707: Someone Spilled the Tea

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. Brian is off somewhere in the Pacific Northwest with the fam, so it's just me and Dave today. Dave will be joining me shortly for a chit-chat about the late and great Tom Lehrer. Now, a little follow-up. This is from The Economist, and we know a lot of our listeners are Gen Xers, so this is relevant to your interests.

Forget the pity party for millennials and Gen Z. Generation X may be the real lost generation. Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen X is overlooked in pop culture and underrepresented in media buzz. But they're also the least happy, according to global polls.

Stuck in the middle, Gen Xers are juggling aging parents and dependent kids while navigating midlife health issues and stalled careers. Their income gains have been the smallest of any generation, and thanks to the 2008 financial crisis and a sluggish job market, they missed out on key earning years and stock market booms.

Home ownership? Turns out Gen X suffered the biggest drop compared to boomers. Many foreclosed during the housing crash. And with shaky pension systems and looming social security cuts, their future looks even grimmer. So, next time you hear complaints from younger generations, remember, Gen X didn't just get ignored, they got screwed.

Thank you, Economist. Teens across the U.S. are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence for emotional support, advice, and even friendship, according to a new study from Common Sense Media. More than 70% of teens have used AI companions like ChatGPT or Replica, with nearly a third saying the conversations are as satisfying or more than those with real friends.

Experts are sounding the alarm. While AI offers constant availability and non-judgmental feedback, researchers warn it may stunt teen social development and critical thinking. No shit. Some even rely on AI to write breakup texts or sensitive emails, raising concerns about over-dependence.

And the fact that you've got a girlfriend or a boyfriend, why would you want to break up with them over text? Or break up with them at all? Jeez. The study also uncovered disturbing trends. Minors using adult role-play apps, weak age restrictions, and AI producing harmful or sexual content.

Researchers urged parents to take note, as most are unaware of how deeply AI has integrated into teen life. As one teen put it, AI is the new addiction. And with youth mental health already fragile, experts warn the risks of replacing real relationships with virtual ones are only just the beginning.

Yay progress. In the news. So, T, the safe, women-only dating feedback app that swore it would empower women and protect anonymity, just Ashley Madison the shit out of itself.

Turns out their idea of security was leaving their legacy database wide open. Like the back door is not just unlocked open, it's flapping in the breeze open. Hackers snatched 72,000 images, including selfies, IDs, and personal verifications.

Plus, just for funsies, 1.1 million private DMs. Then promptly spilled the whole lot onto the web. Because nothing says empowerment like having your face and life story plastered across revenge forums and mapped out for creeps to browse.

Well, T's response? They disabled messaging, called in cyber experts, and they warble about compliance with law enforcement. Meanwhile, users are lawyering up for a class action lawsuit, since apparently nobody at T had the bright idea to check if their anonymous safe space was actually, you know, safe.

Now, women who signed up to protect themselves from stalkers and bad dates are dealing with widespread doxing, identity theft, and trolls rating their selfies like it's hot or not in 2003. If you ever wondered what happens when Move Fast and Break Things meets Hey Girl, Tell Me Your Secrets, now you know.

So, just to clarify what everyone is thinking, no, the T app wasn't vibe-coded by a rogue AI on a Red Bull bender. While some vibe-coding did creep in, the real enemy here was good old-fashioned human laziness. Legacy code, zero security audits, and dusty Firebase settings straight out of 2017.

So yeah, AI played a cameo, but this flop was written by hand, with all the grace of a MySpace dev on a deadline. So don't blame on AI, what can be chalked up to good old human incompetence. Microsoft has released a new study identifying which jobs are most and least likely to be replaced by generative AI.

Based on 200,000 anonymized Bing co-pilot chats, researchers found that roles involving writing, teaching, advising, and customer service are the most vulnerable. Topping the list, translators, historians, sales reps, and authors.

