713: Ourovibeos

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Start your free trial at Shopify.com. Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo, discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Anything going on? Yeah, not much. Okay. We'll ignore the old geopolitical dystopia we're sliding into and just focus on the tech one. Please, let's do that.

Pretty please with sugar on top. All right. Let's do that. It's a minefield and I like both my legs. Yeah, apparently podcasters that dunk on people can get shot these days. Yep, they can. So let's just move right along. Let's dunk on some rich people. Tesla's grip on the U.S. electric vehicle market just slipped to its weakest point in nearly eight years.

According to data from Cox Automotive, say that 10 times fast, shared with Reuters, Tesla accounted for just 38% of EV sales in August. The first time its share has dropped below 40% since 2017. Uh-oh. It's the end of days. It's the end of days, Brian.

Uh-huh. Please? One can only hope. We're pretty close. I don't know. Everywhere I look, I see Teslas with new dealer plates. And I'm like, what the? Still, still. Little Nazi mobiles.

Little Nazi mobiles. But I guess they just really want that $7,500 credit before it goes away. End of September. They want to be able to use Grok in their car, Jason. Yes, they do. I was thinking last night, just how, you know, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is one of the greatest books ever written.

And Elon can just ruin everything. He just ruins everything with Grok. He really does. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Pot. Life. Everything. Okay. Moving on. What do you got? Well, he's been unseated as the world's richest person, so we got that going for us.

For a little while. Oracle's stock is up more than 42% on Wednesday, thanks to an earnings call on Tuesday that left investors stunned, I tell you. The company missed earnings and revenue estimates, but still they were stunned. Because that makes no sense.

But the forward-looking guidance alone was apparently good enough to get investors to rally around it. The bulk of that reaction had to do with the revenue that AI computing demand was expected expected to bring to Oracle's cloud infrastructure service. Yes, all the money is in, you know, it's a bubble when all the money is in the tools and not the product.

So, shares skyrocketed in response. Oracle's stock is now on pace to have its largest single-session surge since the dot-com boom. Another worrying sign that everybody seems happy about, but I go, huh, that's not good. With the current surge in shares, Ellison has increased his wealth by more than $100 billion, thanks to the roughly 1.16 billion shares he owns.

This rise grabbed him the title of richest person on Earth from the former title holder, Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As of Tuesday, Ellison's current total fortune was $295 billion, having increased by $100 billion in just the past year. Today's initial increase has catapulted him to a staggering $389 billion, surpassing Elon Musk's whopping $384 billion fortune.

Well, let's not tax the micro-rich. No, let's not. Why would we do that? Why? Why? Would they have to innovate? Yeah, yeah. Don't even talk to me about innovation after the Apple event this week. Jesus. Hey. What a shit show that was. But, hey. So, the Oracle thing.

Yeah, Oracle shares spiked after reports that OpenAI signed one of the largest cloud contracts ever. According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI will spend $300 billion on Oracle compute power over five years. That's $60 billion a year, starting in 2027. I don't know about you, but if you've looked at the numbers, OpenAI does not have $60 billion a year to spend on computers.

They just don't. But they will, because innovation. Innovation, innovation. That's right. Yeah. AI. Innovate. Yep. So, a little bit more about that OpenAI thing. We've been talking about how Microsoft, if they were smart, they would just sit back and let OpenAI fall to pieces because they need Microsoft's blessing to do this deal where they become a for-profit company.

Yes. And we're just like, oh, well, Satya Nadelic should just sit there and go, I'll just take the pieces when it's done. But for some reason, some reason, Microsoft has acquiesced to their request. And now they have said that they're reworking the partnership and it should be able to go through now.

Okay. So, they've signed a non-binding agreement to update their deal while they work toward a final contract. So, Microsoft has put in billions of dollars into OpenAI and they get half the money from ChatGPT and stuff. So, that means that OpenAI needs to make $120 billion a year.

To be able to pay those bills. To be able to pay for the Oracle bills. Just the Oracle bills. Because, I mean, the case in point here is that, you know, OpenAI is locked into using Azure for their cloud computing. So, this is going to open them up to buy, to use more things like Oracle. So, all of these things have to go together.

And I think what everybody in the industry is banking on is OpenAI going public. Because that's the only way that they're going to be able to keep that shit show going for just a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer. That's right.

