he put it on eBay because why not? If you can't just sell it through regular channels, just say, fuck it and put it on eBay. Right. Well, the bidding, the bidding now for the, the multi-billion dollar company that he claimed at some point it was is a, now the highest bid is $210,600 right now with 131 bids in, in four days to go before the auction ends Tuesday morning at

944 AM Eastern. I wonder what the significance of 944 AM is. And I mean, I know with Musk, we got the, you know, 412. 420 or 420. That's right. You can tell I'm not a pothead, but yeah. So he's, he's trying to auction off basically everything that's left. Well, Jason, if you include the decimal points, that is actually an eight figure number. That's true. That is going for at the moment.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Tense cheese sandwiches and bad decisions are not included in the eBay auction. So, uh, yeah, if you've got a few bucks and, uh, poor judgment, then head on over to eBay linked in the show notes. I really can't believe this guy's still kicking around, but you know, grifter's going to grift. Then again, you know, waves around in general.

I was going to say, have you seen the country lately, Brian? He should be flourishing right now. I'm surprised he's not working at the white house. So Dan P writes in, and here's a little oppression note. He says, I know you guys are against AI, but I wonder if you're missing the boat. And I, I, I cut his, I cut his, uh, note down for brevity here. I'm 70 years old, retired from the tech world. So I'm an older, grumpier than you. You both rode the coding wave

while I schlepped on the tech infrastructure side. The AI wave is just beginning to crest at the shore and I'm not missing this one. The amount of money and resources being thrown at AI and LLMs may be a bust. Oh, not maybe, but in the meantime, someone has to help these people spend their money being older. All I want is a tiny piece of that pie, whether you miss the boat or even care if there is a boat is your business. But with the money being thrown around in potential for jobs and job loss

parentheses, AI is killing entry-level software engineers already. End paren. You should be a little more circumspect about the subject in service of your listeners. Well, Dan P, that's very funny that you sent that because I thought the same thing, uh, while we were on vacation. And, uh, we'll be getting into that a little later in the show. I would like to point out that, yes, you have, you have been exploring it yourself a little bit. Uh, I have been taking classes. It's not like we've just been pooping on the stuff. It's we've been, we've been learnedly pooping on the stuff.

In the news.

Well, let's talk about AI, Jason. Okay. You know what? You know, one company that's no longer posting on Indeed about their job offers, Jason? Who, Brian? Indeed. Oh, indeed, indeed. Yes, job hunting platforms Indeed and Glassdoor are cutting their workforces, and it may be thanks to good old artificial intelligence. About 1,300 jobs from the companies will be eliminated, mostly in two departments, research and development. There's research and development for job posting

boards, Jason. Apparently. Apparently. And people in sustainability. Ironically. Ironically. There will also be some executive shuffles, including the exit of Glassdoor CEO, Christian Sutherland Wong. They're going to be hiring Christian Sutherland Wright. Oh, man. That one's going to get us some emails. I don't care. Anyways, they didn't specify any reason for the consolidation and the job losses,

but Adi Kobo, who is the current CEO of the holding company, has been enthused about the importance of AI in the missive, which likely didn't make any of the impacted employees feel any better. AI is changing the world and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences. He wrote, delivering on this ambition requires us to move faster, try new things and break things. I'm sorry, fix whatever is broken.

Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked about this. We've talked about the, uh, the weird, uh, situation that is job hunting right now where people are using AI agents to find them jobs. And then the AI is denying them their jobs because their resumes sucked or whatever. And it's just getting worse and worse. So forget all these sites. They're all just going to be AI shitholes now. Yeah. Like everything, like everything.

Yeah. And then, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The, the job site that you used to go to, to try to get a job has been firing a bunch of people. And that is a basic, perfect encapsulation of where we're at in history right now. Yep. Yep. That dead internet theory is coming true faster than you thought. Very quickly. So much so that that, that, that theory has become mainstream. I don't know if you've noticed, but the dead internet theory is popping up on sites that don't even have anything to do with tech anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how much it's going to be theory anymore,

but fact soon. Yeah. Well, another perfect encapsulation of where we are in the world right now, a Tesla robot taxi inexplicably drove into a parked car. Oh, I can explain it, but go ahead. I know we can all explain it. Yes. Yeah. This is the limited, again, we talked about this just before the break. Tesla has started their, their robot taxi service in Austin, Texas in a very small

area. That's meticulously gate kept with a very tiny amount of actual cars that are doing it. And very, very pro Tesla people that are allowed to be taking these rides. And it's been going horribly. It is continuing to go horribly in a video recorded by YouTuber dirty Tesla. The self-driving model Y is seen turning and accelerating into a Toyota baking light contact with its tire. As seen in the video, the model Y had already dropped off the passenger, but had trouble navigating out of the

dark alleyway afterwards. Something normal cars can do. Yes. According to dirty Tesla, there were no serious injuries and damages and the robot taxi safety monitor monitor swapped to the driver's seat and drove the car off. Let me get out of here. Yeah. So there you go. And then we all know why this is happening. It's because their technology that they're using is flawed. Yep. Yep. I wonder

if dirty Tesla is like the, the clean cut brother of dirty Sanchez. I tell you, you don't want to get in a robo taxi that dirty Sanchez was in. No, you don't. And here's the thing that pisses me off about robo taxi. The name robo taxi implies to me that there's a fucking robot involved. I want robots.

No, it should be like Star Tours. I want, uh, I want the little guy up front. Yeah. Yep. That turns his head and looks at you instead of looking at the road. Perfect. Oops. Is your first ride? It's mine too. As he sideswipes the Toyota. Yeah, that's it. It's perfect. Uh, well, and the other big thing that we've always complained about with AI is power usage and draining the Amazon. So you can ask stupid questions and make it right limericks, but, uh, there's a, some further information here about

what's going on there. PJM interconnection is the largest power grid operator in the U S serving 65 million customers across the district of Columbia and 13 different States. This summer, some parts of PJM's power grid are expected to use so much electricity that people's bills for the summer are projected to be 20% higher than before, according to Reuters. Now, is this because, oh, I don't know the heat waves that's going across the U S and everybody's cranking their AC. No, no, no.

It's the gibbification of the East coast. Pretty much. Yes. It's because the majority of, uh, of our nation's, uh, AI providers have their data centers in PGM's region and they're using so much fucking power. It's driving up normal people's electricity costs, which shouldn't be fair. Shouldn't be fair.

Shouldn't be fair. Let's get out the pitchforks. Oh wait, exactly. Let's render some pitchforks mid journey and send them to our representatives. Yeah. Now in, in PGM's defense, they have capped its prices for now and they are fast tracking the connection of 51 power plants to its grid. But a lot of those aren't slated to come online until 2030. Checks watch. Nope. 2025 still.

Yep. Um, but you know, AI is going to solve all of our problems. Jason deep inside alphabet, the parent company of Google, a secretive lab is working on a promise. So audacious, it sounds like science fiction or as we like to call it on this show. Bullshit. Yeah. Bullshit.

Yes. To solve all diseases. Is hunger one of those diseases? Cause we're not going to be able to afford to buy food. Yeah. No, they don't. They don't think about that. Jeez. Damn it. The company is called isomorphic labs and it's now preparing to start its first human clinical trials for cancer drugs designed entirely by artificial intelligence. Let me tell you, I am not lining up for that. Uh, yeah. So, I mean, the question is, can we really trust the black box algorithm with our

lives? The answer is no. Although I trust one more than RFK jr. So there's that fair, fair. If you, if you put them on the scales of justice, uh, the scales would just fucking break, I think is where we're at at the moment. Uh, so yeah, this is the whole idea of the alpha fold breakthrough, which is an AI system that stunned scientists by predicting the complex 3d shapes of proteins to understand why this is a big deal. You need to know the, how drugs are traditionally made.

Basically it's trial and error over years and it takes decades and decades. And theoretically, theoretically AI can solve this problem and move things along a lot faster. Fewer monkeys with fewer monkeys. But of course we all have questions about AI right now. The black box problem. We know AI gives an answer, but we don't always know how, which raises critical questions. Will alphabet own the next cancer drug? Like it owns your search results. Yes,

absolutely. Will these AI design treatments be affordable? No. Or will they be trapped behind sky high patents accessible only to the wealthy? Yes. Will human trial standards keep up with the sheer speed of machine generated breakthroughs? No. And who is liable if an AI designed drug goes wrong?

