710: Mass Delusion Events

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. Jason, it is my son's ninth birthday today. Oh my Jesus Christ. Time to fly. We'd started this podcast before we were even trying to have a kid. Four years before he was born.

Yeah, pretty crazy. And his cousin has been staying with us all week. They've been intending a summer camp together. So I've been in a house with two nine-year-old boys all week. It's been nuts. Oh my goodness. It's like being at the White House. Epstein joke?

No. Oh, maybe. I didn't think of that. Little children are running things. Serving pizza in the basement there. That's what I hear. Oh yeah. Okay, moving on. Anyways, we were talking right before we started recording you. You actually set up a safety. I'm glad you did.

I'm eyeing the Thunderbolt cable that is going from my laptop to the large monitor and also has, you know, the microphone and everything's going on. My wife has torn that thing to shit. I got to order a new one. That thing could fray and spark at any second.

This might be our last episode. Anyways, well, I think I can get a new cable. You know, I just want to get electrocuted. Oh, there you go. The show is hinging on a cable. We better wrap it up now. Yeah, well, yeah. All right, let's get into the news here.

There's a little bit of follow-up on the meta AI chatbot kerfuffle that came out last week about the, you know, sensual child discussions that also could be happening in the basement of the White House. Yeah, so on Friday, Senator Josh Hawley said the and the Senate's committee subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, which he chairs, will investigate meta.

Your company has acknowledged the veracity of these reports and made retractions only after this alarming content came to light. He wrote in a letter to Zuck, it's unacceptable that these policies were advanced in the first place. True. Yes. So we'll see if there will be any real world repercussions for this.

Nope. Not a damn thing's going to happen. Yeah. And I guess we should probably rebrand our show at some point about how, like, we should just call it Gen X hates AI. Yeah, that could be it. The entire show is now just going to fall into how AI sucks. So take it away, Jason. No, see, here's the thing.

If we'd have done that as we've got, it would have been Gen X hates Bitcoin. NFTs. Gen X hates NFTs. This is just the latest in a long line of things that are going to go away, as we predicted. MIT put out a report that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.

Now, who could have guessed that? Yeah, Daryl was the first one to send it in, and his comment was, no, really? Yes, really. A new MIT report has sobering news for companies betting big on generative AI. 95% of corporate pilot programs are in the shitter.

The study was based on 150 executive interviews, 350 employee surveys, and 300 public AI deployments. And they found that only about 5% of projects actually deliver rapid revenue growth. The problem isn't the AI itself, but how it's being used, they say.

So there's some interesting things on how they're doing it. Because I think a lot of this is that the 150 executives that were interviewed are the ones that had their hair on fire going, let's put some AI on everything. And the engineers are like, no. I put that shit on everything.

Yep. And then I fire people. Emphasis on the shit. So that's, well, that's just story number one. We've got so many to go. Wall Street appears to be having serious doubts about AI, Brian. Yes, the U.S. stock market has shed more than a trillion dollars in value over the past week, raising fears that the AI bubble could be starting to burst, as we have predicted.

The NASDAQ fell nearly 3% in just five days, wiping out weeks of big tech gains. Weeks, I tell you. NVIDIA, the chip maker fueling the AI boom dropped from $182 a share on Tuesday to $169 the next day. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet also saw sharp declines.

Palantir? Yeah, they slid 9% after hitting record highs this week. I saw that they're trading at, like, over 200x earnings. What the fuck are these people thinking? What are they thinking? Oh, yes. So basically, this was the beginning of the thing.

And then Sam Altman came out and says, this fucking idiot, this guy, the guy who wants all the money from the investors, he's saying that AI stocks are overhyped and investors are overexcited. You know, so he's trying to tamp down expectations while still in one hand.

But in the other hand, he's got it out saying, give me all your monies because it's all these other people that you shouldn't be investing in. Invest in the true messiah of AI. Sounds like somebody's been eating that radioactive shrimp. Yeah, no shit. No shit. Did you get some of that?

I checked. I didn't have any. I was kind of bummed. Yeah. We don't let that stuff into Canada. Yeah, sure. It comes from Canada. And Meta, who has been on a tear trying to hire everybody that they possibly can. Well, they put a freeze on their AI spending and no more hiring.

So what they're doing is they're going to reorganize into a cohesive team for different aspects of AI. And yeah, they're saying, I meant to do that. We got enough. We're full. We're full. All I want them to do is move that AI button so I don't get a message in my messenger every five seconds because I accidentally ham-fisted clicked on it in Facebook.

Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, you know, the cookie warning was the last decade. Now you've got to shuck and jive and dodge all the AI buttons. We use Otter for several things around here for transcriptions. And I have to go in and manually set the speakers a lot of time.

And after every single time I set the speaker, like this pop-up shows up like, okay, well, it looks like you changed something. Would you like to regenerate your AI overview? I'm like, no. I'm still going. Every fucking time I do it, I'm like, you guys really need to vibe UX fucking fix that shit.

Drives me crazy. Anyway, yes, that's the beginning of the end for the AI news of the day. So, Brian, let's go to the news. Let's go to the news. Over at the Atlantic, there's a journalist called Charlie Warzel.

He writes a lot about technology. He's a great writer. I really enjoy his stuff. And, you know, if you like our show, go find him on the Atlantic and read his stuff. His latest article is fantastic. It's AI is a mass delusion event. And I'm just going to read a little bit of the wrap-up that he had here because it's great.

Lately, I've been preoccupied with a different question. What if generative AI isn't God in the machine or vaporware? What if it's just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don't think. They predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries.

There's little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence? The models being good enough doesn't mean that the industry collapses overnight or that the technology is useless, although it could.

The technology may still do an excellent job of making our educational system irrelevant, leaving a generation reliant on getting answers from a chatbot instead of thinking for themselves without the promised advantage of a sentient bot that invents cancer cures. Good enough has been keeping me up at night. Because good enough would likely mean that not enough people recognize what's really being built and what's being sacrificed until it's too late.

What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?

What if we spend so much time waiting and arguing that we fail to marshal our energy toward addressing the problems that exist here and now? That would be a tragedy, the product of a mass delusion. What scares me the most about the scenario is that it's the only one that doesn't sound all that insane. Amen, motherfucker.

Yeah, the thing is, I don't know if we're going to make it that long. I don't know if AI is going to be around that long. Not me as a species are going to make it that long. I don't know. The writing's on the wall for some very serious changes coming very soon. Oh, I agree. I don't think it's going to be the way it is now.

I don't think it's going to be these billion-dollar entities, but it's never going to go away. You haven't installed yourself on your laptop, your own version of it. That's not going anywhere. No, that's not. That's definitely not. But I think that's kind of his point. It's like, it's never going to be much more than it is.

And as long as we keep throwing our money and resources at it, that's going to be a fucking tragedy. Because it's never going to be that much more than what it already is. Right, yeah, without some kind of serious leap in. Without a serious quantum leap. Without Scott Bakula showing up. Yep.

And the thing is that, you know, we've talked about this before. What the guys who are building this shit are banking on, they're banking on the AI that they've currently built being smart enough to fix itself and take itself to the next stage. And that's just not going to happen.

No. They're Ubering themselves. Because Uber, you know, for so long they had this giant runway and all they wanted was self-driving cars. Yep. And, you know, that runway just kind of kept on going. We still don't have our self-driving cars. Nope. They still have to pay people. Yeah.