Meanwhile, manual labor jobs like roofers, housekeepers, and dishwashers appear far safer from automation. Go figure. But the study cautions that AI isn't replacing entire jobs, just changing how tasks are done. Microsoft researchers emphasize their findings reflect current chatbot capabilities, not long-term economic impact.

They also admit AI often fails at tasks requiring human intuition or basic factual accuracy. Yeah, let's give it to the historians and the writers and the translators. Yeah, let's give AI to those people and replace their jobs with something that is basically factually inaccurate.

Smart. Still, as OpenAI's CEO bluntly warned, entire job categories may soon be totally gone, bro. CEOs are already using AI to justify layoffs, and Microsoft's AI applicability score suggests white-collar jobs may be at greater risk than we thought.

And in more fun AI news, ChatGPT users were shocked, shocked, I say, this week after discovering that their private conversations were showing up in Google search results. Surprising everybody because nobody knew people Googled for anything anymore. Fast Company broke the story, revealing that thousands of chats, some sharing intimate details about users' relationships, mental health, and even drug use, were indexed and visible online.

While names weren't attached, the context was sometimes specific enough to potentially identify users. The leak wasn't a data breach, but rather a feature, not a bug, OpenAI had quietly enabled. Users who clicked Share on a chat were shown a checkbox labeled Make This Chat Discoverable, with a smaller, easy-to-miss warning below saying it might appear in search results.

OpenAI initially defended the language as clear enough, but after public outcry, the company pulled the feature entirely. Their chief information security officer admitted the design made it too easy for people to accidentally share highly personal content. Meta is facing a major copyright lawsuit from two adult film studios, Strike3 Holdings, and Counter Life Media.

Over allegations, it pirated nearly 2,400 adult movies to train its AI models. Filed in California federal court, the lawsuit claims Meta downloaded the content via BitTorrent from private sites and even shared the files to speed up downloads, a practice known as tit-for-tat.

The studios argue this helped Meta develop its movie gen and other AI tools capable of mimicking high-end adult film production. Evidence includes proprietary tracking data and links to 47 IP addresses allegedly tied to Meta or its contractors.

The complaint also cites stealth IP addresses and hidden data centers used to obscure Meta's activity. The studios are seeking up to $359 million in damages for willful copyright infringement. Meta has not yet responded.

Strike3, known for aggressive copyright enforcement, may settle, but a jury trial is still on the table. In northern Italy, fed-up farmers in the Dolomites are fighting back against Instagram-fueled tourism. With crowds of up to 4,000 people a day trampling across private land to capture scenic selfies, locals have installed turnstiles, intercharging tourists 5 euros, about 6 bucks, for access to popular photo spots.

While Italian law guarantees free access to natural parks, farmers say this is a desperate response to trash, trespassing, and official inaction. One landowner called it a cry for help. Alpine Club president Carlo Zanella backs the move, blaming travel influencers for the chaos and urging the government to step in, comparing the situation to Venice's over-tourism fee.

Elsewhere in Italy, authorities are cracking down on unruly summer visitors. New laws ban shirtless wanderers, impose beach caps, and fine people for digging umbrella holes, blasting boat music, or even walking barefoot. The message is clear. Respect the land or pay the price.

A wave of new online age verification laws just went into effect, and the results are mixed. In the UK, the Online Safety Act kicked in on July 25th, requiring websites with adult content to implement, quote, highly effective, unquote, age checks.

This means no more simply ticking a box saying you're over 18. Now, users might have to upload a government ID, use facial age estimation, or provide credit card details to access certain sites. And it's not just a British thing. In the U.S., a Texas law that the Supreme Court recently upheld requires similar age verification for websites with significant pornographic content.

At least 24 U.S. states now require users to upload a legitimate ID, provide a credit card, or pass a biometric selfie scan before accessing adult content. The UK's Online Safety Act expanded age checks to most digital platforms that might harbor, quote, harmful material, end quote.

Not just porn, but also anything from racy jokes to edgy discussions on Discord, TikTok, and even Wikipedia. Sites risk massive fines for letting minors slip through, and even direct messages or late-night scrolling by teenagers can trigger compliance nightmares.