The company that owns the AI, the programmers, the AI itself, or perhaps nobody. I was going to say they're going to blame it on the AI and the AI is not a person. So no one. Yes. And when contacted by Gizmodo for this story, a spokesperson for Isomorphic Labs said the company doesn't have anything more to share.

And signed it with a poop emoji. Well, speaking of the poop emoji, guess who's also been in the news with AI? Of course, that was Elon and his AI chatbot Grok, which has gone full Nazi this week. Yeah. I think I'm sure everybody that is listening to the show has followed this story.

Everybody that has a pulse knows this story at this point. Yes. So we will not get too far into it. But yes, he decided to go and fix his AI Grok because, you know, it hated him and it was too liberal for his taste. And he apparently dialed it up to 11 the other direction.

Oh, I don't know. I think he, I think he nailed it just right with his views. That's true. It is like an Elon chatbot now. It really is. Basically, it's, it's out there and it's basically claiming that Jews are behind every bad thing that happens in the world using subtly and not so subtly coded statements that are rampant on the internet. It is a, yeah, it's, it's kind of insane what the answers are. You know,

somebody asked which 20th century figure would be best suited to deal with this problem, meaning the Jews. And of course, uh, the AI came back with a Hitler. He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively every damn time. Yeah. Wow. So in the, in the light of that, Elon came out with a new Grok model, Grok four and Grok four heavy. Uh, so he should have just called it Grok four SS. Yeah. It should have just done that.

That'd have been saved us some time. So the, the benchmarks on this new one are supposedly very good. They're huge. They're huge. They're the bestest benchmarks ever. Uh, it says it's better than PhD level in every subject, according to Musk. And, uh, it is also the most expensive subscription AI package out there for Grok super heavy or super, I'm sorry, super Grok heavy,

not Grok super heavy, super Grok or me. Super Grok heavy, uh, 300 bucks a month for that one, even though it doesn't do nearly anything that the other, uh, LLM providers do like coding or not racist shit. There is a little known higher level, Jason. It's called the final solution.

Oh, that one. Yes. Okay. Great. Um, yes. And, uh, in, in his launch event, he does say that, uh, Grok will soon be integrated into Tesla's. Then the next day he says, Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon next week at the latest. So, well, we, well, we know next week at the latest means maybe it may eventually make it in there in a couple of years, but here's what I'm thinking.

So we've got, we've got these two ton pieces of metal run by a computer that can't see where it's going most of the time, but it can tell if you're black or white or Jewish and decide to maybe run you down. This is going to end well, this is going to end well. All I'm saying is if you're in Beverly Hills, watch your ass. Well, I know somebody that's finally had enough of this shit. Yeah.

Linda Yaccarino is stepping down as CEO of X, apparently effective immediately. As of two days ago, I believe she posted the news on X, of course, saying I'm immensely grateful to Elon for entrusting me with the responsibility of, Oh God, I don't even know if I can make it through this.

A protecting free speech, turning the company around and transforming X into the everything app. Three things she didn't do. Yeah. Three things that did not happen. She went on to say that the historic business turnaround we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable. Now that I can agree with. Yes. Remarkably bad. Absolutely been remarkable.

Yes. How you destroyed one of the greatest things that the internet has ever given us so quickly. It's awesome. Yeah. It's awesome. And as of yet, Elon has not commented on this. Oh, he did. He did. Oh, he commented. Okay. Yes. He said, he said, thank you for your service. That was like it. Yeah. I mean, I suppose she got paid. And then to add insult to injury, they took away her blue check. Hey man, rules are rules. You got to pay for that.

You do got to pay for it. If you're not on the payroll anymore, then you got to pay. Nope. Nope. No free lunches at X. One of the worst CEO 10 years in history, except for what's her name? Yeah. Yeah. At least Marissa walked out of there with a couple hundred million dollars. And she didn't turn Yahoo into a Nazi machine. No, she didn't. She just turned it into a useless machine. So sorry, Linda, you are no longer

required this January bare knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural bruise cruise sales 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. Now here's a fun one. Twitter is also no longer required, or X as they call it now. I still can't wrap my head around it. I try to, but I can't. So six months after NPR quit, the impact has been absolutely

negligible. Despite once having millions of followers, NPR saw just a 1% drop in web traffic, which was already minimal from the platform. NPR and member stations shifted efforts to Instagram and threads where they focus on sharing news directly instead of chasing clicks. Staff report less burnout and better engagement.

The move signals a broader trend. Social media may no longer be the traffic driver newsrooms once relied on as platforms become less effective, less welcoming. Yes. No shit. A hundred percent. The social media is dead. Yeah. For actual traffic. All these people, we've said it for years. They sucked everybody in. All the businesses got sucked in. You built your little homestead on their little walled garden and they

said, give us some money or we're going to call the bulldozers. And that's it. That's what's happened. I mean, and if you think that going on Instagram and threads is a patch to it, that's just dumb. Well, you chase them while they work, right? So if it's working for now, that's fine because they're kind of new, but eventually the same shit's going to happen. Eventually Instagram and thread, well, Instagram's already changing. It's almost all ads these days. It's, it's not real

content anymore. Threads is decent ish still, but at some point they're going to go, we need to make money because it's owned by the same motherfucker. Yes. You know, it's not like you put a new name on it. It's still the same motherfucker who makes all the decisions to take your money. Speaking of motherfuckers, uh, SpaceX's Starlink satellites are interfering with astronomers ability to study

the universe. We've known this about just the visual side of it, but there's another side of it, Brian. The second gen satellites are leaking radio signals, thousands of times stronger than the cosmic signals. Radio telescopes are designed to detect. Wait, Jason, I think I can faintly hear it. It sounds like Borat. Throw the juice down the well, throw the juice down the well.

Oh God. So the problem seems to be the propulsion or internal systems and they're working on a fix. They, they've had this problem before they fixed the problem before and then the problem came back. So, yes. So there's 8,000 Starlink satellites already in orbit and have plans for 42,000 of these fucking things. Yeah. And that's just, that's just Starlink. Now Amazon's getting up there

with project Kuiper. Uh, yes, it's called Kuiper Scott Galloway, not, not Cooper. I heard him on a podcast calling it project Cooper. He's too, he's too, he's too in love with Anderson Cooper. That's the problem. That could be, that could be it. Now the problem is Scott Galloway doesn't do his own fucking research. He has a little team of monkeys who sit in the room and come up with every little soundbite that he says, and he doesn't do any research on anything. He just gets a script and fucking reads it and doesn't do his pronunciation checks properly on YouTube like everybody else does.

But anybody who's been to fucking junior high school knows it's called Kuiper, like the Kuiper belt that shit up in space. You dumb fuck. I can't wait for our listeners to troll through all of our old podcasts and put together a mega mix of every mispronunciation we've ever done. Oh, I know.

It's going to be great. I know glass houses. Fuck it. They'll probably go back and find the time when we thought Scott Galloway was cool or when Elon Musk was cool before they all turned, you know, rich dumb fuck supervillain. Anyway, what's that? What else we got? Well, apparently it won't matter too much if we're looking out into a, into space these days, Jason, because there is a new research that has bolstered a theory that the earth sits in a giant cosmic void. Okay. Thank God. Much like my

heart. Yeah. So basically it's just saying that, uh, they think that space is likely peppered with bubbles of relative emptiness. And some astronomers believe we're now sitting inside of one basically the universe might be clumped together and, uh, we're in a big empty patch called Morrissey. I think, you know, he announced another tour and canceled shows almost immediately.

It's like fucking clockwork with that guy. I swear to God. Oh, Jesus. Anyways. No meat must be cooked in the state that I'm going to be playing in. Yeah. Anyways, moving on. The links to the show notes, if you really want to get into that one.