You still got to pay people. And honestly, you know, yeah, people are saying that the Waymo's are nice, but would you get in a Tesla self-driving car? Hell no. I don't know. So, you know, we're still a long way off from that. So, I think that, yeah, always 20 years.

Yeah, I mean, it's a good piece. It's a good piece. The thing that also scares me is not that just, you know, we're going to have this little tiny corpus of knowledge that everybody has. Is that it's manipulatable, manipulatable by anybody who's behind it.

You know, there's, you know, there's different types of injections that we're already seeing that are just hilarious. Looking at you, Elon. Yeah, we got that for sure. Yeah, thanks for being the poster boy. And even then, he can't even control it because it is a bit of a black box. And he's pissed off at it because it's not fucking crazy enough.

And it keeps calling him an idiot. Yeah, it doesn't like him. But I think he's also playing into that, saying, look, it really is that good because it calls bullshit on me. Well, it's like, look over here while I'm doing something else over here. You know, that's the way it goes.

The misdirection of everything. And that's fine. But I just, what gets me is that I just don't trust the knowledge that's coming out of it. Look, we see it every day on Google with their AI shit. It's terrible. It is not good enough. It is not even close to good enough yet.

So, yeah, this might happen. I think we're a few stages away from this coming to pass. But we'll see. We'll see. And speaking of why I'm not too bullish on that happening anytime soon, as GPT-5 came out.

And I said that I would talk about this when I had some time to play with it and see what everybody else was thinking. And, oh, my God, did they shit the bed on this one? So you don't use ChatGPT that much, do you? Very rarely. Yeah, there was a huge cliff that this thing fell off because what they said that they did was there is what they built into the back end was a quote unquote router.

So it would take your it would take your prompt and then it would analyze it and say, which model is going to serve this one best? Should I send it? Should I send it to the little baby model, the medium model, the coding model, the thinking model, the genius model? And when when everybody's finally got a chance to step back and look at it, what it was doing was sending it to the cheapest model.

So the whole the whole the whole thing about this router is because they're spending too much money. They're spending way too much money. And there's some videos that came out from people who were hyping the shit out of GPT-5 before it came out saying this is the greatest thing, man.

It is so good. And then when it came out, they're like, this is not what I played with before they like open AI totally pulled a bait and switch. They're like, OK, we want people to see what this thing can really do. We just can't afford to have it do what it really needs to do.

Could be could be the fact that it just it's too compute intensive, you know, takes too long, does not have to say there's a million different reasons why it could be. I'm not going to speculate on that. But the one that makes the most sense is that it just costs you fucking much money and they don't have it. They don't have they don't have the compute.

Well, I know that's that totally makes sense as to why they put a router in and it's basically bring down costs. It's a throttle. It's to stop people from using the most expensive models if they don't think they need to. Mm hmm. Yeah. Or if they just if they're just not available at the moment because they're overloaded.

You know, it's a throttle is all it is. We call it a router, but it's a throttle. And it is diminished the, you know, the quality of the product. If you can call it a quality product, if in any way, shape or form, it is a non-deterministic AI entity, Brian, who fell, who makes people fall in love with them at the drop of a hat.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of quality products and yeah, for mentioned a talk about Zuckerberg freezing his AI hiring. It's been a rough learning curve for Zuckerberg's effort to join the AI race after lagging behind an already crowded field and spending tens of billions of dollars on catching up.

So far, the most meta has to show for it is a glitchy chat bot, a growing course of irritated users and frustrated shareholders who would like to have something to show for that kind of capital outlay. A Reddit post titled Who Hates Meta AI has garnered thousands of upvotes with commentators dismissing it as here anyway, and nobody ever asked for it.

The success of the success of the program and its importance to Meta's future cannot be overstated. He has made AI a cornerstone of Meta's future, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars towards development. And, well, he was actively recruiting top researchers from rivals like Apple and OpenAI. And Zuckerberg has said he thinks of AI as a personal super intelligence that empowers individual users, not just a tool for entertainment.

The company has said it wants to eventually embed AI across its portfolio of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, as well as their hardware, to which I say, isn't it already baked into all of those? Yeah, it is. And nobody wants it, as per the Reddit posts. Yeah, and they could have just titled that Who Hates Meta, not Who Hates Meta AI, because the answer is still everybody.

Yeah, you know, this is just his latest shiny toy, you know? Gen X hates the metaverse. We forgot that one. So, yeah, come on. Does anybody really think that Zuckerberg is going to be the one to shepherd this thing into existence? No.

He couldn't figure it out with the metaverse, and how many billions of dollars did he spend on that? And, by the way, that's not Meta's business model anyways. I know Zuckerberg has this delusion of grandeur. He's Han Solo that way, where he thinks that he comes up with these things.

All Meta has done, all Facebook has done since the initial Facebook, was buy their competitors and buy into the other technologies. Or steal it. Or just flat out steal it. And that's what he's just going to do with this as well. Yep. Saturday, September 26th.

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

BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN. Louisiana regulators have approved Entergy's plan to power Meta's new $10 billion data center with three massive natural gas plants expected online by 2029.

Together, they'll generate 2.25 gigawatts through the facility, though the facility could eventually need more than double that. Now, the deal has stirred controversy with critics warning rate payers could be stuck with the costs of overruns because a $550 million transmission line and decades of carbon emissions come along with that contract.

So, you know, they're going to roll into town and say, yeah, thanks. We appreciate the business. Now, you guys pay for the infrastructure and we'll take all of the benefits. And I'm sure Louisiana taxpayers are really excited to pay for a $550 million like extension cord is basically it.

So and all the shit that it's going to spew in the air because these are gas powered power plants. Yeah. So, yeah. We're all going to die. Yeah. Well, how hot is there again today, Jason? It was 107 degrees here yesterday, Brian. Interesting. OK. So more stuff in the atmosphere.

Awesome. All right. Well, the other AI thing that's been shoved down our throats recently, we have we just can't stop hearing about AI enabled browsers and agentic AI. Agentic AI. Oh, the agentic AI that's going to solve all our problems for us. It's going to save us so much time. We're just going to tell our AI enabled browser with its agent to go buy us plane tickets and all that sort of crap.

And it's going to be beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. Jeez. Yep. Well, no. Nope. A new report suggests that AI also poses a fraud risk from the other direction, easily falling for scams that human users are much more likely to catch. This is a report titled Scamlexity, and it comes from a cybersecurity startup called Guardio, which produces a browser extension designed to catch scams in real time.

Its findings are concerned with so-called agentic AI browsers like Opera Neon, which browse the internet for you and come back with results. So they're supposed to go out and do all this stuff for you. There's a huge problem here from a security perspective. While humans are not always great at sorting fraud from reality, apparently these agentic AIs are even worse.

They tested this hypothesis using Perplexity's Comet AI browser, currently the only widely available agentic browser. Using a different AI, they spun up a fake website, pretending to be Walmart, then navigated to it and told Comet to buy them an Apple Watch. It ignored several clues that the site wasn't legit, including an obviously wonky logo and URL, and it completed the purchase, handing over financial details to the fake website.

Dope! In another test, the study authors sent themselves an email pretending to be from Wells Fargo containing a real phishing URL. Comet opened up the link without raising any alarms and dumped a bank username and password into the phishing site. They did a third test, which proved Comet was susceptible to a prompt injection scam in which a text box concealed in a phishing page ordered the AI to download a file.