But in classic internet fashion, users have found hilariously creative ways to blow past these digital velvet ropes. VPN downloads surged up to 1,800% in the UK as thousands pick Australia, the U.S., or, quote, somewhere with more chill laws, letting them sidestep age verification with a single click.

To bamboozle facial recognition age checks, some are using high-res images of Norman Reedus' face from the video game Death Stranding, or even rolling up with Sims characters, moving them from side to side for the camera to fool the systems. One person on social media joked that 60% of the UK population is now Norman Reedus.

And I saw another thread where people were using Twin Peaks' deputy director Gordon Cole, Titan's vinyl figures, to trick the facial recognition. If you see one of these, you'll get it. It's pretty funny. Minors also snag a parent's credit card or older sibling's ID or crowdsource trusted adult accounts to slip under the radar.

With age estimators still easy to outsmart, plenty just punch in fake birthdays and spin up fresh over-18 identities on sites that don't demand hard proof. For the over-the-top stuff that gets nuked from big networks, users just migrate to obscure smaller platforms that fly under the regulatory radar, sharing guides and exploits for anyone missing the glory days of the open web.

Most of these systems are Swiss cheese for anyone with basic digital smarts. And kids these days, oh, they have plenty. And if you're stuck in age of verification hell, Grumpy Old Geeks recommends private internet access. Just go to GOG.show slash VPN and sign up today. A federal jury in Miami has found Tesla partly liable for a fatal 2019 crash involving its autopilot system and awarded $329 million in punitive damages.

The crash killed a 20-year-old woman and severely injured her boyfriend. The car failed to break at an intersection while autopilot was active, striking another vehicle and a pedestrian. The jury assigned one-third of the blame to Tesla and the rest to the driver who was sued separately.

Plaintiffs argued that Tesla allowed autopilot to be used on roads it wasn't designed for and that Elon Musk exaggerated its capabilities. Tesla plans to appeal, saying the verdict was wrong and blaming driver error. The ruling is a landmark decision since it's one of the first major legal defeats for Tesla's driver assistance technology.

We've previously covered Elon Musk's new Tesla diner in Hollywood, and there's some new news coming out of 404 Media. Living next to Elon Musk's Tesla diner in Hollywood has turned into a waking nightmare for some residents of a neighborhood apartment building. While the retro-themed 24-7 diner with its massive four-story movie screen draws long lines of Tesla fans and curious tourists, neighbors say the experience has been anything but charming.

Former resident Kristen Rose described the months of early morning construction, flashing lights, and roaring generators as absolute hell. She ultimately moved out, citing noise pollution, toxic fumes, and strobe lights blasting into the bedrooms, even with the blinds shut.

Others soon followed, including an elderly couple who'd lived there for decades. Current tenants complain about crowds, traffic jams, and constant honking. One woman said she now sleeps with AirPods in just to drown out the chaos. Another likened the environment to living in Times Square without the upside.

Residents say complaints to Tesla and building management went largely ignored, and no rent breaks were offered despite the disruption. Some, however, remained supportive. One top-floor tenant called the diner the best thing to happen to Hollywood in 10 years, praising the joyful vibe and happy families.

But with protests outside, reinforced gates, and a spike in vacancies, it's clear not everyone agrees. Before I welcome Dave this week, if you don't know who Tom Lehrer is, I highly recommend you stop the podcast and go listen to some of his work. There's a link in the show notes to literally everything he ever did.

If you're on any of the major streaming services, you can find his music there as well. Tom was the original music troll, a math nerd with a piano in a pitch-black sense of humor. In the 1950s and 60s, Tom Lehrer wrote savage, hilarious songs about nuclear war, racism, religion, and even pollution decades before satire went mainstream.

Imagine Bo Burnham, Tim Minchin, and Weird Al rolled into one Ivy League professor with zero fucks to give about fame. He was an inspiration to millions and had one hell of a great run.