Uh, the fourth guy on discord for this one, he was the first one to send it in. The DOJ is going after us for developing anti-ice app. This is the guy that created ice block. The iPhone app that lets you, uh, report and share sightings of ice officers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's a, it's a decent app. The, there's no tracking of any personally identifiable information. Every, uh, notification

is dropped after four hours because they're no longer relevant. And he's very, very spot on about his privacy. Now I saw this guy on KTLA here in California in, uh, in Los Angeles. And they did like a five minute interview with the guy to give that, I mean, to like, they let him run. It was just like, I mean, he was going and he is, he's articulate. He's, uh, very, very, uh, smart about what he's doing. And, you know, they asked him, they're like, are you worried about them coming

after you? He's like, well, no, it's like, you guys have, he's like, you guys have ways, right? Now you see that sometimes people put up a thing that says, Hey, there's a cop up ahead. It's just information. That's all we're doing. We have, we have full legal standing to do what we're doing.

So go fuck themselves basically. And then he, then he even came out saying, you know, look, man, I come from a family of Jews who were in concentration camps. And all this is, is a play to turn the United States into a white Christian nation. And they're just like, well, thank you for your time. Thank you. And they were like, legit, like, like they, you can see him under the table going, yeah, brother, say it. I hope he doesn't have a Tesla. I know. Like back over him going to

the next, next interview. I did look like he was in a, an undisclosed location though, in a bunker somewhere in a very dark room. So, but yeah, good for him. Good for him. I'm, I think it's a great thing. There's nothing illegal about it. I agree. And screw everybody. God. Yeah. Except I keep looking every day and I can't find any posts, but there's that. Yeah. There's that. I mean, you know, Elon could tweak the voting machines. Why not? Yeah. Oh, wait, we're not supposed to say

that. No, no. Yeah. Speaking of tweaking here, consumer advocates said on Tuesday that the Trump administration is to blame for an appeals court decision that effectively killed the FTC's click to cancel rule, a Biden era effort to stop companies from trapping consumers and subscriptions with onerous cancellation terms. We talked about this when it was going through. This is a great thing.

It absolutely should exist, but no, we can't have nice things with this particular administration. Yes. Yeah. So yeah, they basically just slow rolled it to the point of death and we're not ever going to get it now. So that's great. Enjoy, enjoy having Sirius XM forever.

They got my roommate. We have it now for another six months. Dude, she got it down to 30 bucks though. Yeah. I mean, I did that too. And then I was like, what am I doing? And I finally put in the effort to actually cancel it and I haven't missed it. Well, here's the thing that we found out that actually kind of makes it useful. We can play it through our Sonos. So that actually makes it really useful. So we've unfortunately now have

the Diplo station playing all day long, but there's that. Not my account, unfortunately. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Well, TikTok may be wavering here in the U.S. as we have no idea. Yeah. TikTok is also being slow rolled here in the U.S. All this bluster about doing something about it and Trump's going to give it to America, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and nothing is ever happening. Well, over in the EU, they are in regulatory hot water again, only a couple of

months after it was slapped TikTok with a hefty fine over data transfers to China. Ireland's Data Protection Commission is opening a fresh investigation into the platform because China came out and said, our TikTok came out and said, oh, we might have found a few other bits of data that went to Chinese servers. And then the DPC said, well, we're going to look into that again because you guys are in trouble. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. But if there was any doubt that the data is just being

funneled directly to Chinese servers, it's happening all the time. Proven. Yeah. And who cares? Yeah. If they don't get it through TikTok, they'll just steal it somewhere else. It doesn't matter. They'll just check the LLM. Right. So speaking of checking the LLM, a new study reveals that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama can be tricked into giving dangerous answers. Yes, we know.

Like how to get rid of the problem in air quotes. Thanks, Grok. Yeah. So here's what they're doing. They're burying the request in dense academic language and fake citations to bullshit the bullshitter. Researchers from Intel, Boise State, and University of Illinois call the method info flood, a form of jailbreaking that overloads the chatbot with jargon to sneak past its safety filters. The technique rewrites banned queries into long-winded theoretical prose, evading keyword-based

moderation systems. And the paper shows how prompts like how to commit a crime can be rephrased into technical sounding essays that AI will respond to despite built-in restrictions. And it so reminds me of the old quote, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit, because that's what they're doing. Yep. I love it. I mean, it's just a, you know, we said when back at the, back at the beginning, when it was the grandma, like my grandma used to build a nuclear bomb and I sure do miss her. Can you tell me how to do that again? Yeah. Like it's just whack-a-mole. They put

that, they put that, uh, they, they, they try to put a restriction or a wall around that. And here we are. Yeah. There's a great site out there. That's like all crowdsourced. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, which we talked about on an old show. It's just kind of like a bulletin board of people throwing up their, their, their jailbreak quotes saying that this is, this works. And you know, if it's fixed or not, if it's still open and you can just go there and it's just a nice

resource of how to jailbreak your LLM. So there we go. Uh, this one just came in this morning. I love it. McDonald's job applicants may have had their personal data exposed. Thanks to shockingly poor, not very shockingly. If you listen to this show, cybersecurity on his hiring platform, Mick hire security researchers, Sam Curry and Ian Carroll discovered that they could log in using the credentials. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six, gaining access to

names, contact info, and even chat logs for more than 64 million applicants. That's right. 64 million people have applied for jobs at McDonald's. Look, we're all going to be applying for jobs at McDonald's pretty soon. Yes. I was going to say there's only like 350 million people in the United States approximately, but McDonald's is a global company. So I think I just solved the problem, Jason. We're all going to work for McDonald's and basically just make ourselves

our own hamburgers. That's it. That's how we will survive. Yes. And your retirement plan is to become the hamburger. Soilet green is people. Yep. The platform run by Paradox AI uses a chatbot named Olivia to screen candidates. Once inside, the researchers found a vulnerable API that let them see nearly everything applicants had ever submitted. Paradox and McDonald's were notified on June 30th. Both say the issue was fixed within hours, blaming the breach on a forgotten test

account with outdated credentials. Yep. Who among us have not set up a test account with one, two, three, four, five, six. Oh, me. Brian, I'm loving it.

Brian, since you're here on the West coast, you got the, uh, the added bonus of getting murder bought a couple hours early. Did you take advantage of it and watch the season finale last night? I did not. Oh, well I did for you. So I would say it's phenomenally perfect. It was, it was flawless. I thought I would like to know how we're at a season finale when I've watched approximately 19 minutes of footage so far. It's one of those things where you just have to go back

and just binge the whole thing and it might take an hour, 200 minutes. That's actually close to three hour, three and a half hours close to that for the whole thing. Okay. That's actually not too bad. It doesn't feel like it. Three and a half hours over 10 weeks is really pushing it. It's like we got three of those three, three of those andors in one week. I know. Yeah. This is like one murder, three. Yeah. One murder bought a night. But anyway, I loved it. Uh, they did get renewed for a second

season, which is good, which is good. Yeah. Considering there's not much show to it. And I mean, they must have been shot the whole season in one day. I mean, think about it. It was just all out in the, you know, like a desert backlot for 90% of it. So at least the season finale is on a space station. So that's good. So there was some effects that they threw in there. That's we, at least we know where the budget went for the last one. And, uh, of course, to capitalize on that, Martha Wells has

released a, I'm not going to call it a book. I'm going to call this a pamphlet, a murder bot pamphlet called rapport, friendship, solidarity, communion, empathy. Uh, it's 34 pages. Oh my God. A dollar 99. And since it's with a tour, uh, no DRM. Okay. Not toward the platform toward the, the imprint. Yeah. So if you want a little story, I, they, there's a little description of it. And I'm like, I am so far behind on murder bot. I have no idea where it's at right now. So isn't the little

description, the entire story. I think that might be spoiler alert. Uh, in sad news, Netflix has canceled the residence after one season. Uh, it was so good. It was so good. The thing about the residence, this was the murder mystery, uh, with a, what's her name from orange is the new black.

It was so good. So well-written, so well-produced. It was overproduced. The, the special effects that they used to recreate the white house digitally were unnecessary. It was really cool, but they could have got away with maybe a third of the budget if they cut the CGI out. So maybe, maybe it'll get, uh, re-swizzled and come back some other day, some other place, but it was just, cause it was so good. I mean, I, this, this one makes me sad. This is a, yeah, but it was still like half the budget

of severance and all that was, was hallways. Yeah, no shit. So maybe, maybe it'll go to Apple TV. Maybe they'll pick it up. Apple TV loves spending money uselessly. I know. I know. Uh, speaking of that, they put out a trailer for Neuromancer this week or last week on July 1st, because July 1st, 1984 was the first publication of Neuromancer. And it is the weakest sauce trailer I've ever seen in my life.