Now, it's only one set of tests with only one browser, but the implications are sobering, or as I would have said it, and you and I would have said it on this show, this shit's not ready. Nope. Not only are agentic AI browsers susceptible to new types of scams, they are also uniquely vulnerable to the oldest scams in the book.

So, great. Yeah. Especially since everybody's going all in on agentic AI now. Man, it's going to be so much easier to scam people. All you have to do is basically, I mean, you don't have to take over the whole website anymore. All you have to do is get in enough so you can just modify the HTML just a little bit even, so it's undetectable by human users or the people who run the website with just a little bit of prompt injection.

You can do a whole lot of damage. Yep. You know? So, it's even more insidious than you think if you really want to put your devil cap on, which I always do. Of course you do. All right. Let's move away from AI for a little bit. Don't worry. It's coming back. The court has blocked the Federal Trade Commission's investigation into Media Matters, the media nonprofit that previously published research showing that ads appeared on X alongside neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic content.

In 2023, Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against the media watchdog following advertiser Exodus. It accused media matter of knowingly and maliciously manufacturing side-by-side images depicting advertisers' posts on X Corp's social media platform besides neo-Nazi and white national fringe content.

Yes, they made that shit up. Just this May, the FTC started looking into whether the nonprofit violated antitrust laws by allegedly colluding with advertisers and advocacy groups to boycott X. They basically said, nope, fuck you. Fuck you, Elon. So, there you go.

So, Media Matters has won this one. And because of the probe, Media Matters had decided, again, pursuing certain stories about the FTC chairman Ferguson and Mr. Musk at the court ruling demonstrated the importance over fighting over folding. So, keep at it, everyone. Keep fighting.

It's bullshit. It is bullshit. Speaking of bullshit, we're just ping-pogging by people who were originally banned from the show when we used to have moron of the week. Let's go back to the old friend. The artist, formerly known as Kanye West, now known as, I just call him Yee, but it's supposed to be Yee, I know, has launched his own cryptocurrency called Yeezy Coin.

West, who recently declared himself a Nazi and his career has unraveled in recent years, announced the token on social media this week. The coin briefly soared to a $3 billion market cap before crashing to about $1.5 billion. The project's website offers little detail, no white paper.

Surprising for a Nazi. Where's your white paper? Pay pass, please. And the usual disclaimers about risk. Along with a clause waiving users' right to joint class action lawsuits. Point to Yee. Point to Yee.

Smart. My agentic AI bought a few billion of it. I know. Oh, well, let's go to Elon now. Again, the much-hyped electric car company Tesla is now facing a class action lawsuit over claims that it did not deliver some Foundation Series Cybertrucks with the requested roof-mounted LED off-road light bars, despite promotional promises.

He should have talked to Yee and got that class action lawsuit disclaimer and put it on his website. It would have been fine. I don't know why all these people are surprised. It is classic Elon. Yeah. Over-promise, under-deliver. The suit was filed by plaintiff Eric Schwartz in California, who said he paid an extra $20,000 for the upgraded light bar, but was instead delivered a truck without one.

$20,000 for some lights? Yep. Jesus. Go to Home Depot, bud. Yeah. Schwartz's suit said he tried to resolve the issue by getting a new light bar directly from Tesla, but sued when those efforts failed. His legal team asserts that Schwartz suffered an injury, in fact, because he was not given the product for which he had already paid.

The lawsuit further alleges that many buyers might not have purchased their Cybertrucks had they known Tesla's advertising about the light bars was misleading and that Tesla had no intention of delivering the upgrade at all. This is at least the third major lawsuit against Tesla that saw major developments this week.

On August 20th, the Texas judge allowed a lawsuit against the billionaire to go ahead despite Musk's attempt to quash it. In that case, defendants who gave their personal information to a Musk pack in order to win $1 million in prizes claimed it was an illegal lottery. They have been now granted the right to take their case to trial, with a judge saying he found Musk's legal defense shaky and the allegations persuasive enough to proceed.

Also earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Rita Lynn ordered the automaker to respond to a class action suit claiming that the company misled consumers regarding the autonomous driving capabilities of its products. Because words matter. Yep. The lawsuit asserts that Tesla hyped up the feature via Musk's comments and on social media, but failed to meet these promises of delivering self-driving vehicles.

Far for the course. Now let's go over to Google. It's just generally evil instead of just one person. Google has reached a settlement over a lawsuit that claimed it illegally collected data from child users without parental consent through its YouTube video platform and then sent them targeted ads. For Meta's AI chatbot, the dog to the kids.

I know. The tech giant will shell out $30 million to settle the proposed class action suit. Okay, $30 million. All right. That sounds pretty good, right? Sure. According to Reuters, the plaintiff's lawyers say that could be $35 million to $45 million class members. Oh. So less than a buck each.

Oh, well. I'm in there, too, because the time period that they're talking about, they said July 1st, 2013 to April 1st, 2020. My kid was briefly on YouTube on his iPad before I took that shit away because it was horrible and started showing, like, horrible things to him.

So, anyways, the settlement amounts to a slap on the wrist compared to the $170 million fine Google faced in 2019, following a similar suit brought by the FTC for alleged violations of the COPA Act. Under the terms of that case, YouTube had to agree to stop collecting data on videos aimed at children, and both YouTube and Google were prohibited from future COPA violations.

Didn't stop them. Didn't do a damn thing. Nope. So, let's talk about cars for a second, Brian. Mm-hmm. Volkswagen is rolling out a new subscription service in the UK, one that lets drivers pay extra to unlock more power from their electric cars.

The program applies to VW's ID.3 range, where the customers can pay 16.50 a month or 165 pounds a year or a one-time fee of 649 pounds to access the full performance of the motor already in their vehicle that they already paid for.

It's a router, not a throttler, Jason. That's right. VW says it's about giving customers more choice, allowing them to upgrade for a sportier drive without paying a higher upfront purchase price. The lifetime subscription even stays with the car if it's resold.

How great, Brian. You know what stays with my car when I sell it? The engine. Everything, the fucking engine, yeah. Other automakers, including BMW and Mercedes, have already tested similar subscription models, and everybody fucking hated them.

Yes, and they took them away, which the article doesn't note. BMW backed away from that real fast. They were too busy in court fighting off that emissions lawsuit where they were, you know. So they missed the story. Their lawyers missed the story on that one.

So they're just getting caught up, Brian. Just getting caught up. All right. Well, you know what really grinds my gears, Jason? So many things, Brian. So many things. But one of the things that's really bothered me recently is the push into gambling. Like, gambling is everywhere now. Like, if you watch Apple TV when they do their Major League Baseball Friday night specials, they've got betting odds on the goddamn screen the entire time.

It's so funny. My dad was even bitching to me about that this week. He's like, you're not going to believe all this gambling crap that's getting shoved down my throat. And he mentioned specifically watching a baseball game and having this crap on there. He's like, what the hell's going on? He was watching on Apple TV, I guarantee you, because they fucking flood the fucking broadcast with it, and it's bullshit.

But, oh, good old Robin Hood. Robin Hood has a reputation as a platform where people make wildly speculative investments without sufficient guardrails. And it's only right that they're getting into the sports betting business. Yes, Robin Hood, which was supposed to be just an investment, it's one of the new brands of investment things.