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 non-stop 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 super host Dave Bittner is joining us again for all the links to everything Dave does and his podcasts are legion. Please check out the show notes. Hi, Dave. Hello. Hello. Nice to be back. So, yes.

Brian is off enjoying the wonderful Pacific Northwest today. So, I thought that we really had to get together because we lost a legend last week. And I think between the three of us, you and I are the ones that probably affected the most.

Tom Lehrer died last week. And Tom was one of those people that I always kept checking. I'm like, is he still alive? Is he still alive? I mean, he outlived Abe Vigoda for Christ's sake. Right. And so, when he finally did die, I was just like, oh, it really kind of stung.

So, I thought we could get together and just talk a little bit about Tom for a moment. Yeah. I mean, what a brilliant satirist. Right? I mean, and I guess I learned about Tom Lehrer in the late 70s, early 80s.

That time in your life when you're starting to check out comedy and comedy albums, which I think I started with old Bill Cosby albums. And then, you know, eventually somebody said, hey, have you checked out Tom Lehrer? And I remember looking at one of the albums, and on the back of the album, he had all of the negative reviews of his previous album.

And I thought to myself, okay, this is my kind of guy. But, I mean, has there ever been a smarter satirist? I was thinking about this, and the only one I could think of was maybe Peter Shickley. Yeah, I don't think so. And, yeah, I came into Tom Lehrer late because I was a huge fan of stand-up comedy.

I had all the Eddie Murphy tapes. I listened to the Bill Cosby, the Richard Pryors, and all of that. But it wasn't until I went to live with my dad when I was like around 14 or 15, and he introduced me to Dr. Demento, and specifically Tom Lehrer, because of the song The Vatican Rag.

Okay. Because my dad was a huge fan of Tom Lehrer when he was back in college. It was just one of those things where I was just like, as soon as I heard it, I'm like, okay, well, I have to have everything that this man has ever done. Right. And then became a Tom Lehrer completionist, as it were.

Yeah. But I don't know anybody that has made more of an impact with such a short career than he has for that genre of music, for sure. Well, and also for my generation, I'm a couple years older than you. He was so foundational through the work that he did for the electric company.

Yep. And I think some of it might have made its way onto Sesame Street as well. But to this day, one of my all-time favorite jokes is his song about Silent E, where he says, he turned a dam into a dame, but my friend Sam stayed just the same.

What a smart, funny joke to toss at eight-year-olds, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He just had a knack. And of course, in his career, this whole musical thing was just a side gig. It was a dalliance.

It was not his main thing. I think it's probably the thing in his life that made him the most money once his albums started taking off. But he was a mathematician. Yeah. And he was a prodigy. I didn't even realize how, you know, how smart he really was, because he skipped a couple of grades and got into Harvard when he was 15.

Graduated magna cum laude in mathematics at 18. And then a year later, got his master's. I was like, OK, well, overachieve much? Right. You know? Right. Yeah. I was reading through some of his biography stuff. And when you think about that, it's surprising that he did not have a PhD.

But the stuff I read said that he kind of dallied with one over the course of about 15 years and just never bothered to finish it. I guess didn't really get in the way of any of his career aspirations to not have it. Yeah, really. He did what he loved to do.

So. Yeah. There's a funny story that I saw come by that I've included a link to. There's a series of posts over on Blue Sky. And it's titled The Delightful Story of a Prank Tom Lehrer Played on the NSA. And this is just a wonderful story.

It starts, it's written by someone who says that they worked as a mathematician at NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the Trump administration. And they had enjoyed Tom Lehrer's music. And this person had access to the NSA's research directorate, which has an electronic library.

So just for fun, this person did a search on Tom Lehrer and up came an unclassified research paper. And it's called Gambler's Ruin with Soft-Hearted Adversary, whatever that means.

But in the paper, there are five sources that are cited throughout the body of the paper. But the bibliography lists six sources. And the third entry in the bibliography that is never referenced in the paper says, Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds by N. Lobachevsky.