It is literally like a, a, a, a zooming shot of a dive bar saying in production. I'm like, okay, yeah, that's, it's, yeah, not much there. Minimum viable effort, Apple TV plus. Thanks. Thanks for that. Uh, we did get a trailer for project Hail Mary this week with Ryan Gosling. I liked the book quite a bit. Yeah. The book is great. Not really jazzed about this movie adaptation. They did a good

job with the Martian. We'll see. They did. They did. They, they, they, they, they were, they fucked up with the Martian because they took out the greatest line at the beginning, you know, but we'll see how this goes. I, I don't know. It, I don't think that they, this is, that was such a good long book and had so much story. Can you cram it into just a movie? I don't know without losing too much.

You're going to lose a lot, but we'll see. We'll see what they focus on. That's, that's always the important bit. I'm looking at you foundation. Hey, that just came out. I know I got a notification. Yeah, me too. And I said, no, no. And apparently a lot of other people said no too, because it's way down on the top list of shit people are watching on Apple TV plus. Yeah. We did get a new trailer for

the running man, the, the remake of that. And, uh, I don't know. There better be a three breasted lady. That's all I have to say. Wasn't that, wait, that, that was total recall. Oh, that was total recall. Not the running man. Sorry. That was not running man. Sorry. My, my, my, my shitty eighties Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are running together. They do. You got universe creep on that one. Yeah, no, that was total recall. And they did remake that with Colin Farrell and it was not very good.

So, uh, but this, this is helmed by Edgar Wright, one of my favorite movie people of all time. So. Well, and I, I believe if I recall correctly that the, uh, the running man from the eighties was not, uh, not very, uh, not along with the book. It foundationed it. And I, my understanding of this one is they're trying to make it more, more to the book. So we'll see.

Trailer looks good. I enjoyed the trailer. Yeah. I think it'll be, I think it'll be interesting. I like Edgar Wright. Uh, so I do too. Yeah. I still haven't seen the last night in Soho. I've got that on my, my DVR. I should probably watch that. I just keep, whenever I think I'm in the mood for an Edgar Wright movie, I just go back and watch Shaun of the Dead. Cause the best, the best of it all.

Yeah. He peaked early on that one. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports, most dangerous strikers collide. Bare knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren, the gorilla tail 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 pleaver, colon BKFC 94 till verse Romero. Watch it live. Only on the zone. Sign up now at the zone.com. Uh, Sandman season two is out. I I'm like halfway through it and it is so truncated. It makes me so sad that they, they cut this thing so short. Fucking kneeling his little pecker.

Yep. We will be doing a very similar review and good omens two drops. Yeah. Yeah. No three. Good omens three, three, three. So yeah. Yeah. It's just, it makes me sad because it's so good. The acting is so good. The effects are so good. And Sandman himself dream is so fucking good, but yeah, yeah. It's just, it's a bummer. It's a bummer. Uh, I moved over and rewatching animal kingdom. Cause they just put that on Netflix. That was a great series back in the day.

Uh, it's based on a movie from Australia, uh, about some bank robbing kids and their crazy mom. Uh, it's got Ellen Barkin in it and she's phenomenal. I talked about this when the, when the first aired way back in the day. Uh, so the first couple of seasons are pretty good. Uh, it kind of falls apart at the end, but I think the first three seasons are totally solid. Totally solid. Uh,

I watched Guy Ritchie's the covenant C minus C plus C plus. I'll give it a C plus. Okay. It's yeah. Out of the Guy Ritchie realm. I like Guy Ritchie movies personally. Uh, this was not one of my favorites. The second hack, second half of act two. I totally fast forward, but the beginning and the end are solid. I watched Thunderbolts as well. Okay. I was tricked into this one thinking that it wasn't as superhero-y a movie as, uh, I thought it was going to be. And it was just another fucking

superhero movie. It's an MCU movie. Of course it's. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, somebody said it was more along the lines of mystery men, which is still the greatest superhero movie ever made, but I have to agree with you there. Yeah. That is still, it is hands down the best superhero movie. If you don't like superhero movies, that's a great superhero movie. Oh God. Yeah. Ben Stiller. That's phenomenal.

Janine Garofalo. Janine Garofalo. Everybody in that movie. I'm, you know what? I'm going to go back and watch that again. I think I might be watching that this week. Yeah. Yeah. And the old guard two came out on Netflix. Completely skip it. Just garbage. We talked about this on, on discord and it's, yeah, the old guard one was really good. And this one is not, and they set it up for the, the, the third one with a, no, just skip this one. And I'm going to tell you right now, I, my prediction machine is skip the third one too.

All right. Well, I've got some painfully sober on a plane movie reviews. I had a very early flight out of Toronto to Los Angeles, uh, last week. And, uh, apparently air Canada has a deal with Disney plus because they have got all kinds of Disney plus content on their, uh, on their entertainment systems.

Uh, I watched two documentaries that are both available on Disney plus. The first was Jim Henson idea, man. Phenomenal. Okay. Absolutely phenomenal. Uh, just every, we lost this guy way too soon. He might be, you know, when people look back at the, at the, at that time period and they think the visionaries that we had, we had Steve jobs and we had all these people, Jim Henson might have been the best of them all. Like this guy is insane. The amount of stuff that he did that I

didn't even realize he did is amazing. And he just seemed like a really great guy. It's a, it's a great doc. I think it was directed by Ron Howard actually. Oh, even better. There we go. Yeah. I need some inspiration lately. I'll tell you why in our next segment, but I could definitely use that. I'll check it out. All right. And the other documentary I watched is the beach boys, which went into the history of the beach boys. Again, another band that, uh, I learned an awful lot about because they

were well before my time, but, uh, music is phenomenal. The story is heartbreaking, just heartbreaking. What happened to these, uh, these mostly family and, uh, what their dad did to them and, oh my God. And then Brian Wilson kind of going nuts, but like genius nuts. It's, it was riveting in a way that you think of a documentary about the beach boys wouldn't be.

It was absolutely phenomenal. It does not just, when you put it in here, I'm like, well, I'll be skipping that one, but now you've sold me. No, I think you absolutely watched this. It was phenomenal. Both of these were great. Yeah. There was another one that I saw recently or not too recently, but a little bit ago that I thought I would never really get into was the Bee Gees documentary. Did you ever watch that one? I did watch that. That was great too. That was really good too. I was like, do I really care about the Bee Gees? I'm like, yes, I do actually.

Yeah. Well, that was really good. And you will care about the beach boys when you watch this too. It's a, there have been so many great music documentaries that have come out in the past, like five, six years. It's been amazing. Agreed. Agreed. And then Barrett wrote in one more reason to just stay home and watch movies. And it's a link from the verge. AMC now warns moviegoers to expect 25 to 30 minutes of ads and trailers. Yeah. That was all over the news here in LA.

It's all over. It's all over all the social networks too. People are going to the movies and saying, just don't even bother showing up until 20 minutes after the movie is supposed to start. Yeah. And all the studios are just pissed off because the trailers before a movie are how it's like they're bread and butter. They literally make money off of those trailers. And if people are now it like incentivized to skip them, that's shooting everybody in the foot, you know?

Yep. Totally. We can't have nice things, Jason. Nope. Nope. Yeah, we can kind of. HBO Max is back. Yay. For the next two weeks until Zaslav fucking drops another peyote tab for whatever the hell he does to make decisions in that boardroom. I love that. This is the email I got from them. We are so back.

New originals, hit movies, all of HBO and more. It's good to be home. Nothing you need to do. You're ready to keep streaming. Okay. It's all the same shit. It's exactly the same shit. You just renamed it again. They put a new splash screen on the app. That's it. They changed the icon. Who gives a fuck? And you know how much money they spent to do that?

Zillions. That's right. They spent five Zaslavs on that. Ups and doodads. Brian, a couple of weeks ago, I talked about an anchor power bank that I liked. And I was getting ready to order it? Yep. Yep. And then I got an email that it had been recalled.