That's the only way they're going to get that kind of money. And if you have stock in any of the – if you just have stock, seriously, liquidate it and put it under your pillow because you're going to need it soon. Because that's just going to be – it's going to be worth toilet paper at some point.

I don't know when. It just keeps going to the moon, Brian. But there's going to be one day when people wake up and they go, I should have sold yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. Or you just hold on to it forever. In the news.

Well, Anthropic is going to pay a record-breaking $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit, a piracy lawsuit brought by the authors. We've been talking about this for quite some time. The settlement is the largest ever payout for a copyright case in the United States. The AI company behind the clawed chatbot reached a settlement in the case last week, but terms of the agreement weren't disclosed at the time.

They did come out. Now, the New York Times has reported that 50,000 or 500,000 authors involved in the case will get – wait for it – a life-changing $3,000 per work. It's better than $2. I want my $2. I want my $2 is basically what they're getting.

But, you know, it's a landmark case, and it's good as far as we're concerned because we should be paying attention to copyright. I still want this to go to trial. I want it to go as well. Well, hold on a second. So, the settlement is the first of its kind in the AI era, Justin A. Nelson, the lawyer representing the author, said in a statement.

This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery. It will provide meaningful compensation for each class worth $3,000 and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners. We do like the precedent. I'm not thrilled about what it did, and I do want it to go to trial as well.

Anyways, so this happened, and, of course, it does set that precedent. So, all these other lawsuits are going to be looking pretty good. It should be noted that Anthropic, of course, has agreed to delete everything that was downloaded illegally and said that it did not use any pirated works to build AI technologies that were publicly released.

Bullshit. What did you use them for? Your little private ones? Yeah. Bullshit. Somebody got a really big Kindle over there? The company has not admitted any wrongdoing. So, this all came out, and everybody was like, well, I guess this is good. But, apparently, the judge from the trial, Judge William Alsup, has said, actually, you know what?

No. He has rejected the record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement that Anthropic has agreed to pay for the privacy lawsuit. According to Bloomberg Law, the federal judge is concerned that the class lawyers struck a deal that will be forced down the throats of the authors. Maybe they don't want just $3,000.

Alsup reportedly felt misled by the deal and said it was nowhere close to complete. In his order, he said he was disappointed that counsel have left important questions to be answered in the future, which is why Jason and I want the trial. Yes. Including the list of works involved in the case, the list of authors, the process of notifying members of the class, and the claim form class members can get used to pay as part of that settlement.

He explained that class members get the shaft in a lot of class auctions once the monetary settlement has been established and the lawyers stop caring. It's true. Yeah, those lawyers stop $1.5 billion, and they're like, payday! Yes. So he's instructed the lawyers they must give class members a very good notice about the settlement and design a claim form that gives them the choice to opt in or out.

They also have to ensure that Anthropic cannot be sued for the same issue in the future. He also wrote in his order that the works list, class members list, and the claim form all have to be examined and approved by the court by October 10th before he grants the settlement his preliminary approval. So that seems more procedural than anything that you and I want, which is we want to see the bodies.

We want to see what's buried. Yeah, I was hoping he was going to reject it on, you know, ethics, but it just means, it just, yeah, I know. I know. It just sounds like they didn't fill out their TP reports, TPS reports.

The TPS forms are due. But this is, of course, opened up a floodgate. Two authors have now filed a lawsuit against Apple accusing the company of infringing on their copyright by using their books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. Wait, wait, wait. Apple has an artificial intelligence model? I was about to say, this is almost embarrassing.

I'm not sure I would file this lawsuit. Yeah. Your books must suck because their AI is shit. Yeah. The plaintiffs, Grady Hendricks and Jennifer Roberson, claim that Apple used a data set of pirated, copyrighted books that included their works for AI training. They said in their complaint that AppleBot, the company's scraper, can reach shadow libraries.

Oh, this is the same shit, same shit, same shit, same shit. All of them are doing it. Same shit, same shit, same shit. Yep. But somebody has come to the rescue, Jason. Who, Brian? Well, with web publishers in crisis, a new open standard lets them set the ground rules for AI scrapers.

The new really simple licensing standard, RSL, creates terms that participants expect AI companies to abide by. We had them already. They're called laws. Well, copyright laws, and then we had robots.txt, which was not legally binding.

Is it supposed to be legally binding? But Jason, the RSL will add to robots.txt. That's how they're going to do it. Oh, that is such a great idea. Who came up with this genius, genius plan, Brian? I don't fucking know. Okay.