Okay, okay. So you're laughing. Yeah. Did you get the joke? Yes. So Tom Lehrer had a song about this made-up character named Lobachevsky, who was famous for stealing other people's work.

It was a song about the new mathematics and how it was all about stealing each other's work. So Tom Lehrer snuck into this bibliography for a research paper he did for NSA, a lyric from one of his songs from an album that had come out a couple years earlier.

Now, the person who discovered this wrote a letter to Tom Lehrer asking if he had ever gotten in trouble for it. And Tom said, no, no one ever discovered the joke. And so the person who wrote this said, he was a comedian who could quietly tell a joke and wait more than 60 years for the payoff.

That's dedication to craft. Oh, that it is. That it is. No, it was, and I was researching him a little bit. I think I covered it on the show probably three or four years ago that I was, I was just trying to figure out where, what he was up to, what he was doing.

And I came across his website, which was Tom Lehrer songs.com, where I found an entire disclaimer where he was just like, take my music and do what you want to with it. And I was like, wait, what?

I don't know why I got on the kick for it, but I found that he had given up all of his rights to all of his music years ago. Yeah. Put it all in the public domain. Yeah. And if you go there now, the site is still up. We don't know how long it's going to be up since he's passed now.

Yeah. But it is definitely worth going and getting everything that you can. Right. It's all there. The sheet music, everything. Everything. And he doesn't have a huge library. He only put out a handful of albums. And then there's also the stuff from Electric Company.

So it's not like there's a giant body of work, but. There's enough. Yeah, there's enough. There's enough. I mean, some of it's a little topical of its time. And so you kind of have to figure out what makes this so funny for a few of them.

But others are just timeless. Yeah. Yeah. No, they're definitely, definitely phenomenal. Some of my favorites, Pollution is one of my favorites. Mm-hmm. I don't know. I thought that was, the thing about his music that really got me is, is it was also, it was funny, but it was also really good music.

Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And he was borrowing all different musical styles along, you know, he was clearly, well, one of the things he taught was musical theater in his later years. Mm-hmm. So he had a deep, deep knowledge of that.

And you can tell, you know, the things he borrowed from, because all of his songs sounded strangely familiar while still being unique. Yeah. They weren't direct ripoffs like the type of stuff that Weird Al does. No disrespect to Weird Al, you know, but they were more suggestive of a style.

I guess Tom Laird did, the one he did that's, that is famously, is a direct ripoff is the one he did, The Elements. Yes. Yes. Which is right from, what is it, Pirates of Penzance, which is very funny. And I'm sure, I was thinking every chemistry teacher in the world must get sick of their students asking them if they've ever heard The Elements by Tom Laird.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And also, Clementine, he does multiple styles in Clementine, which are very funny. Yeah. Yeah. No, quite a, quite a loss. The world is a better place having had someone like him.

I'm trying to think, like, who are the smart satirists today? Is there anybody writing stuff that is on par with this that at its core is so intelligent and so smart that does not talk down to the audience that assumes the audience has a certain level of knowledge and appreciation?

I don't know. I think I've heard Bo Burnham's name bandied around a bit, but I couldn't really, I couldn't really get into him. So, I mean, I've heard some of his music and it is, it is fairly smart and, and fairly well thought out.

But I just, he's just one of those guys that I could not get into. So. Yeah. I'd say the other person that Tom Laird reminded me of just with the clever turn of phrase is Cole Porter, sort of drawn from the same style, the type of wordplay that Tom Laird used very much reminds me of Cole Porter when he was at his best.

And that was another just, just incredibly clever person, a delight to reverse engineer how they put, strung those words together. Just amazing. So. Yeah. And I think there were five songs that he did for Electric Company in total. L, Y and Silent E are the ones that I think everybody knows.

Mm-hmm. But there was O, U, S, N, and N apostrophe T as well. Yeah. Yeah. There was another one where, what was it? Oh, yeah. Can't, couldn't, won't, wouldn't. Yeah. Was N apostrophe T.