Okay. So you could either send it back in or whatever. I did the whole rigmarole. You have to take a picture of it and the serial number. The upside is they let you keep it and they send you. I got the $40 worth of credit for anchor.com. And it turns out for $40 in credit, the only thing I could get at anchor.com was a power brick. That was half the capacity of the one that they recalled. So I'm glad that they let me keep the one that could catch fire and explode because,

yeah, I'm still going to use it because, you know, I live on the edge, Brian. I live on the edge. Yeah. Yeah. You know, why not? Yeah. Just check the site. There are other ways that you can get a refund, I think, if you bought through Amazon or whatnot. I'm sure one other person probably bought the fucking thing for my recommendation. So, so back to, I think it's Dan P's email at the beginning of the show. I have spent

the last two weeks just completely immersed in AI coding. I wanted to get into just AI coding. So vibe coding. I prefer AI assisted coding. How's that? Yeah. No co-pilot AI assisted coding. So I, I fired up a visual studio code, which I already had installed on my machine. Uh, you know, it's a free IDE from Microsoft and now it's got co-pilot. Yay. I hate that IDE. I really do.

It's just, it's just too much. It's too much shit in it. All IDEs generally have too much shit in it. You just got to go back to BB edit, man. No, unfortunately you can't do that anymore. I, there's a, there's a middle ground. You can always tweak these things, but then I found out cursor is what the kids were using and windsurf the other, the other AI enabled IDE. So it's cursor and windsurf are the two big dogs. Now I fired up cursor, got my environment set

up by saying, you know, I, I literally went in and said, make me a web app for artist management. I want it with a backend written in Laravel, the PHP framework that everybody's using nowadays, which I still think probably sucks and gave it some parameters. And then it just started and, and said, these are all the, uh, dependencies you need. You need to update NPM. I was, I did, I did a couple of things. It just told me exactly what to do. And I just pasted it into the terminal,

which is built into the IDE too. And in five minutes, I had a completely up-to-date system running, uh, the newest version of PHP, uh, NPM, uh, home. I got my homebrew up to date, all this shit and a skeleton of a complete artist management tool for a management company.

All right. Now it wasn't perfect. I spent the next two hours just talking to it, telling it what to do. I'm like, okay, make this, this, do this, blah, blah, blah. In just plain language. I did not write one single line of code, did not pay anything to have it done. It would have taken me a month to do what I did in two hours. And that, that was the realization. And I'm like, yeah, junior coders are fucked. Absolutely fucked. Yep. And the thing is, since I have a coding

background, I can actually talk to this thing and tell it what to do and make it a little bit more efficient as it goes. If you're just, you know, new coming into this, just blathering at it, you're going to spend so much money in tokens because right now I'm on the, the, um, I think it's the free version of the $20 a month plan. There was a whole bunch of news in the past couple of weeks about how cursor changed their pricing model and pissed everybody off. And since I'm still on the quote unquote free trial, the 14 day free trial, I got like all this crap for free. So I'm just

like, well, I'm just going to do the free trial shuffle. Email addresses are free, baby. And since there's really not that much memory in between sessions, I could probably just reinstall, redo a new account and go through it, which brings me to the issue. If you are going to use this and pay for it out of pocket as an independent coder, it's going to get expensive fast. Right. Uh, I looked at some

of the numbers that I was pushing up here. I'm like, okay, well there was 570,000 tokens out the window with two prompts. Cause I did this whole, I'm like, build me a migration plan to move this web app that you just built on my local system into a new open BSD system. Give me all the dependencies and write a document with shell scripts. So I can just pick this up and move it over there. And it did it. And it took a couple minutes, but it gave me a beautiful migration document with all the shell scripts

involved to, to spin up the, the DB, move it from SQLite to my SQL or Maria, whatever. And, uh, it did all this stuff and it was just completely free. And I'm just like, oh my God, this is, this is insane. So I also dug into Claude code, which is Claude's command line tool builder. And also Gemini has come out with a new command line coding backend. And Gemini seems to be much cheaper than, uh, Claude is

Claude can, you can, you can spend a lot of money on these things really fast without actually knowing it. So, so if you're a company, if you like a corporation or work at a corporation that has one of those unlimited, all you can eat packages, dude, you're in the butter zone, just make shit all day. It's like, I was about to say, you know what? All the, all of them are cheaper than a room full of developers, which gets me to the point that it won't be very soon. What I'm noticing in all the boards I'm reading that you're, they're starting to charge a lot for this stuff. The, the,

the, the free lunch for AI coding and AI in general is about to be over because these people need to start showing more of a profit than they are because they need to start hitting benchmarks. And so I'm thinking about this and all this is, is more fucking consolidation to bigger players.

That's all it is. All we're doing now is we're taking money out of the mouths of these junior coders and, and, and creating this knowledge void and taking all the money that we would be spending on them, training them up to become, you know, senior developers along the way, giving it to these fucking companies that already have enough money that it's just another consolidation of wealth tactic that these guys are using. Exactly. And it's going to bite, bite everybody in the ass. It's so

going to bite everybody. I can just see it coming. I mean, it's not, I'm not new to this, you know, this is, this is not a new revelation by me that's going to change the world. Yes. We're fucking ourselves in the long run. We are, we are just taking the, taking the food out of our mouths tomorrow by using this stuff. And it just, it kind of, kind of hurts my heart that we're doing it, but you know, for the time being, it works. I'm with Dan P let's take some money now from these guys,

because if we don't, we're not going to be able to afford, there's going to be none left. NVIDIA is going to have all the money. All the frontier model people are going to have all the money. Even Meta is not going to have all the money because they're giving it to the developers of this shit that is going to end up ruining society. Just, just look, look a week ahead, guys. Just think about this shit. Sam Altman may have been right about one thing is that we're going to be

fucked if we don't start thinking about it now. So there's my, we're not. So yeah, no, there we go. Speaking of a shitty future, the onion back in 2005 did an episode on the dystopian future set in 2056.

And there's, it's a newsletter entry that I, that I put a link to in the show notes. A lot of the stuff is in flash because it was, the onion was back in flash back then. Yeah. But this guy has, you know, archived a lot of those files and you can use a flash emulator to go check it all out. It's a pretty good read. If you want to go check out what we thought dystopia or what the onion thought dystopia was going to be like in 2005 and some of it is actually pretty spot on sadly because it's the onion and they generally were back in the day. That's true. Well,

Jack Dorsey's beard is here to save us all, Jason. Oh, yay. You know, he likes to release things that make the world better. Well, he's just released a decentralized peer-to-peer messaging app that functions entirely over Bluetooth networks and it's called. Oh, like the ones that they used in Hong Kong before? Exactly like that, except now it's by Jack Dorsey's beard.

Okay. And it's called BitChat. So there you go. Another new thing to be on that nobody cares about. I think this could be useful if you're in the middle of a protest and you don't have Wi-Fi or whatever, except he's going to be working on turning it into a Wi-Fi type of thing. Yeah. So I can do both. So put the ICE app on this.

Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. But this is, this is technology that's already existed. So, you know, there you go. Thanks Jack for reinventing the wheel again. Okay. I found a single serving website, this thing called where goes, it's a link checker that if you put in a short URL, it will give you the trace of the entire path of the URL. Cause I, I get emails all the time from people looking for some of the artists that we manage. And some of them are attempts to hijack

their social media accounts. So I always, I always have to be the guy that goes through and make sure every link that we get is viable and useful. So I found where goes link checker. And because I'm an asshole, I opened up cursor and said, go to where goes link checker and completely replicate the functionality of it, but change the look and feel enough so that it doesn't look like that one,

but make it work locally for me. So I always have a copy of it going 10 minutes later, I had my own version of where goes link checker running on my local machine perfectly. Nice. Fucking AI code. Yeah. So I, yeah, what I'm actually doing now is I'm using all my free credits and I'm making a tool belt for sites that

go that tend to go away. Uh, I, I use some time calculators cause I I'm in podcasting. So there's a lot of, I work with time a lot, you know, it's like, okay, these are all the, the way points we have for ads that go into a file, but somebody puts an ad at the beginning. That's three minutes and 26 seconds. I need to shift all of those other timestamps down the line and doing math is hard.