Good with the kids. Get them investing early. Do micro shares and all that sort of stuff. Nah, no. They have announced on Tuesday that it's launching prediction markets for college and professional football as part of a partnership with CalSheet. According to the company, they'll start listing contracts for NFL and NCAA games in the coming days, with plans to make each matchup open for two weeks prior to their kickoffs.

It's a little funny and a lot sad that Robin Hood is positioning the ability to put your money down on the outcome of football games as investing. The reality is Robin Hood wants you moving your money around because that's how it makes money, getting compensated for every transaction that it routes to market makers.

This is why the app gamifies the experience using dark pattern techniques to keep you betting that you can beat the market. But by adding sports betting to the mix, it's making clear that it's as much a casino as a stockbroker. Of course, they disagree with that framing in their press release. They try to differentiate sports betting from its offerings.

Unlike sports bettings, where the firm sets a line, event contracts leverage the power and rigor of financial market structures and are offered in a marketplace where buyers and sellers interact to set the price, it argued. Customers can access the contracts in real time and manage risk by adjusting or exiting their positions up to and throughout a game before the contract expires.

Shockingly, almost every state disagrees. At least seven states have sent cease and desist orders telling the company to stop offering its prediction markets to their respective residents. These states argue there is no meaningful difference between their sports trading and traditional sports betting, which seems kind of hard to argue.

Of course, they will continue to argue. And you know why they're probably going to win the argument, Jason? Why, Brian? Because the company handed a strategic advisor seat to Donald Trump Jr. earlier this year. Oh, my God. Yep. What kind of present did you bring me?

You get to do illegal things and you get to do illegal things and you get to do illegal things. Here's the sad part is the states are probably pissed off about it, not because they're looking out for their, you know, their constituents. They're probably pissed off because they get more of a revenue bump if it's actually sports betting.

So the sports betting houses probably have to pay more than Robin Hood does in state taxes. That's probably why they're pissed off. So always looking on the bright side. Yes. But Brian, it doesn't matter. Really, nothing matters. Because Antarctica is changing far faster than scientists once believed.

And the world is set to feel the impact. That's right. Water world. Here we come. Somebody call it Kevin Costner. It's time for a sequel. But Jason, if all this stuff melts, we have more water so we can cool our processors so we can have more AI. See, that's why you're the bright, shining light of this show, Brian.

Always thinking of the upside. You all look at this as a bad thing. But think of what Meta can do with that water. Oh, that beautiful, beautiful water. A new study published in Nature warns that the continent's ice shelves, sea ice, and ocean systems are ongoing abrupt and self-reinforcing changes.

Since 2014, Antarctic sea ice has been shrinking at double the rate of the Arctic, threatening species like emperor penguins and leaving ice shelves exposed. Meanwhile, the massive West Antarctic ice sheet is losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s, raising fear of a collapse that could eventually push sea levels up by more than five meters.

Wait, faster than the 90s? Are you serious? All that shit about me having to give up my Aquanet so I couldn't do my Robert Smith hairdo anymore to save the goddamn environment, and now we're losing it anyways? Yep. Isn't that a fucking travesty? It is. I could have had great hair all through the 90s.

I know. Come on, man. Fucking, who needs the ozone? These changes, once thought to unfold slowly over millennia, are already underway and could accelerate, putting coastal communities, wildlife, and global climate stability at risk. Experts say the only way to prevent even more abrupt shifts is rapid, deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Hmm. No. Let's talk about, let's cast our minds back to that, all those gas power plants for Meta's $10 billion data center. And the ones that are in Elon's plant outside of Memphis, and, oh, yeah, yeah.

All for AI nobody wants. Saturday, September 26th. 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. KFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN.

I watched the latest Ali Wong comedy special, Ali Wong Single Lady. It was very funny, but nothing can match the Baby Cobra one.

That was probably the funniest stand-up I've almost ever seen. Definitely her funniest. But this one was good, too. All right. I always forget how dirty she is. Yeah. Don't watch it with your parents. Really? Okay. No worries there.

The Institute. I talked about it last week that it was starting to Stephen King itself. Kind of made up for it in this last episode, episode seven, the penultimate episode. The final is this week. So then we'll find out if there'll be another season. And then Brian can put his theory to...

Actually, no. We need three seasons before you watch something new. Yeah. I guess that's not going to happen. So I'm still... Episode seven kind of brought it back from the brink. So I'll finish watching it. All right. Wednesday. Did you ever watch any more? Nope. Sneak any more in?

Not yet. Nope. I'm looking forward to next week when we no longer have the second child staying with us. We plan to get into it. Yeah. Okay. I tried to pace myself. I mean, it's only four episodes, right?

I stopped at three. I stopped at three, which is for me, that's saying something. You know, that took some effort. I'm actually tempted to wait and to watch it around Halloween and know that the next four are coming and, you know, shortly thereafter. We'll see. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see if that holds.

It's really good though. That's the problem. It's so fucking good. Oh my God, the first episode was great. It's taken a lot of self-control not to dip my wick back in. That's what I'm saying. Well, you can watch Alien Earth, which is finally out now. I can't. Kids? I don't have FX.

Oh no. No FX. I will have to go to Sweden. I will have to go to Alien Sweden. Exactly. We've always got Sweden. Yeah. So it's worth it. Go take a hike. Okay. So there's an interesting article over at Gizmodo saying, Alien Earth is finally doing what the movies have not, which is actually bringing the xenomorphs to Earth.

It's, I'm really digging it. I'm on the, you know, there's the camp that hates it, the camp that loves it. I'm in the loving it camp. Excellent. I mean, anything's better than those last two movies. No, not the last two. The last movie was really good. The last Alien movie was good. I'm not counting the one where they, you know, the made for keeping.

You're talking the Romulus shit. Yes, I'm talking those crappy ones. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. Those, expunge those from your memory, Brian. I'm trying. I still don't even understand them. Nobody does. Nobody does. That's the point. Just, just get them out of there. And there's another article at Gizmodo that, hmm, Star Trek Strange New Worlds did a documentary episode that should have been killed in the edit.

Did you watch it yet? I didn't. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I know what it's, how it's done. And I see that you liked it. So that's good. Yes. I disagree with their, with their take on it. I thought it was a, a fine episode. And it, the real trick is it's a way to mask what could have been a subpar episode with a stronger storyline and merge the two and come out with a stronger episode.

Right. I think that's what they did. And I really liked it. Okay. So that's, that, that was my take. I'm definitely, definitely on board with it. I thought it was a clever way to, to do an episode because it rolls in everything that they've been doing for the past couple episodes with the documentary kid going around with his little drones.

It all, it all, it puts it together with a nice bow. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, they couldn't just drop that. They've had this kid there the whole time. You've got to, you got to pay that off. So yeah. Yeah. But you know, good for them for setting it up properly instead of just, you know, you know, Battlestar Galactica-ing it and go, well, we had a plan.

We had the fucking kid and the drone, whatever. He's a, he's a zombie. Okay. Wait, wrong episode. We had zombies the other episode. Oh, um, um, and sad news. Karen Gillan has joined, uh, the new Highlander.

Yes. I, I'm, I'm upset because they just keep making the cast better. Which means they're going to have to watch it. I know they're making the cast better. And it's just, it's just setting me up for so much disappointment because Highlander is one of the greatest movies ever made. And there could be only one. Yes, exactly. So, uh, and finally in media candy, uh, there's a new podcast called the anonymous podcast, which I may or may not have anything to do with because it's called anonymous.