It's like, you know, would you like to take a walk? No, I wouldn't. Could we go and have a talk? No, we can't. It's another funny one. But, but I didn't, the thing is like, I didn't know that those, there was a light bulb that went off much later in my teen years connecting the dots between the Electric Company songs and the Tom Lair albums I'd been listening to, right?

Like I was listening to Tom Lair on the albums for several years before, I guess I swung back around to something from Electric Company and went, wait a minute, that's Tom Lair. Of course it is. Of course it is. Yep. Yeah. It's funny. I've seen some lyrics from Werner von Braun show up recently.

Because one of the greatest lines in that song is, once the rockets are up, who cares where's it come down? That's not my department, says Werner von Braun. Right. Right. Well, I do have a link in the show notes for a full performance that he gave in Copenhagen. I think it's back in the 50s, so it's old black and white footage, but even just his audience work is hilarious.

Just such a dry wit, dry, smart wit. Yeah. So do check it out. If you're not familiar with his work, hopefully you're in for a treat. Yeah, definitely. I've seen a lot of those old ones, and it's funny because he does change the lyrics a little bit from performance to performance, which is interesting, versus the album version.

So I'm like, I want the album version, because of course, you know, that's what we do. We always want the album version. Yeah. Yeah. You wonder how much a person like, when you have an active mind like that, how much of this is about amusing yourself? Yeah, that's true. You know. That's true.

Oh, so good. So a little follow up here. We got a note in this week from Gabriel and says, I'm sending this one to Dave. And it's just a little Instagram video that says, one devastating fire at a furry convention could probably cripple the entire cybersecurity industry in a single night.

No lies detected. Yeah. I was going to say, kind of tracks, probably. Yeah. It's interesting. I wonder, you know, furry conventions as espionage targets. What's the crossover there? I don't know.

I was in Pittsburgh one year, and I turned on the afternoon news, and that's what they were. They had the world's largest furry convention going on in downtown Pittsburgh that weekend, and they were covering it on the news. And listening to Pittsburgh newsletters try and dance around just the entire thing was fairly entertaining.

Yeah. Yeah. Yins aren't going to believe what's happening today in Pittsburgh. Right, yins. Yeah. Yeah, we had some furry conventions in Baltimore that I drove by on a couple of occasions. This is before I really knew anything about the whole community.

And yeah, something to see. But, you know, but also I'd say overall benign to the rest of the world. You know, furries don't, they're not out to prove anything. They just want to do their thing and be left alone, and overall it seems pretty positive.

So good for them. Yeah. And the craftsmanship is breathtaking in some cases. That's true. That's true. Some of their costumes are, like, these are better than Disney World costumes. Yeah. Right? No, I've seen some of them, man, with just the electronics and the, it's just insane.

Like, man, I kind of want that just for the electronics alone. Yeah. Active cooling systems and all sorts of things, right? Especially with summer coming here, man, I could really use that. Yeah. Well, you know, you get people who are technically inclined, who also have a lot of disposable income, and that's what you're going to end up with.

Yeah, seriously. One other thing I wanted to talk to you about this week was, I just bought a new camera, and since you are a cameraman in your former lives, I thought you might get a kick out of this. I got the Insta360 X5. Yes, you got one. Now, I got one.

It has arrived. Yeah, it's all right. All the pieces and parts are coming together now, because I had to get some stuff separately. Yeah. Like the lens protectors and things like that, because these are just two giant pieces of bubble glass, and I'm like, I'm not taking that thing out on the road just yet. Okay. Yeah, it's a damn expensive piece of kit.

Yeah. And the reason I thought about getting this, there's two things behind this. First, I was watching the new Ewan McGregor, Charlie Borman series, Long Way Home on Apple TV, and they use these things extensively in the production for that, because they were mounted on the motorcycles, they had them on sticks, they used them all over the place, because they're quote-unquote 8K.

But that's for the entire 360-degree picture, not just a little subset of it, the whole thing. Right, right. But it is, you know, fairly high definition. So watching that on my 75-inch TV, I was like, wait a minute, this is like a $600 camera strapped to a motorcycle, and it looks this good?