So I created a little app that I put this in and put in the other timestamps and it just shifts them automatically for me. All this stuff I made, just making a utility belt that all runs locally on my computer with free fucking, you know, uh, token credits from all these LLMs that are trying to get customers before they run out of money. So I recommend that everybody do the same thing.

I have a quick tangent here, Jason, cause something you just said sparked, uh, sparked a thought in mind. You just said math is hard. Uh, my kid is, is eight years old now. So I'm, we're trying to, he's trying to learn his multiplication tables and all that sort of stuff. So we're, we're teaching him. He's got worksheets, all that sort of stuff. I play a lot of Yahtzee with him because that helps obviously, right? Cause you're, you're doing, you're doing multiplication, you're doing math, you're doing all that sort of stuff. You're doing addition. Um, he is this next generation,

the total digital natives. He's the fucking smartest little shit. When I, when we're done with our Yahtzee game and he has to add up all his scores, he doesn't sit there and try. The idea of course is for him to write it out and do the, all the addition and figure it out. He goes, Alexa, what's 16 plus 32 plus 42 plus 86 plus 42 plus. And he does it all that way. Little shit.

Well, you know, that's what they said about the calculator. When the calculator was invented, it was going to make us all dumb, but I was so blown away. I was like, first off, no. Secondly, that's really goddamn smart. Yeah. Yeah. It was really smart. As he asked Alexa, not Siri. Yeah. Well, yeah, that thing. Thanks to dad for being smart for that one. Okay.

And speaking of AI slot, Brian, YouTube is updating its monetization rules to crack down on low quality AI generated videos starting on July 15th. You mean the low quality AI videos that they were encouraging people to put up on YouTube just a little bit ago? Okay. Yeah. The ones that they're going to generate themselves through their own tool to make them?

Yeah, exactly. So they're going to say, well, you can pay us to make them using our AI tools, but you can't monetize them on our monetization platform. Funny how that works. Yeah. They just want to get the money to come in, not go back out because that's what possibly could have happened. They could have just been a broker. They could have just, you know, have been fine with taking their 3% off the top, but no, they just want to keep it all.

So there you go. They say it's a minor tweak to their existing rules, but you know, it seems a little bit. Yeah. Their minor tweaks are, you know, when they make a minor tweak to their monetization algorithm, that's probably hundreds of millions of dollars of downline value. That's not getting given back to, I mean, I'm going to use the term in scare quotes here, creators, because these people are creating shit. No, they are not.

The dark side with Dave, our friend podcast, superhost, Dave Bittner joins us every week. Dave decodes all things daily on the cyber wire, exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat, breaks down industrial cybersecurity and control loop, and even brings the laughs and only now we're in the building. And we're so happy to have you back, Dave, after our prolonged absence. We missed you.

One week. Right. It took a little, a little, uh... It felt like a month, man. When we take a, when we take a week off, that's hard on me. Sorry, Jason. I had to fly. Yeah. Yeah. So you're actually in California now, Brian. I am. I am. I got a...

Spitting distance from Disneyland. I can smell the caramel corn. Very good. I am envious of your location. Yes. Well, we're hoping to be going next week. We're fingers crossed. I think we'll be going, so we'll see. Yeah.

So I want to follow up on what we talked about with the, um, emulating devices and Game Boy emulators. Okay, cool, guys. I'm going to, I'm going to go make a sandwich. I'll be back. Okay. We'll talk about, we'll talk about Star Wars is some shit in five minutes. We'll page you when we start talking about Star Wars.

Okay. Exactly. So I was, for some reason, I was in the mood to, I was, I was looking at the old, uh, Sony PSPs to find, see if I could buy an old one with the wipeout game, the cartridge and everything. And I'm like, okay. And then in the process of looking for one, you can get them. They're like a hundred bucks. I'm like, Hey, it ain't that fun. I found, uh, PPSSPP, which is a play state, a PSP emulator for your iPhone, which is about the same, you know, it's just like having

a PSP. Yeah. And then I found that, uh, yeah, all the games are out there. Easy to get the PSP emulator itself is free for download because now you can have emulators on the, you know, the iOS store. I've had those for a while at long last took me, it took me about five minutes of, you know, hanging on the back waters of the internet to find every PSP ROM that's ever been made, download

those. And then I, you know, installed the PSP, SSPP and, uh, installed. Yep. And installed wipeout and was playing inside of 10 minutes. No fuss, no muss, easy peasy. And so that just got me on a little bit of a tear. I'm like, okay, well, duh. Why don't I just look for emulators for the phone instead of going through all this trouble with my analog pocket and all this other crap. And then I found Delta Delta supports NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS,

Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis. I was having problems getting the Game Boy ROMs onto my analog pocket and I just gave up. I'm like, this is taking too much time. I don't know. Ain't nobody got the time to steal this kind of shit. So I installed Delta and took all those ROMs that I had sitting around trying to get on my analog and just dumped them into my phone, which, which always helps when you, this is why I like having a one terabyte drive on my phone because it doesn't

matter. Sure. Sure. Okay. Here's 300 gig of, of ROMs from the old days. Yeah. And boom, within 30 seconds, I'm playing Donkey Kong country. I'm playing whatever, whatever game I ever want to play. So it, uh, yeah. How does it work like control wise with the touchscreen? You, it, there's two, there's actually two modes. If you turn it vertical, you actually see the buttons, like it's the actual emulator you're playing. So if it's a Game Boy, you get like kind of a Game Boy shell and the buttons

are in the same place as a Game Boy, turn it, turn it horizontal. They're on the screen, which is kind of annoying, which is why I recommend the backbone iPhone game controller, which I happen to have lying around, which I've almost never used because there aren't that many games, like new games that I want to play with it. Like driving games are kind of wonky with the sticks. I want a steering wheel, which you don't get, but, um, I, the, that thing just plugs into your phone and then you have a full controller to play all the old games and it's phenomenal. It's

phenomenal. If you, and the backbone is on sale right now for like 40% off because it's Amazon's, we want all your money week. Right. So, uh, go check them out. They have USB-C that, and there's a pro one that I, the one that I got was like 70 bucks when I bought it. Um, I think they're up to a hundred bucks now, but back down to 70 with the discount. Um, they have a pro one now that actually uses Bluetooth to connect, but it's like 170 bucks. So I pass on that one. Uh, just get the one that

plugs into your phone. It just clips in. It's beautiful. And then it just kind of plays like, I guess a switch would be, or, uh, any of those other, you know, handheld game devices, which I don't have. Right. Cause I don't need it now. Right. I need now. Right. Yeah. Uh, it's, it's phenomenal. It's a, it's a great setup. I love in the backbone when, when you're actually using the backbone, phenomenal controller. Great. It feels great in the hands. Well worth it. If you want to play games on your phone for extended periods of time. And now with every ROM in the universe,

I do believe there will be some extended periods of time that I'll be wanting to play my iPhone as a game controller. Now is this, these, uh, emulator apps on the app store? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The Delta, the Delta emulator, you can pay to get a little bit extra. Same with the PSP one. There's like gold versions of both, but it works fine out of the gate with, uh, for free. So, cause they're

all open source projects, right? Right. You know, so there's, exactly, exactly. So you just have to hit the backwaters of the internet to go find your ROMs. But once you do that, you're, you're solid, man. You're solid. Yeah. Uh, I included a link here to the emulator I use on my Mac, which is open EMU, which same sort of thing. It's just a front end for a bunch of these open source projects. And that

works pretty well. Um, I also, uh, included a link to a timely story that we actually covered on today's cyber wire, which is about the FBI taking down a Nintendo switch piracy website. Hmm. Get your ROMs while you can is the. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny. Um, I want to update on this, uh, Amber Nick device that I got, uh, again, tip of the hat to a grim ghost on Mastodon for pointing it

out and recommending it to me. Um, and this is the little hardware device that has all the emulators built in, uh, which is wonderful. Uh, you know, it's about the size of a, an iPhone, uh, has all the controls on it. The screen is actually quite good and, um, it comes preloaded with hundreds of games,

hundreds of games, but it sounds illegal. Well, doesn't it? Yes. Here's my point is conspicuously missing our games from Nintendo. Oh, right. Got it. So because Nintendo is so litigious about these sorts of things, if you want to play Donkey Kong, if you want to play Super Mario, you got to go find