But as the article points out, although enforcement is an open question, it can't hurt that some heavy hitters back it. Yeah, it can. Among others, the list includes Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and People, Inc. RSL adds licensing terms to the robots.txt protocol, the simple file that provides instructions for web crawlers that all these crawlers fucking ignore.

Supported licensing options include free, attribution, subscription, pay per crawl, and pay per inference. The latter means AI companies only pay publishers when their content is used to generate a response. You mean that black box that they tell us that they can't really know what exactly is going on when things spit things out?

So now we're going to track the black boxes? Yeah. That splits by adding some lines to our robots.txt file? Yeah. It's unclear whether AI companies will honor the standard. No, it's very clear.

Well, they've been known to simply ignore robots.txt instructions. As for technical enforcement, the RSL standard can't block bots on its own. For that, the group is partnering with the cloud company Fastly, which can act as a sort of gatekeep. This is such fucking bullshit. That nobody's ever heard of.

Have you ever heard of Fastly? No. Cloudflare. If you want to meet, hang out with Cloudflare. Fuck Fastly. Who the fuck are these guys? Anyways, points for, I guess, for somebody trying to come up with a solution, but this is dead on arrival.

It's not even on arrival. It's just dead. So I looked at the RSL Collective is co-founded and led by Eckhart Wolther, one of the co-creators of RSS, and Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com and IAC Publishing. So, yeah.

Two guys. Two guys came up with this and said, hey, let's try it. We're asking.com for some money, please. Yeah, no shit. Well, Google has stirred controversy with a recent court filing that appears to acknowledge the, quote, rapid decline, end quote, of the open web, which, yeah, we've been saying it's coming since the day, the day ChatGPT launched, we've been saying it's coming.

The company now says critics cherry-picked that phrase, insisting it was only talking about open web advertising, not the web itself. Still, the distinction may not matter much. Google admits advertisers are moving money to connected TV, retail, media, and in-app ads, as well display ads on traditional websites are flat or shrinking.

That's right. Which, I have another article that I haven't put in here yet, but yeah, Google is starting to put ads with their AI-generated responses now, basically cutting everybody out of the loop. So, yeah. So, Google has basically killed the golden goose at this point.

Right. That's basically what it has turned into now. Google, who protected the web, because that's where it made all of its money, has now said, ah, fuck it. We're just going to squeeze whatever last bit of juice we can get out of this thing, which just makes me think, I'm going to miss the web, right?

I mean, I missed Twitter when it went away, but I'm really going to miss the web. I mean, that's been most of my life, and yours too. Yeah, absolutely. And it's on life support. It is on life support. I'm going back to Gopher. I didn't like Gopher. I didn't really care for it.

Well, just in case you were wondering how well Google's AI results were going, here's a Mandela Effect event that you probably thought was real. The Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, the agency run by Elon Musk to cut fraud, waste, and abuse from federal operations, at least according to Google, never actually existed.

What? This is what Google's AI overview response will tell you if you search certain content related to Doge's operations. The Blue Sky user, who goes by Ayukunu, first pointed out this mistake in Google's comprehension skills, finding that querying the search engine for information and the number of deaths caused by Doge's cutting of essential programs resulted in a response that claims the agency is fictional and from a political satire or conspiracy theory.

Gizmodo was able to recreate these results. According to Google, there is no actual government department named Doge, and the term is used in critical or satirical context to refer to policies or actions taken by the Trump administration. The results expand on this, stating, It is crucial to understand that there is no actual government entity named Doge, and the discussions around it is part of a political discourse or satire, not a factual government action.

What the fuck? Fuck. So, the Google has killed search, killed the web, replaced it with its Google AI responses, stuck ads on them to cut everybody out, and all the shit that they return is fucking false.

Yeah, that kind of sums it up. Google didn't offer any explanation when contacted, though a spokesperson for the company did tell Gizmodo, this AI overview is clearly incorrect, something I say basically every fucking day. Okay, Google's not correct, chat GPT's not correct, Claude's not correct.

But we're throwing billions upon billions upon billions of dollars at this. All I could think of this week was the word obscene, because these are obscene amounts of money. Imagine what you could do with that much money if you actually did it, like, put it towards the right places.

We could actually be living in a utopia. No. Well, I mean, I'm with Google on shutting the internet down. That would help. I'm going to miss it, though. Now we live in a bro-topia. You miss 1990s internet, Jason. I do.