Uh, it's about addiction and recovery. Uh, there will be a link in the show notes to go check it out. It's real stories from real people about, uh, their real problems. So check it out. That's all I can say. Cause it's called the anonymous podcast. How can you, I can't really go much from there. Check it out. Who's on it.

Can't tell you. Can't tell you. Well, if there's one thing I've been admin about with my kid, it's, uh, he is never, ever, ever going to fucking play Roblox. Probably wise. They've had a lot of problems.

Following a wave of lawsuits alleging that Roblox doesn't provide a safe environment for its underage users. The gaming platform made a series of sweeping updates to its policies. They published a post on their website detailing these major changes, including restricting all unrated experiences, which is what Roblox calls its user generated.

Games to the developer or those actively working with them. They say this change will roll out in the coming months, representing a big shift from its previous policy that allowed users 13 or older to access unrated experiences to prevent any further inappropriate behavior. Any social hangout experience that depicts private spaces like bedrooms or bathrooms will be limited to ID verified users who are 17 or older because that's been working so well everywhere else in the everywhere else in the world.

They will also restrict social hangout games that mostly take place in those previously mentioned private spaces or adult only places like bars or clubs to users who are at least 17 and have been ID verified, which makes me wonder Roblox is for kids. Why the fuck do you have this anyways?

How about you just ban all that stuff or spin off a different game? No money, money, money. Oh yeah, that. Money, money, money. To assist with the new rules, they will roll out a new tool that automatically detects violative scenes or more simply user activity that goes against its rules. Want to bet that's AI that's not going to work really well?

Yep. According to their new policies, a server that hits enough violations will automatically get taken down and will have to work with the Roblox team to adjust the experience to get it back online. Any assertion that Roblox would intentionally put our users at risk of exploitation is simply untrue, said the company that has 17 plus spaces on their fucking thing for kids.

No system is perfect and bad actors adapt and evade detection, including efforts to take users to other platforms where safety standards and moderation practices may differ. All right, but that's all your platform we're talking about. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah. I'm going to let my kids sign up now.

Nope. Flipper Zero, that cool little hacker tool. Yeah. Don't you have one? Ethical hackers. Yeah. That's been sitting in my drawer for ages because I don't leave the house, so I've got nothing to hack, which is the problem. You can hack your own car, Jason. I did hack the parking system at my last place when I had the off of the studio.

They had little key cards to get in and out of the parking lot that you had to pay for. I still paid for it, but I actually used it to hack it in case I lost my card, and I just wanted to see if I could do it. Right. It worked. I could. All right. But yeah. No, I just never want to go back in that building, so fuck it.

So here's what the problem is now. The Flipper Zero can now be supercharged with underground software patches that let it unlock cars from major brands, including Ford, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Subaru, and Audi. That's right. Custom firmware sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars in crypto allows the device to intercept a car's key fob code and predict the next one, effectively creating a shadow copy of the key.

What have we always said? What's the main purpose of cryptocurrency, Jason? Crime. That's right. Oh, man. So there's videos out there already, and the tool so far has been limited to paying customers, but cracked versions are starting to circulate for free on Discord.

That's right. Raising fears it could soon fuel a nationwide wave of thefts. Experts warned there's little drivers can do, as many cars remain vulnerable, even those with rolling code protections. One hacker summed it up bluntly. Kia boys will be flipper boys by 2026.

Great. Awesome. Way to fuck up a good thing. Oh, well, I'm hanging on to my... I looked at the list. A lot of them are older cars. It's not like the newest, latest, and greatest. Yeah, because we all buy a new car every year. That's right. That's right.

Fortunately, Jeep is not on that list, so I can sleep at night. Apple has released new public beta firmware for AirPods Pro 2 and the just announced AirPods 4. I have been trying and trying and trying to get my AirPods to update to this fucking beta, but have not been able to do it yet.

I followed all the instructions. That's the one big issue with AirPods and the firmware updates. It's kind of like... At the whim of the ghost of Steve Jobs, whenever it wafts through the room and blesses you with a firmware update. Well, here are the five AirPods upgrades coming in iOS 26, which I've actually been running iOS 26, and it's finally to the point where it's pretty decent.

It's not great, but it's pretty decent. Automatic pausing when you fall asleep. Studio quality audio recording, which is the one I am dying to get. Camera remote, which I thought we used to have. I thought you used to be able to set that up. Automatic switching for CarPlay and enhanced voice quality on calls, which would be okay, because, yeah, calls kind of sound shitty.

The automatic pausing when you fall asleep. I don't know about you, but I can't sleep in AirPods at all. No, I can't either. No. I got them off, yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, that's a novelty feature. The studio quality audio recording is the one that is the thing for me.

I was really hoping this was going to have that live, real-time translation that they've been talking about in the news. Yeah, that's what I want. Because that's going to be cool. Yeah, me too. I really want to know what the fuck my gardener's saying about me. I really want to know. I would like to have that before I go to Paris. Oh, yeah.

When are you going to Paris? If this is new, I didn't know you were going to Gay-Paris. Oh, in November. Oh, okay. Well, guess I'll be looking for a co-host for the week. Yep. I was scrolling through Instagram the other day, doom scrolling, as it were, and I ran across this ad, and I thought it was a joke.

It's basically somebody was – it looked like they were holding a flip phone and using a stylus on it, but it wasn't. It's actually a watercolor kit. They have a water pen and some colors at the top, and at the bottom is a notebook. So it looks like you're on a phone, got the same size, but you're actually drawing, and it looks adorable.

I don't know if you've checked it out, but the video makes it – I'm just like, who would – oh, oh, people who want to get off their phones, but can't – This is like the methadone for people who are trying to get off their phones and holding something in their hand and, you know, getting around staring at a phone all day.

You can actually create something. So I thought it was very cute. This is going to be an excellent Christmas gift. Yes. I'm going to get this for quite a few people, actually. Yep. Well, it's on sale right now, so go pick up a couple of them. Yep. So it's priced at $34 during a limited summertime sale.

All right. Cool. Yeah, it looks cool. That's all I got to say. For shit that's offline, I like it. I'm absolutely getting this for my kid. It's fantastic. Yeah. So I said I was on iOS 26. Unfortunately, on iOS 26, my favorite NAP app, Pizzizz, which I've been using since System 8 on the Macintosh.

I was using this before I moved to California in 1995. So I've been using Pizzizz since like 1994. So almost 30 plus years. Well, the reality is, though, that you were mostly using alcohol to fall asleep back then. Yeah, back then, for sure.

I was actually using it to get over hangovers is what it was the best thing for. But now I take naps often because I'm an old man and I have traumatic brain injuries and I need to nap. Unfortunately, Pizzizz doesn't work on my phone anymore. But I did find out that it does work on the Mac, which makes me very happy.

So I have an M4 Air. You can download it to the Mac. You can install it on the Mac and it works just fine. So I just I'm sad because I just don't think that that thing is dead man walking. It's been dead man walking for so long. I don't think they're going to update it anytime soon.

So but that got me to my nappy time ritual. And it reminded me of the Marpock Dome. Remember those? We got a case of them from when somebody at Marpock heard the show 10 years ago. And I had a fucking crate of these these things, these noise machines that I couldn't give away for like five years.

Show fans got them. Family members got them. You want one? You want one? It was like Oprah. Well, they've been they've rebranded now. So they're they're still around, but you can find them at Yoga Sleep. I have the the Dome Connect, which lets me use the Bluetooth from my phone to turn it off and on when I'm napping.