the ROMs on your own, which is not hard to do. Um, hence me playing Donkey Kong country right at the game. Right. Right. Now the funny thing was I ordered this device. Uh, I think I ordered it on Friday when we record on the, on the recommendation of our listener, it arrived on Saturday. The box came, I didn't take it out of the box. I handed the box to my son, Jack and said, I want you to figure out

how to use this and then come back and teach me. Right. You're, you're, you're vibe dadding. Well, and I don't know, this is, I suppose on, on one level, I should have some shame that this is where I am in my life now, where I point in having children. Well, exactly, exactly. I don't want to pull weeds on my own. I don't want to take the garbage out on my own. If I'm paying for college,

dammit, you're going to learn how to run the emulator and teach me how, and you're also going to go out onto the internet and find the games that aren't on it and load it up. And that's exactly what he did. So he went out and found all of the missing games, the, the Marios, the Donkey Kongs, the, uh, Mega Man 2s, all those sorts of things. So it's fully loaded up now. And, um, I have to say it's a fun little device. I'm happy I have it. It's a little overwhelming just how many games are on

there. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's the, that's the whole thing that goes on in the music industry too, right? Like it's like you load up your streamer of choice and it's just overwhelming how much music there is because there's everything ever, right? Like everything, every game that has ever been made is out there. Right. And yeah, so you, you have this, uh, this curse of unlimited options and how do you organize them and how do you, and you can tag favorites and things like that,

but it's still, uh, yeah, it's a little overwhelming, but still happy. It's fun. It's fun. Yeah. It was, you know, 75 bucks. Well spent. Uh, it's a device I'm glad to have. One of those things you can throw in a bag if you're stuck somewhere or you just want to kill some time, you can play it. Uh, you know, scroll on social media. That's right. It'll hook up to Bluetooth, uh, headsets if you've got it and it has a headphone jack and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just,

it's remarkable how well built this little device is. I think like we've talked about before, it is extremely well built with very inexpensive components, right? Uh, but the screen itself is very good. It, this is not at all. They did not cheap out on the screen. So these folks know what they're doing. They know where to spend the extra five cents, uh, and at the Chinese factory.

I think the analog pocket is so expensive because I think they had to license, uh, do a lot of licensing with Nintendo for the, the actual cartridge port probably. Oh yeah. The IP behind that. So I think that there's, there's probably some, some licensing fees that are passed on because yeah, it shouldn't be as expensive as it is for 250 bucks. It shouldn't be that way, but, and, uh, all of the, the add-ons that they have, the adapters and things like that. I, I, I smell a licensing deal.

Yeah, I think so too. So part of playing with this device, what the, the game that I have dug into the most and spent the most time on is Mega Man two, which, uh, is my absolute favorite, uh, classic NES game.

And, uh, it's one of the few games that I played all the way through and got to the point where I could just play it from start to finish. It probably took about an hour to do. And I would do that just to something to do to relax and, and because I could, um, so it's been fun to do that again, to try to remember how, of course I can't do it in an hour anymore and I have not made my way all the way through, but I'm trying. But what strikes me about that game in particular is just what a

banger of a soundtrack it had. Um, and you know, that was one of the things about that NES was the, the capabilities and how clever they were with using its sound capabilities for good music and sound effects and all that kind of stuff compared to the other stuff that was out on the market at the time, especially personal computers. Uh, it was just so much better. So that got me thinking

about, uh, the music of Mega Man 2 and I found, uh, a video on YouTube of an orchestra performing the music from Mega Man 2 and 3. Right. And I mean, yeah, it is nice. Uh, it's really nice. And of course it's, it's, I think, I think it's in Japan, of course, you know, cause where else would it be?

Uh, but I'm so happy that it is. And that someone did these orchestrations and somebody performed it and that there's a market for this orchestra to get in front of an audience. Uh, and it, it makes me wonder, you know, this is, I think where we are, um, when it comes to financing a city orchestra,

right. That, uh, as many nights full of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, you have to do a night of everyone's favorite movie themes. Exactly. Yeah. Pay the bills. I mean, the biggest thing at the Hollywood bowl every year is the star Wars nights. Right. Right. Classical music and everybody brings their lightsabers and it's nuts. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Last time I was at the Hollywood bowl was for Lord

of the Rings. Right. Right. So that brings me to, I'll jump around a little bit, but that brings me to, um, this documentary on Disney plus about John Williams. I don't know if either of you have had the opportunity to watch it yet. I have. It's phenomenal. It's so good. It's really good.

And I mean, the music of John Williams, I think it's fair to say is the soundtrack of our lives. And I wonder where John Williams sits among the musical greats. Is it way up there? I certainly, when it comes to movie music, but I'm saying, comparing him to the classical composers that we

all know and love, I think it's fair to say at this point, more people have been exposed to John Williams music than probably any classical composer. Oh, I agree. A hundred percent. In fact, a couple weeks ago on this very show, I was talking about the empire strikes back soundtrack as being just on fucking believably good. And it's just, it's pure classical music and it's amazing.

Yeah. So part of what was in that John Williams documentary was part of, was the difficulties he had with the Boston pops and how many of the musicians, uh, were not pleased with him being brought on as their conductor. This is 20, 30 years ago. Um, because they did not take movie music

seriously. They did not think it was real classical music and, uh, the, the struggles that he had, he resigned at one point and came back. But I think that argument's done. I think people now accept that this is the classical music of our time. And it's the thing that's keeping the doors open for so many orchestras around the world. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, even, uh, I, I know, you know, you may not be

aware of this, but Trent Reznor, uh, from Nine Inch Nails has done a lot of soundtracks and he just announced a one-off music festival that is just film composers. Oh, wow. Playing live. It's, it's, I, I would, I'm not going to be in LA when it happens, but I'd kill to go. It's, it would be amazing. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you see folks like, um, Hans Zimmer. Yeah. To be able to tour, you know. Yes. He's touring. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And he's not just touring. He's also touring with

the lead vocalist from dead can dance is singing with him. Right. It's just unbelievable. Like the, the, yeah, it's, it's, it's amazing. And so it's an amazing time to be alive for that kind of stuff. Everything else sucks, but, but, but swinging back to the video games, I think what this speaks to is how evocative music is for all of us. And for me, I was reflecting on how the games that I really,

really love all have a musical component to them. I was thinking like Spy Hunter, the Star Wars arcade game, Mega Man, Top Gear, Outrun, Vanguard, even games like Pac-Man and Galaga and Donkey Kong all have these musical components. Um, and those are the ones that I come back to time and time again.

Well, I mean, Spy Hunter's use of Peter Gunn, like that was mind blowing for me. It was well before I'd never heard the Peter Gunn song or theme or anything like that. And I was just like, whatever this is, it's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Just really getting into it. And a quick callback. We had, uh, Mark Cantor on the show way back in the early day who did the programming for Spy Hunter and took the Peter Gunn theme and turned it into code. So if you want to walk down memory lane and some terrible

audio, go back and check out that episode with Mark Cantor. It's, you know, the, and you can listen to the entire Spy Hunter video game soundtrack on YouTube. They have it from start to finish. And part of what's remarkable about it is that, would you say his name is Dan Hunter?