I seriously do. Yes. I miss the hand-curated Yahoo! You know? Come on. Absolutely. When they started unleashing robots on the web is when everything went to shit. Pre-social media internet is what I miss.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of robots on the internet and scraping shit, at least 15 million YouTube videos have been quietly scraped by AI companies to train generative tools, according to a new investigation by The Atlantic. The videos, pulled from over 2 million channels, included nearly a million how-to tutorials, many without creator consent.

I would say all without creator consent. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, NVIDIA, and ByteDance have used these massive data sets, often in violation of YouTube's terms of service. The practice raises major legal questions around copyright and fair use, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here we are again.

Yes. More. More lawsuits coming. Yep. And for creators, it could mean competing directly with AI-generated videos built from their own work, hoisted by their own petard. Someday you, too, may get your $3,000. Yeah. You know what's funny is I had scrolled ahead a little bit, and when you said speaking about scraping, I was reading the next story, and I was like, oh, they scraped somebody up out of a tunnel accident from The Boring Company?

That, you know, that would have been a good segue, but yeah. No, The Boring Company, one of their workers went splat. So, yeah, they're still drilling holes in Nevada, so they're trying to make the tunnel go to the airport now, which, sure, I guess, but I was just, I put this in because I was just amazed that they were still in business.

I thought they'd been shut down so many times that they kind of gave up, but I guess, you know... I mean, how long have they spent in Vegas, and they've got nothing to show for it yet? They've been... Well, they got that, they got one tunnel that doesn't have autonomous vehicles driving, it has, you know, people-driven cars, I guess, but...

A single car at a time, yeah. Here's the thing, they still have, they have to stay in business, because where are the Morlocks going to live? That's true. You know? They have to see how many holes it takes to fill the stratosphere. I love to turn... Anyways, it was a weak Beatles joke.

Yeah, yeah. I didn't get it, because, you know, Beatles, but... Yeah, you don't like the Beatles. No. But we've got the dynamic duo back in action, Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg. Form of douche, form of bag. Yes, Zuckerberg and Luckey are teaming up again, this time not for gamers, but for soldiers.

Bloomberg reports the U.S. Army has tapped Luckey's defense startup Enduril. How do you say that? You're the Lord of the Rings fan. I think, well, the problem is I read it. This is why I thought the Grand Prix was the Grand Pricks when I was a kid. That's true. Okay.

Well, him and Meta, alongside Rivet Industries, are going to build prototypes for mixed reality combat goggles, because Microsoft shit the bed on that one. Yeah. So, yeah. Great. Awesome. We're going to... Yeah. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Click to skip... Like, the soldiers are going to be coming up on the, you know, the town and getting ready to attack... This is what we should arm our soldiers for as we send them into fucking Memphis. Yeah, that's true. That's true. You know what they're going to do? When they're rolling into Chicago, they're going to be getting ads for, like, you know, go to Geno's East.

You know, hey, you're... Portillo's. Yeah, your Humvee's coming up on a Portillo's in two exits. Would you like to pre-order? Click to pre-order now. Yeah. Great. Well, lawmakers are turning up the heat on Meta over child safety. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing Tuesday after whistleblowers alleged the company buried troubling research about kids using its virtual reality platforms.

Again, and again, and again, and again, and again, it's the same shit, same shit, same shit. We can actually just put up the same goddamn podcast every fucking week. You know, it's funny because I do have another article that I didn't put in here about people who are having to do content moderation without getting, you know, the proper psychiatric evaluations done.

We've never talked about that before. We've never talked about that before. Nothing's changed. Shocking. Absolutely nothing has changed. But what's changed is the client. This time it's Google's AI. This is the client. Before it was Facebook. Now it's Google AI. But yeah.

So yeah, according to the Washington Post, who I still don't, I guess they do a journalism every now and again. Thousands of pages of documents reveal researchers flagged risks ranging from child predators in VR apps to grooming and horizon worlds. One researcher even said that they were told to delete evidence that a boy under 10 had been propositioned by adults online.

Meta denies wrongdoing, insisting it has conducted nearly 180 studies on youth safety and introduced new parental controls and protections. Bullshit. Yeah. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Yeah. It's all bullshit. None of it's true. None of it. God, I'm angry this week.

Well, here we go. Mark Zuckerberg is under fire after a hot mic caught him apologizing to the Cheeto-in-Chief at the White House dinner. When Trump pressed Zuckerberg on how much Meta would spend, Zuckerberg stumbled blurting out at least $600 billion through 2028.