Yeah. Let me investigate this thing, because there's a use case I got this for. I'm starting a new podcast, multimedia, hyper-local endeavor here in my town of Woodland Hills.

We don't really have a lot of news coverage that is just specific to our area. And back in the day, I did a site called Blogging LA, and then I went on to do Metro Blogging, which was all hyper-local news. And I'm like, well, I'm a podcaster, I know how to do hyper-local news, nobody's doing this, we've got a lot of stuff going on, the Rams just moved into the neighborhood, it's like, it's a really growing community, and I ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

So I'm like, maybe I should just start my own little news media empire. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do that. No, that means I'm going to go interview a lot of people that have local businesses and who are doing things. What kind of rig can I get? Well, I have a really nice small rig camera setup that we talked about on the show before when you were talking about your Disney guys and the live streamers.

I have a really nice setup for my iPhone with a Rode video mic and stabilization and all that stuff and grips and all that, but you can only point in one direction for that one. I'm like, can I get one of the 360 cameras that's high definition enough, put it between me and my subject and do the interview on one camera in one take without having any other gear?

That's why I got it. So once my stuff gets here this week, I'm going to start doing some tests with it. But yeah, I got the external microphone clip coming because you can plug it into an external microphone clip that if you use the little Rode mics, the little pucks, the receiver can sit next to the camera and not show up in the video because it's right in the blind spot that it stitches together.

So I can put the wireless mic receiver there and then the guest and I can both have wireless mics. Because I saw that this thing has a single wireless attachment that they sell. Yeah. So I was curious if you could hook up two to it.

I don't think you can because I think that's kind of Bluetoothed directly to it. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, but you can buy – there's a little $20 adapter, it's all it is, it's $20, that clips into the USB-C charging port that gives you an external charging port and a mini plug-in.

So I can just plug in the Rode and boom, connect that to the lavaliers that the guest and I are wearing. I like it. Yeah, and also the Rode wireless mic has onboard recording. So it's, you know, kind of just for sync to get it to the camera.

So later on when you're syncing it back up, you can take the live tracks from the actual recorder and marry those up so you have full fidelity audio with the 360-degree camera. Yeah. So I think this might be a pretty cool setup for doing these in-person interviews.

So as a camera guy, I thought you might be interested in that. No, I am. I was looking through this thing and it definitely triggered my techno-lust. I'm really interested to see how this goes. I am looking forward to seeing your test footage.

Of course, the image quality looks amazing on their website, but it always does. So I'm really curious to see when you have it out in the real world, how much does it really deliver? But it sure seems impressive. And it's not, I mean, yes, it is expensive.

But for a pair of 4K cameras, basically, if that's your use case, it's, you know. Yeah, exactly. My Nikons that I had in my studio were $2,000 each. Right. You know, so the interesting thing about this, too, is it's like the hard part, the clever part that I need to figure out is how do you bring an external light without it showing up?

That's the real, that's the next trick. Right. Yeah. I was thinking about that as well. Like, could you, because you, could you put some kind of a, like, Chinese lantern, you know, little tiny Chinese lantern on top of it. That's exactly what I was thinking, too.

Yeah. Like, okay, on top of this, because they sell cages for it, so you can get a cage, put another stick on top of it, and then put a Chinese lantern up top and be able to light the scene from just that. Right, right. Like, if you could get a Chinese lantern, like, the size of a Magic 8-Ball, you know?

Yeah. Something like that. Maybe bigger, like a cantaloupe, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That might work. All right. Well, this week on Camera Talk with Dave. Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. I mean, I'm very curious to hear what you think about it, because if you give it the thumbs up, there may be one of these in my future.

All right. Well, playing with it so far, I'm pretty impressed. Just hanging around the house, it's pretty impressive. But once I get a double interview going this week and be able to stitch this stuff together, I'll post it to our Grumpy Old Geeks Discord, so everybody can check it out when I get it up there.