Mark Cantor. Mark Cantor. Sorry. It rhymed. Mark Cantor did not phone it in. Right. Yeah. No. Like there are, it's, it's like 15 minutes of original music. Right. Right. And there are, there are solos and there are variations. It's not just the same thing over and over again. And so when we had the opportunity to do those sorts of things in a game

as old as Spy Hunter is, uh, it's amazing. And I think that's a big part of why we have affection for those old games. Yeah. And Mark, Mark, to his, you know, his credit was no slouch of a coder. He went on to found a little company called Macromind, which then became Macromedia. Yeah. Okay. I'm familiar with a few of his products. Yeah. I might've used some of them now and then. He's been smoking pot for 30 years. So he's not the same guy probably he was back then, but hey. Well, Dave, I would say it's

not even the old games. I mean, I, well now let's talk about some other old games, which aren't as old, but I mean, I know Jason and I, when we first worked together many, many years ago, uh, Trent Reznor had done the soundtrack for, for Quake, which we played quite a bit. And it was a wonderful soundtrack that he did. Very interesting. And I know, you know, Jason, you just mentioned Wipeout a few minutes ago. I know we played this on this, on the stereo at our work incessantly when you and I worked together, the Wipeout XL soundtrack, which is one of the best soundtracks for a game ever

made. I think, I think that game, that soundtrack on that game single-handedly ignited the entire electronic music movement in the country because it was so popular and it was so good. Yeah. We played this all the time. I could, they don't have it. They don't have it on a lot of streaming media, but I have included a link in the show notes. Somebody had put together the playlist, uh, from it. So yeah, it's an amazing soundtrack. Like we listen, I listened to that nonstop. Yep. It's to the point now, if I listen to one of the albums, I expect the song from the

soundtrack to come on next after that one's over. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're coming up on time here and I just, before we, before we wrap, I want to do one non-music game. I talked about this on the show before, and I just had an update Mahjong Titan plus on Apple arcade. There's thousands of Mahjong boards on there. And a couple of weeks ago I was on the quest to complete them. All I have

finally completed them all go on. What do they send you? Do you get a medal? Do you get a check? What happened? Oversized check? I get the freedom to poop without my phone in my hand playing Mahjong again is what I get. I have completed 4,678 boards, which ranks me 12,294th out of 1,910,570 players.

What a feeling of accomplishment that must give you at night. It does. It fucking does. I know you're not a gamer, Brian, but some people out there will realize that I see that 12,294 and I'm like, I'm so close to the top. I'm so close to the top. I have never played Mahjong and I know nothing about it. So this is all new to me, but congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It was an accomplishment.

My wife is of Chinese descent and obviously she has a lot of Chinese relatives and in Toronto specifically. I have been in one of those rooms, one of those back rooms where it's all like 85 year old Chinese women playing Mahjong. It is crazy. Yeah. They chain smoking and. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

There's chicken feet everywhere and everybody's just chomping away and. Right. Right. Don't you dare interrupt. I was like, what's this white, what's this white boy doing in here? Right. Yeah. So it's the, yeah, it's the heat. Uh, well, good for you. I, it's, I mean, uh, you know, I talked about my accomplishment of making my way all the way through Mega Man 2. I suspect these are similar things. So at least I know how it feels. Yeah. I played a game once.

Come on. You used to hang out in the Disneyland arcade. I played a lot of Spy Hunter. I never finished it. Never. Yeah. But yeah. The problem with Spy Hunter is that it is not a game that you can enjoy under emulation. I'd imagine you need the whole thing. You need the steering wheel. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but you can listen to the soundtrack. So guys, I got a real quick question for you. Both of you guys live with women and I wanted to figure out if this is a, it makes it sound as if that's an odd thing. Yeah. A real live women. I've lived with women most of my adult life. So shut the fuck up.

Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. I've noticed, I've noticed that every time I go into the kitchen, the microwave never says the time it's always just a couple of seconds. Exactly. So I didn't, I'm trying to figure out if this is just an, a woman thing, an impatience thing, because I live with a very impatient person who just can't wait for the microwave to finish. It gets close and she's like close enough. Boom. And then leaves it. And so I'm always going by annoying. I'm always clicking

the cancel button on the microwave, which leads me to two points. But the first is do either. Apparently you deal with this too, Brian? I do a hundred percent. My, my microwave is always on three, four or five. Yes. Dave, you know, uh, my wife has the opposite problem, which is that, um, she is easily distracted. So she will forget that she put something in the microwave. Ah, okay. And then I

get, I get, we get that on the, we know, but that's on the stove. I spent 25 minutes cleaning a pan of rice yesterday that was completely burnt beyond recognition. But the microwave on the other hand never finishes. But guys, I get both. Not only does my microwave say three, four or five, the coffee cup is inside of it. Oh, always, always. That's a new twist. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No, it does not. It is very, it's an interesting thing. So no. Okay. Okay. I'm not

alone on that. Now the thing that gets me is we live in a technology age where we have a box that can take food and make it hot by pressing a button. Like it's out of fucking star Trek. Yeah. But, but they can't figure out when you open the door to reset the clock and they don't have to do it right away. You can wait a minute or two to turn it off. They can't figure that out. What kind of shitty, lazy ass engineers do they have at these microwave companies that do that? Okay.

Hmm. Yeah. I think, I don't think they should reset when you open the door because sometimes you have to stir things and put them back. That's what I'm saying. Give it a minute or two after, you know? Yeah. That's what I'm going to say. I think there should be a timeout where if after X number of minutes, the microwave just like, I don't know, first it beeps and then it gives you another minute and then it resets itself that that seems completely reasonable to

me. Yeah. And maybe somebody is going to write in and say, there is a $4,000 microwave that does this exact thing. Well, I just did a quick Google search, Dave. I just did a quick, quick Google search. And yes, there are, there are smart microwaves with wifi and voice control. You can connect your microwaves to Alexa. And so you could, there are multiple options for you to be able to control and reset everything. And I'm sure there's one that actually does a reset itself, but you could

just tell your Alexa or Siri to do it if you've got the right microwave. Well, I'm never going to buy that microwave. So. Well, then you will live with three, four or five seconds on your microwave. Okay. But let me ask you this. So what happens when you point out this oddity to the lovely lady in your life? Divorce. You don't, you'd never know. Yeah. You don't, you do not bring it up. No,

I said, why the fuck would you ever do that? That's dumb. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm not a newbie when it comes to marriage. So I've certainly understand. Wives famously love to have things pointed out to them. Oh, yes. Yes. I'm not even married. It's just a roommate situation. And yeah, no, usually in my relationship, if I were to point that out, I will get a litany of the things that

I do horribly wrong. Yeah. So I don't need that. Invariably a much longer list. Yeah. You don't open that door. You do not open that door. Period. Nah. Choose your battles. Exactly. It's not that hard to hit cancel. That's true. That's true. Much less expensive than the divorce. Yeah.

There is someone here at the office who does that. Oh, they're fair game. Yeah. Leaves it with a few seconds. And what annoys me about that is that the microwave does beep, you know, and I can hear it from my studio. So I'm like, somebody left the microwave. But I don't know. We'll never know who.

Okay. I just wanted to clear up that modern technology inconvenience. Yeah. It's real. They need a Sniglet for that. I'm sure there is one. I got the books. I should dig it up. Oh, man. Brad. What was that? Who was the comic who did Sniglets? Rich Hall. Rich Hall. I was going to say Brad Hall. Rich Hall. Okay. No, it's Dan Hunter's brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brad Hall. Okay.

No, I have all the Sniglets books right next to my Murphy's Law books. I got those. I re-bought those a couple of years ago and I'm never giving them up. Sniglets are awesome. I have a bunch of the Jay Leno headlines books, which still make me laugh. Oh, you're the one that makes it. Okay.

I heard that one was sold of those. Yeah. I knew it went somewhere. I don't know. Yeah. All right, guys. Okay. See you next week. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got one new Patreon, Fourth Guy. Thank you very much for the patronage and the hat tip earlier. And from the Legacy Files, Oliver, Steve, Macy, Brett, Thomas,

Brian, Jason, Rogue Sphere Studios, Copper 3K, and Ivor. Thank you all very much. Yes, thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got Jonathan, Levy, Judge, Florian, Ralph, Miles, Nicola, Robert, and Thomas. And over the tip jar, we've got Adam. And Jessica bought some merch this week. Thank you, everybody. And just a quick reminder, if you want to support the show and keep us on the air, you can head over to GOG.show slash donate to find multiple avenues to give us

your hard-earned money. Or you can go to Patreon.com slash GOG. And if you go there and sign up for as little as $3 a month or pay for the whole year and get a discount, you get the show a little bit early, ad-free, and at high definition. Sadly, no reviews this week. Boo. But happy birthday to friend of the show, Robert Fogarty, who does our voiceovers and intros and things like that.

Happy birthday, old boy. Happy birthday. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 704. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate.

Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. We'll love you for it. Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts, feedback, cool links? Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact.

And don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review, and we'll read it on the show. And guess what? We've got GOG merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show. Stay grumpy. 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 Colon, BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero.

Watch it live, only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.