Moments later, thinking the microphones were off, he privately told Trump, I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with. Fucking cowards. Everybody at that dinner is a fucking coward. Exactly. At the dinner, other executives also praised Trump with Sam Altman calling him pro-business and Sundar Pichai thanking him after Google's antitrust victory.

The moment underscores Silicon Valley's increasingly deferential stance towards the president. No, the stance is on your fucking knees, blowing him, you assholes. I'm sorry. Fuck. They don't give a fuck about anything. No, they don't. No, they don't. Fuck them. Here's a good one.

AI hype may be lifting Wall Street, but on Main Street, it's losing steam. A new U.S. Census Bureau survey of over a million firms shows AI use among large companies plunged from nearly 14% in June to under 12% in August. 2% is not a plunge.

I'm sorry. But it is the sharpest drop since late 2023. Smaller firms nudged upward, but most mid-sized businesses stayed flat or fell. Despite years of promises, 95% of companies that adopted AI report no new revenue. Read me that.

No new revenue. The stumble comes as OpenAI's long-awaited GPT-5 disappointed, and firms once betting on automation are now rehiring people. Yes, people. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And a new report shows that developers using AI coding assistants are creating far more security problems than those who don't. What? Yeah. Go shocker. Nobody saw that coming. Security firm Apiro analyzed code from thousands of developers and found AI-assisted programmers produce 10 times, 10 times more vulnerabilities, even as they wrote code three to four times faster.

While AI reduces... Nine times. Nine times. While AI reduces typos and logic errors, it also fuels severe issues like privilege escalation up 322% and architectural flaws, which rose 153%.

With major firms mandating AI use, experts warned the tech is fixing minor mistakes, but creating major time bombs that leave systems exposed. I heard somebody the other day that had the fucking audacity to say, hey, if you're vibe coding a new app from scratch, there's zero technical debt.

Bullshit. You're creating technical debt at a fucking... And just at a scale that we've never seen before. And... First off, there's also always technical debt. Always. You have technical debt the second you have finished your code. End of story.

They're compromises. You make compromises along the way. Period. It's, you know, that's the way it works. But, Brian, this is where you and I come in and we need to get back in the game. No. Absolutely not. I'm just going to go start a fucking farm.

Freelance developers and even entire companies are now cashing in on fixing vibe-coded software. That's right. The trend started as a LinkedIn meme, but it's now a real business. On Fiverr, developers like Hamid Siddick advertise themselves as vibe-code fixers, cleaning up clunky user interfaces, broken branding, and buggy features.

He says he regularly works 15 to 20 clients who rushed out AI-assisted projects that don't hold up. Established firms like Oolam Labs are leaning into the trend, too, with the tagline, we clean up after vibe-coding. Literally. Dedicated site, vibe-code-fixers.com, has drawn nearly 300 developers offering cleanup services, though only a few dozen projects have been matched so far.

Give it time, man. We should have done that. Brian, we could have been the platform. We could have been the platform. We could have vibe-coded the platform to fix the fucking vibe-coding. There's still time, I guess. There's still time. The vibe-or-boros.

Yeah, exactly. The consensus is vibe-coding is here to stay, but so is the human workforce needed to fix the mess it leaves behind. This is like creating a Y2K problem, like, daily, you know? Pretty much, yeah. It's ridiculous. But I hate to say it.

We fucking told you so. Mm-hmm.

Media candy. Brian, I did something this week that I thought was very strange for me. Mm-hmm. I watched the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. Yeah. You should call your doctor.

I need them to check your meds. I'm not sure what happened. You were making fun of me for watching this shit, like, when we started this podcast, like, fucking 35 years ago is what it feels like these days. And I've even given up because, like, first off, why is it still called MTV?

And why do they have the audacity to call it the Video Music Awards? They haven't shown a video in 20 years. If anything, it needs to be the YouTube Video Music Awards at this point. But you watched it? I watched it. Did you know anybody that was on it? Yes, I did. I'm going to get to that in a second.

Here's the reason I watched it. Sabrina Carpenter, who makes the most forgettable music I've ever heard in my life. My friend Deshaun was a dancer for her. And Deshaun and Honey Balenciaga, or I think Honey changed her name. But Deshaun and Honey were dancers on the show behind her, and they'd been practicing.