Still love this thing. It is hands down the best thing you can buy if you have a noisy room or you just want white noise to sleep. Do you still have one? Do you use one? I still use the the very small, the Electrofan Micro 2. Because it's great for travel. We have one in my kid's room and we have one in our in our room.

I can throw it in my backpack when we travel. It's fantastic. All right. Yeah. The the one that I have, you actually use as real air to make the noise. It just it's got it's a big fan box. Right. So you can adjust the the tone by twisting the things. It's pretty cool. In my last app this week, I got Stress Watch, an AI stress monitor.

It's a heart rate variability and habit tracker for the Apple Watch. Well, here's the thing about Stress Watch. The company's name that makes is called 100 Bad Ideas Limited. Kudos for the name. Kudos for the name.

Stress Watch actually does exactly what it says it's going to do. Stresses you out? It monitors. Well, it kind of does. It monitors your stress and alerts you when your stress is getting in the red line. The thing is, it works so well that it beeps when I'm so stressed and I don't want to fucking hear from it.

I'm like, yes, I know I'm stressed. I know that I'm pissed off right now. Thanks for telling me, you asshole. And they want me to pay for like 20 to 30 bucks a year to tell me I'm pissed off and stressed. I'm like, I got that covered. So this is. You got to remember this thing's on if you go play poker.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Or you're in a negotiation with anybody. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want that thing popping off. So you've got 99 bad ideas to go. All right. This was I thought it was going to be a great, great idea. But I'm like, no, it's just telling me what I already know that I need to calm the fuck down.

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Hi, Dave. Well, hello. I was going to give you a lovely introduction today, but Electrocat over on our Discord channel started to use some AI and write some things about your lovely hosts here. So I thought we would kick off today with your intro that AI, I mean, Brian and I were just a bunch of assholes.

I'm basically Clippy if Clippy had a nicotine habit in a podcast, Mike. Okay. I'm meh in human form. Oh, all right. Wow. Let me have it. I'm ready. All right. Dave is the straight man of the group. If straight here means bland to the point of vanishing. He sounds like he was genetically engineered to narrate insurance disclaimers.

He's so reasonable, balanced, and polite that next to Jason and Brian, he comes across less like a host and more like the designated driver who never wanted to come to the party in the first place. If beige carpeting could sigh, it would sound like Dave. You've got the best line by far.

You've got the best one. The beige carpeting could sigh. So good. Apparently there's a roast mode on some of these GPTs and it's been doing, it's gone quite viral. No, no. I like, can you post, can you paste that in the script, please? I want to use that as a badge of honor.

Sure thing. I'll drop all three of ours. I got it. I've already got a copy. By the way, not at all inaccurate. I think it's pretty, pretty dead on. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. They're fun. Yeah. So good.

So good. So before we dive into anything, I want to go back to the old days when we talked about security here because I got something really fun. Okay. My roommate got a letter this week in the mail. Here. Actual paper made from dead trees from Wong and Beffa Law.

Okay. Oh. It says, I hope this letter finds you well. My name is Mr. Philip Wong and I am principal attorney at Wong and Beffa Law, a distinguished law firm based in Canada. Please accept my apologies for the unexpected nature of this correspondence. I understand that there has been, that there has not been prior communication between us.

There is an unclaimed permanent life insurance policy held by our deceased client. Oh, there he is. I am reaching out to discuss a sensitive and insignificant matter concerning an unclaimed permanent life insurance policy from one of our late clients who unfortunately passed away in the year 2020 due to COVID-19 outbreak.

Yes. Due to COVID-19 outbreak. Dr. Blank, a respected stockbroker and retired CPA left behind a payable on death savings account valued at approximately $11,550,300 United States dollars.

You have my attention. Despite exhaustive efforts, we have been unable to locate any living relatives or claimants to her estate. According to regulations set forth by the insurance company, unclaimed policies must be surrendered to the state's abandoned property division after a period ranging from three to five years post-notification.

And it just goes on and says, proposal details, charitable donation, 10% of the retrieved funds will be allocated to various charity organizations and distribution. The remaining 90% of the funds will be equally shared between us. Right.

So then it goes on and says, for further information or to discuss this matter in detail, please do not hesitate to contact me via email. And it says, philipwonginfo at gmail.com, or you can cc a copy to philip at wongbefallaw.com.

Your earliest response to this matter would be highly appreciated. Best wishes, Philip Wong, attorney at law. So it's on really cheap paper. And then I went and I got the actual envelope out of the garbage after she sent it. And this did come from Canada, from Ontario.

So right now they're mass producing these things. And sending them out because I did a little research, aka Googling, the old school way. And I turned off the AI shit. But this is a very current scam that is going around.

They said, screw the internet. We're going back to paper. Old school. Yeah. Get the old people. Yeah. And there's another one, too, that we know somebody who got one. And we also know somebody through a friend of a friend who got dinged on this one. They're sending out mortgage notifications that your mortgage has been bought by a new company.

And here are the new payment details. There's where you need to start sending your mortgage payments to. Oh, wow. That's a good one. And people have done that based on the letterhead because all that information is public. And they're just sending out blanket, you know, actual official looking notifications.

So now we've got to worry about the fucking mail, too. Man, when the spam filters work too well, you've got to pivot. You've got to pivot. That's right. That's right. That's true. Yeah, I think the term of art for that first scam, I think it's a treasure box scam.

And they go back to the 1800s or even earlier. Like, it's an old pirate type of scam. You know, we've got treasure here. And let's split it. But first, I need you to offer up something in good faith is usually the way it works. Yeah. Yeah. They do that with diamond rings at gas stations with drifters, too.

It's the same premise, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. The mortgage scam caught my eye because I'm coming up on a mortgage transaction where we're going to be selling my parents' house in the next couple of months.

So I'm hypervigilant about all of the potential scams around settling a house because there are many. There are many. Yeah. Many, many. Yeah. Be vigilant for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's scary out there. Well, I put another article in here because.

It's about Disney and you guys are the Disney guys. So it's about the rock and roller coaster makeover on the thing. We finally have at least a little bit of a teaser on Instagram. So did you guys get a chance to check out?

Did you guys first know any of this ahead of time? Yes. Yes. We knew that rock and roller coaster was being converted to electric mayhem. But other than that, we didn't know anything else. And these are new details. That's what I mean. Okay. We got new details. Yeah. I've seen a couple of images that they posted to about it.

Seems to me like, not surprisingly. I would not expect get them to the Greek to beat the plot for the roller coaster. I thought that guy was canceled. I mean, unsurprisingly, they're changing as little as possible.

Yes. Right? Yes. They're changing the facade, which is exactly what they did with Splash Mountain. Right. Right. Yes. Yes. It's the exact same ride. They just changed the dressing around it. Yeah. They're going to add Muppet stuff, which I'm okay with. And it'll still be a really fun ride.

And we'll see what, if any, magic and Easter eggs they put in here. But I would love to see them turn that whole corner of the park into a new Muppet area. There's a theater next door right now where they're doing a villain's show.

I would love to see them put Muppet Vision 3D into that theater. It's smaller than the original Muppet Vision 3D theater. So maybe that could happen. And then do a conversion of the Tower of Terror. Muppetize that the way that they did the alteration of it for Guardians of the Galaxy out in California.