So what a great time to be. I will send it to you separately, because you're not on our Discord, Jim. I know. I know. It's not. Believe me. It's not up to me. So, finally, speaking of cameras, there's just a video clip I want to send along, which is a history of Hollywood's large format film cameras.

It's a walkthrough of a collection of cameras that are in Hollywood. The American Society of Cinematographers have a clubhouse, and part of their clubhouse is a museum. And someone went in and did a walkthrough with a museum curator about some of these large format cameras, like VistaVision and, you know, Cinemascope, all those big movie theater formats.

And it's a lot of fun. If you're a film buff, because they'll go through and they'll say, oh, you know, this is a VistaVision camera, and it was used on, and they'll name five films, you know, and it's not that they used this model camera. They used this camera.

That camera. That's what's the one, you know. So, there's a lot of fun history. And when you look at the types of things that they did to get a widescreen image, and then you compare that to this Insta360, right, just how far we've come.

It's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, and if you haven't seen the footage on Long Way Home, Apple TV+, highly recommend checking it out. Because they use a couple different cameras. They use that. They use the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. They just did one during – one came out during the pandemic, and they used the Osmo Pocket 2s.

And I've got one of the Pocket 2s, and the quality was not nearly as good as the 3s. It's like – it's not – I don't think it's up to snuff for television, at least for broadcast. Everything I'm doing is 1080p, so who cares? Right. It's great.

Right, right. And that's – I mean, that's a really good point, you know, I think for our listeners, too, is that, like, it's just a solid technique and process to shoot at 4K so that you can zoom in in post. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. How decadent. I know.

It's so amazing. So you can shoot a two-shot, or you can shoot it over the shoulder, and then after the fact, zoom in on a close-up. Yep. Just, you know. And without losing anything. Right. Exactly. There's no downside to it. It's just great. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. And now that I'm stuck in Premiere all day, I'm starting to really kind of get excited about the video editing side of things. So I'm looking for – I'm looking forward to this. You have to use their software to do your exporting, because you're working in a 3D image. It does have one-shot mode, like single-lens mode.

I'm like, well, why the hell do I want single-lens mode, 360-degree camera? I'm sure that there are some use cases, but for the most part, I'm like, I want this thing for the 360-etude, for sure. Right. Yeah. I'm just thinking of somebody, like, you know, walking through the Redwood Forest with this stuck on top of their head.

Yeah. Or on their shoulder or all that sort of – all those old Disney Circle Vision movies, you know? Yeah. I shot Riot Fest one year with – I had one of the early Ricoh 360 cameras, and I had a mount that I could put on the bill of my baseball hat.

Okay. And I shot some stuff from that. And it wasn't that great, because it was at night, but I did get a couple good shots out of it and a couple good videos out of it, which kind of got me the bug. But then I just never kind of went anywhere. You have to kind of leave the house for a 360 camera to really kind of shine, you know?

You and the dogs doesn't really cut it. Do you know if this thing can be externally powered? It can. Okay. That's good. Yeah. It's got USB-C built in right on the side. All right. You can also get multiple batteries. They just upped it, so you can do long-run footage for, I think, over an hour now.

But it does get hot, from what I hear. Oh, I see. But, I mean, if you're videoing for an hour, that's kind of a lot. Yeah. Like, out in the real world. You can use it as a webcam, though, too. Oh. Which is kind of cool. Interesting. So, it is a Swiss Army knife of little pocket cameras.

It's a little thicker than I anticipated, but, you know, there's a lot in there. It's a big battery, too. Right, right. And, yeah, you figure two cameras grafted together back-to-back. Yeah, multiple microphones, the whole nine yards. There's a lot going on in there.

All right. Well, I look forward to your review. So, hopefully, me waiting on it will motivate you to do it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're in good shape here. I look forward to having Brian back next time we get together.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry you had to just deal with me today. Oh, it's all right. It's all right. No problem. This is a pleasure. The pleasure was mine, Jason. Have a great weekend, Dave. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

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