So we watched it to watch them dance because, you know, we love Deshaun. And that was great. I could not – I can't remember the song at all. It was garbage. It was a piece of shit song. But they were great. Like Latte or something like that? No, she's not. I have no fucking – she comes out of a sewer. I mean, this is how it starts.

Her climbing out of the sewer to do a bit about New York. And I'm just like, okay, you should have stayed in the sewer with your music. But, you know, my friends got to dance. That's all good. Who I thought stole the show was fucking Ricky Martin. Ricky Martin came out and did a performance that was phenomenal.

They didn't have all of the crap that all of the other acts needed to, like, you know, boost them up. He came out with a band and, like, four dancers and performed his ass off, had a great time, looks great. He's only, like – I think he's, like, four months younger than me.

And I'm just like, God, I got to get to the gym. But you could tell he was having a fantastic time. He was smiling. He was – he got some kind of, like, super award or something. So he did, like, a medley of his songs. And we watched it twice. It was so good. It was just – it was fun. It was the way – it's the way entertainers used to entertain without the gimmicks.

So that was great. So there was one performance that I liked. The rest of them were just, like, forgettable. Yeah. Buster Rhymes did some kind of performance that was terrible. It was horrible. But I did find this article that says the median age of MTV viewers is 56.

Yeah, we're the only people to remember what MTV was. That's why, yeah. And those people are just stuck in a loop of watching Ridiculous all day now. So that's what they got. All right. Well, good for you. I do not watch any award shows anymore. Yeah. I was really – I was kind of bummed I had to.

And the Emmys are this weekend. So if you don't want to watch another award show, you can skip that one too. Yep. Oh, man. Wednesday. I finished Wednesday this week. How far are you along with Wednesday? Two episodes to go. It's very good. Okay. It's very good. I believe it stuck the landing and I can't wait for season three in six years.

Yeah, it's going to be awesome. When Wednesday Addams is 42. When they're all 56. Yeah, when they're all 56 and watching MTV. I did – yeah, I can't wait for the next round. Hopefully they're already started on it, but – That would be nice. I don't know.

Jenna Ortega has got such a fucking big star right now. They got to walk her in. I think they did because they had a plan for seven seasons of that thing. Oh, God. That would be great as long as they keep the quality up. As long as – yeah, as long as the quality stays. So we'll see. AKA Charlie Sheen dropped on Wednesday.

The two-parter, hour and a half each. It was phenomenal. We finished watching it yesterday. We watched it over two days and – I can't stand the guy. I can't do it anymore. Oh, well, I mean, if you watch it, you might like him. I didn't – I was ambivalent, you know, after the whole tiger blood winning shit.

But, you know, I grew up with Charlie Sheen and I wanted to see how he's doing. I mean, he's eight years sober now. So, I mean, there's a lot of parallels with me and watching this. So, I was probably a lot more interested than you were for reasons. And the funny thing about it is I'm like, if you lived in Hollywood during this time, there's nothing shocking in here.

I mean, I'm sure, you know, mid-America was clutching their pearls the whole time. I'm just like, that's a Wednesday or a Thursday. Yeah, it wasn't just the stars doing that. The personal assistants were doing that shit. Everybody was doing that shit. Everyone. The folks that worked at McDonald's on Sunset were doing that shit.

Yeah. There was literally nothing in here that was just – the only thing is he had a platform. Yeah. Everybody else was doing the same shit. So, whatever. But I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was a phenomenal story of a redemption story, as it were. All right.

Well, good for him. I'm happy. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero.

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

Sign up now at DAZN.com. Star Trek Strange New World season finale aired last night. I was curious to see if you had watched it. I stayed up later than normal to be able to get that done before the show.

What did you think? Well, I was pissed off it was the finale because I thought we got 12. I miscounted. I was shocked. I was shook when I saw the headlines come through about the finale on my newsreader. And I'm like, ah, fuck. I better watch that before the show because Brian's going to watch it.

Shit. I thought it was 110% mediocre. I actually really have a different opinion from you. I thought it was, for the most part, absolutely fantastic. And if that would have been the show finale, I would have been okay with that.

I thought that they treated Pike well. They gave him, I mean, they obviously recycled the Picard story. If he would have started playing a fucking flute, I would have like thrown something at the TV. But, you know, they recycled that whole Picard thing from Star Trek Next Generation. But I thought that giving him that and then the whole like they, you know, started the spark between Kirk and Spock.