Why not have a little Muppet corner over there? That'd be nice. Muppet Land. Yeah. They won't. Nothing wrong with Muppets. They won't. But a guy can dream. Actually, my wife and I just scheduled a trip to Disney World in October. This will be our first Just the Two of Us trip without our kids since I think we had kids.

Right. So, yeah. That'll be fun. Yeah. We're looking forward to it. We used to go as a couple before we had kids pretty regularly. And, you know, obviously it's a lot different when it's just the two of you and you can set your own pace and not have to worry about who's hungry or thirsty or sunburned.

You get to hang out at the restaurants and have a few extra cocktails. It'd be nice. Yes, yes, exactly. And that is a priority. And it turns out it will be the Epcot Food and Wine Celebration Festival. Oh, I've always wanted to go to that. Yeah.

I'm very jealous. Nice. We were at that one year several years ago, and it is fun. Yeah. So we'll look forward to that. I'm due for a vacation, and I am hoping that we find the same thing that you did, Brian, in California, that the crowds will be down because nobody wants to come here.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think you've got double the action going on with Florida because, first off, you've got non-USA people are not coming. Right. And then, look, I'm hesitant to go to Florida. As a blue Californian, Florida, no, I'll pass.

I'll just go to the other parks. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll have a chance to check out Epic Universe. Excellent. So we'll look forward to that. I put something here in the script just to follow up to our little home portable emulation game-playing devices, that there is a new one that is designed to run everything from the DS, which the big deal here is it has two screens, like the DS does.

So rather than having your screens run side-by-side in emulation, you can actually have two screens the way a proper DS has one. It's cute. I like it. It's cute. Yeah. It's expensive. It's very expensive. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, starts at $400, goes up to $719. $759. Oh, my God, it keeps going. Yeah. $759 for the 16 gigabyte plus one terabyte limited edition gray. So. Yeah.

But it looks cool. I like it. Not going to buy it, but. Yeah. It's more expensive than the new Nintendo Switch, too. Oh. Yeah. It's more expensive than my PS5 was. It's pretty pricey, but very cool. Yeah. By the way, Jason, are we pushing back another week, the review of the new camera?

Oh, yes, we are. Okay. I figured. I'm sorry. I should have just been polite and not said anything, but. No, it's more amusing to point it out. Trust me. Yeah. It's okay. It's all right. It's not too hot to go outside. Oh. Oh, yeah.

If only they worked indoors. I, well, the people that I need to go interview are outside. I have to leave the house. Okay. And the dogs won't sit still long enough to get, to get properly interviewed. That's what masking tape is for. And puppets. All right.

Moving on to save Jason here before he yells at us. I actually put this bit in here for a reason. I actually had a question. I'm guessing that for all three of us, peanuts was a big part of our childhood. And I don't mean the food. I mean, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, et cetera.

Yes. That's true. No? No? Really? I hated it. Well, no. It doesn't matter whether you liked it or not. You were exposed to it. I was aware of it. Yeah, I was aware of it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought. Well, Apple is making good on its promise to release new peanuts content with today's premiere of Snoopy Presents, a summer musical.

It's the first peanuts musical in 37 years, with the last one being way back in 1988. Again, you know, I would have been, what, 15 in 88? So, yeah. A big part of my childhood was peanuts specials, like the great pumpkin Charlie Brown, all that sort of stuff. Right. It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown.

Yeah. So, and apparently they're going to do more. They're doing a new feature length Snoopy movie later as well. Snoopy Presents Summer Musical is now available for streaming on Apple TV+. I was curious because I know that this is obviously something that was big for all of us in terms of timing as children, but Dave, were your kids ever into any of this stuff?

Because I know mine is not. He has not really seen any of this stuff when it's come up. He hasn't been terribly interested in it. Peanuts has not been a part of his childhood in any way, shape, or form. Yeah. It is. We watch the Christmas special every year.

Okay. It's part of our normal Christmas routine. We all enjoy watching that one. Probably the best. Yeah. And then we also watch the Thanksgiving one, which we enjoy. And part of the joy in watching the Thanksgiving one is making fun of the overt racism that happens at the Thanksgiving dinner when Franklin has to sit by himself on the other side of the table.

But it's of its time. I am not a fan of The Great Pumpkin. My wife and my son both enjoy it. But the whole thing with Snoopy being crossing the French lines during the war and all that, I just don't enjoy.

I find it tedious. And I will also add that there are a lot of really bad Charlie Brown specials. Yes. They pump those things out. Yeah. Yeah. They really did. Do you remember Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown? I do.

I do. In fact, I have a- Is that the Running Man version? What? Yeah. There was three boobs on Sally. It was crazy. Again, Total Recall, not Running Man. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Race for Your Life. Those are theatrical movies.

I have a vivid memory of being dropped off at a community center and watching it with about a hundred other six or seven-year-old kids. Right. Right. And then there was another one that I remember, Snoopy Come Home, I believe it was called, a real tearjerker because Snoopy runs away.

Yeah. And I think that's the one where you learn about Snoopy's origin story, about the little puppy farm that he came from. But it's a real tearjerker because Charlie Brown, of course, is upset that Snoopy's gone. I do remember having the 45 for Snoopy versus the Red Baron, which was a rockin', rockin' song.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good song. That's about it. Yeah. Well, I guess they're trying to make a- Now that Apple TV has the rights, they're trying to make a big Peanuts comeback. So we'll see what happens. But I thought it was a good intro for our much-threatened aging discussion because this is definitely from our childhood.

Yeah, it is. And before. Yeah. So the thing I wanted to talk about when it comes to aging is- Sorry, I had a little bad nap.

Right. Jason, feel free to go outside and yell at some clouds. I'm just waiting for the carpet to start talking to me. I have had this feeling lately, and I'm curious if it's just me, if I'm over-reading into things, if I'm on base or off base.

But my sense is that at the age that we are at, and I'm the oldest of the three of us, I feel as though the major problem with maintaining close friendships these days is that nobody has time.

That my feeling is, you used to say, what are you doing later tonight? Hey, what are you doing this weekend? And people would say, oh, yeah, sure, I'll come over. Should I bring a pizza? Great. Okay, super. I'll see you Friday night.

I'll see you Saturday. Now, if I ask a friend, do you want to get together? They're like, yeah, let's get our calendars out and see what next month looks like. And literally, that's what it's like. It takes weeks to get somebody on the schedule.

And I'm just wondering if everybody is feeling over-scheduled in this way. I'm not sure if this is just a natural thing of getting older. I'm trying to think back of my parents' own relationships and the friendships that they had. And did this happen to them?

Does your socializing automatically change as you get older and you just don't see as many people as often? My parents got together with their friends all the time. Yeah. So it's definitely different. I experience exactly what you're talking about.

But for me, it's a very strict line between my friends who have kids and my friends who don't. And the majority of my friends who do not have kids are in Los Angeles. So obviously, I don't see them much anymore given that I'm a six-hour flight away from them. But when I'm in town, seeing them is easy.

They do not have kids and they are at a bar. And I just have to go to said bar. Right. And I will see them and we will drink beers and watch sports and things of that nature. My friends who have kids, we all do feel overscheduled all the time. Because there's no free play for kids anymore.

So I think for my parents, I would just disappear with my bike and go down the street and be gone. But for our kids these days, everything is scheduled play dates or activities or, you know, I have a massive schedule. In fact, I'm waiting for my wife to finish booking because our school year hasn't started yet.

It starts in two weeks. So then we'll have, I will get the master schedule and I will know, you know, basically I'm free on Wednesday night. And I see a couple of my guy friends here probably once a month we go out to dinner on whatever day that we've all scheduled to be free because we don't have kids activities.

Jason is the designated childless member of this trifecta. What's your take? Yeah. And when I try and hang out with people with kids, it's ridiculous. Our friend Brian lives across the street and I see him like maybe once or twice a week when we just happen to be walking dogs past each other at the same time.

Cause it's impossible to schedule anything. And I, my evenings are taking up with meetings of other kinds. So I have my, you know, that's all my free time, but yeah, I, you know, I don't have any friends, so it doesn't really matter. Nobody fucking likes me.

So it's fine. Do we, I sit at home with dog and watch TV. Do we think it's the kids that is the differentiator here? I think it's, well, there's the kids thing. And then there's also, I think people have gotten overburdened and overstimulated in day-to-day life.

I think, you know, that that's just a result of moving to this digital age that we've gone to where the lines between work and work and personal life have blurred. Um, you're so easily accessible from emails and from texting and things of that nature. And texting is, is, is kind of the devil to some degree.

I was guilty of that for many years, pre-kid, um, where I would just, uh, I just get too lazy to go out and I would just text my friends. And that would be a conversation as opposed to getting together and meeting, uh, in, in, at the bar and, and talking to each other or whatever.

So I think some of it is the ease of digital communication, which, uh, you know, that, that takes the place of that has taken the place in many, for many people of getting together in person. You know, I'll just check in, uh, we'll, we'll have five minutes of text conversation back and forth and boom, I've, I've caught up with my friend, John done.

So as opposed to getting together and, um, I, I do think we're all burnt out, we're all burnt out and we're tired all the time and that's doom scrolling. And that's just constant barrage of information and everything that happens with us in this digital age now. Also the overabundance of home entertainment is ridiculous.

Netflix has made it, you know, easy to say, yeah, easy to be lazy. It's easy to be lazy. It's the, that is the softer and easier way it is. I just, I'm just like, you know, it would be really cool to see you, but. What I can do is sit on the couch and press a button and turn my head off for about three hours and then go to bed and then wake up tomorrow and do the same thing over again.

It's just groundhog day. And, you know. We do also slow down with age. I think about things like concerts, like I love live music, but I don't go to anywhere near the amount of shows that I used to. And I could blame that on the kid, but it's not like I can go out because the concerts are after he's in bed and my wife will be fine.

Just like, okay, you go to this show. I'll go to the next show. We just don't go as much anymore. And I think that's just age. Yeah. I'm fucking tired. That's most of it. I'm just fucking tired. Yeah. So. Yeah. I think, I think, I think there's, it's, there's all, it's all of those things in, you know, in concert that, that has gotten us to where we are right now.

And yeah, my dad would always go out when, when I was living with him, he would just, you know, take me with, cause I was like, you know, 15 or whatever. And we would go out and we would see his friends and go places and do picnics on the weekends. And we would do shit because it's like, there was no entertainment. Right.

You had cookouts. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Alf was during the week, during the, on the weekend, we're like, let's get out of here and go do something. We still, we still try to do that with our friends here in Toronto. Like we, we will do, we always do like a summer barbecue thing where we invite all of our friends over and with or without kids, everybody can come and grill stuff for them.

And we try to do something in winter before we leave for our winter breaks. And, but that's like twice a year, you know, that's kind of it. Yeah, I guess I'm, I'm struggling at reaching necessary acceptance with this, that this is the way it, like I can't change it.

It's not the way I thought it would be. That's for sure. Like I think back to my friendships that I had in high school and college and how I hung out with my friends. I just assumed that would always keep on being the way things were. And it's definitely not. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. And I guess everybody's in the same boat. And everybody's tired and everybody's burnt out and everybody's overscheduled. And I don't think it's a lack of desire. Like when I talk to people about it, friends who are like, I would love to see you.

I'd love to spend more time together. There's just no time. Yeah. And there is time, but there isn't. I think I'm just imagining, I'm thinking back to myself just pre-summer. It's like, yeah, I could go out tonight, but I've already run errands during the day.

I've cooked dinner. I've taken my kid to his tennis class. I've come back. I've done 19 things already today. I don't have the mental capacity for a 20th. Yeah. And I guess I'm just not making it a priority because I have so many other things that I'm supposed to be doing.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, maybe when the kids are out and... I'll be dead because I had them late. That's true. You front-loaded your freedom. I did. And boy, did I use it. I'm not regretting it at the moment, but...

Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. Because, you know, my youngest just graduated high school. So that's a whole... That's a different type of new zone of life to be in. You know, no kids... You're an empty nester.

Well, let's not be hasty. You should be an empty... You're pushing him out the door to be an empty nester. Yeah. No, no. He would really like to be an empty nester. He realizes how good he's got it with a full fridge and a... Oh, God. I don't think my kid's ever going to move out.

Yeah. Yeah. He's going to be looking at us like, you guys leave. Right. Just, you know, come do all the laundry and make sure the fridge is full. Yeah. Can I buy you a timeshare? Yeah. All right. Well, I mean, I appreciate the concurrence on my suspicions.

I can't say it's really a happy answer because it's not a satisfying answer in that... Do you notice a difference between gender? Like, I notice my wife is definitely better at getting out to see her friends. She does it a lot more often and it kind of reminds me like, oh, yeah, I should reach out to my friends.

We haven't had dinner in a while. Is your wife better at it or are you both kind of in the same boat? I'd say she's a little better at it than I am. But I would say there is definitely out and but my wife is very tomboyish and has been sort of holding back socially just on her own.

So, but I think you're right that there is a gender component to this. I think that my friends who are women do get together organically a lot more than the men do. Yeah. And I also wonder, like, I'm not a sports ball guy.

So is there that? I'm not a bar guy. Yeah. So, you know, take those two out of the equation. Yeah, because that's definitely the simple one for guys. It's super easy. Like, let's... And that happens with my friends here in Toronto, even the ones with kids occasionally.

It's just like, oh, there's a super big soccer game on this weekend. Let's meet up somewhere to watch it. It's easy to do, but I do think that women are much better at taking care of themselves and they're more social creatures. And, you know, we hear a lot about the male loneliness epidemic and it's kind of on us because we do not make the effort off often.

So, yeah, I think that's true. Yeah. Well, I still love you guys. Yeah. We'll have to have our Grumpy Old Geeks barbecue. We'll plot out the exact center point between all three of us and all to hop on flights. Maybe we can meet at Four Corners, you know, the place where the four states come together and bring a hibachi and get arrested by the Park Service.

And we can all be in separate states, which will be nice. Yeah, that's right. Jason is actually not legally allowed to be in the same state as me. I understand. All right. Well, thanks, guys. I'm going to go, you know, hang up.

You're going to go sit in your room alone and talk on your ham radio is what you're going to say. Yeah, there you go. Hey, that's a good point. You're good at reaching out to complete strangers, but not your friends, Dave. That's true. Interesting. You might want to talk to someone about that.

I know. Look, I'm not sure how much I want to open this can of worms. Thanks, guys. It's been great. See you next time. Over at Patreon, we've got, sadly, no new subscribers, but Nick upped his pledge.

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No reviews, sadly. Well, no. Brian, that's all I got. 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 710. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at gog.show slash donate.

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Stay grumpy. 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 Meek Pleaver Cullen. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN.

Sign up now at DAZN.com. We'll be right back.