Yeah, that was great. That was fantastic. Yeah. I was like, this is perfect. You could just end the show. I mean, I'm happy we're going to get more, but I thought it was nice. I thought it was very well done. I thought it was rushed. I thought the whole thing with – Well, you know why they rushed it?

Because they put 18 comedies into the nine-episode seasons. Yeah. You know what? If they would have just skipped episode two, the Q episode, and just wiped that from existence, that would be okay and just made this nine and ten? Well, Q could do that. Q could do that. You know what? Next season, it might happen because we change timelines every fucking week around here.

So who knows? The Berenstain Bears might be back. So we just don't know. But yeah, I really wish – like the whole revelation on who she was and what was happening was really overrushed. That needed more time to bake.

Yeah, I agree with you there. And again, I feel they did too many comedies this season. That's definitely my feeling about it. And they could have drawn out the real storylines a bit more. But overall, I do think that they really did a very nice job of it. It was pretty good. And luckily, I don't think we're waiting six years to get the next season because they've already wrapped filming.

So we'll see. Oh, for four? Okay, good. Yeah. So we'll see. You know, who knows what's going on because everything is changing over there at Paramount and soon-to-be Warner Brothers. You know, now that daddy's got, you know, so much extra money, he's like, here, kids, go buy everything.

Unfortunately, if that deal goes through, we're going to get the Pike cooking show for five episodes next season. Yeah, that's true. Because they'll also have Food Network. Oh, man. I would be okay with that. Actually, I'd be okay with it, too. See, it was foreshadowing when he threw his apron at the very end of the episode.

Yeah, you know, I could see the entire cast on Guy's Grocery Games. That would be fun. Fuck the music episodes. We're just doing cooking episodes from now on. But I hope that merger does. I mean, they're just talking about it now, but I hope that nobody lets that go through.

Even Elizabeth Warren was just like, that's the shittiest deal I've ever heard of, you know? Yeah. It was like when Disney and Fox merged, they went from 15 movies a year separately to five movies a year together. It's like it just kills competition, kills just everything.

I'm just tired of all these mega mergers. Yeah, all of it. So I seriously hope this is bland shit. Yeah, I'm sure he's just going to give, you know, the administration a bag of money to make it go through because that's how life is nowadays. But fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

Yeah. Well, I got some AI stories that have bled into media candy because there's no avoiding it. Amazon Music has just launched new AI-powered weekly playlists based on the preferences and moods of listeners, which just means it scrapes what you've already listened to and extrapolates further.

It doesn't apply modern technology to gauge actual moods of users. For that, you need your aura ring. I'm sure there's something coming through with that. God. So this will be just as shit as all the other curated mixes from every other streaming service. But they'll have snappy names like Empowerment Enthems and Melodic Flex.

This shit is for people that don't like music. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. If you don't like music, you can listen to this crap. Well, you know what? I think Amazon Music is for people that don't like music because anybody that likes music actually uses a different service because Amazon Music is the worst of the bunch.

That's true. And Deezer, unbelievably still out there. Deezer, this is from their press release. You can tell because here we go. Deezer, comma, the global music experiences platform. Okay. What the fuck does that mean? It means it's a goddamn streaming service that nobody pays attention to.

But they say they are receiving over 30,000 fully AI-generated tracks every single day, accounting for more than 28% of total daily delivery of music. That's how bad AI has gotten into the music. And it's not good.

So they've been using an AI detection tool since the beginning of the year, enabling the company to track a steady increase of fully synthetic content on the platform. In June, they became the first and so far only music streaming platform to explicitly tag AI-generated music, which makes me want to go check out Deezer.

Following a massive increase during the year, AI Music now makes up a significant part of the daily track delivery to music streaming, and we want to lead the way in minimizing any negative impact for artists and fans alike, said Alexis Lantermer, CEO Deezer. Note that he doesn't say, we're not going to put it up there. We're just going to tag it.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, they remove fully AI-generated content from algorithmic recommendations, so it won't be in their playlists. We don't include it in editorial playlists. The way we ensure the impact on the royalty pool remains minimal while providing a transparent user experience. And most importantly, we continue to fight fraudulent activity, which is the main driver behind uploading fully AI-generated content.

In January, Deezer reported that roughly 10% of all content delivered to the platform was AI-generated. This number increased to 18% in April and has now reached 28%. Awesome. Great. And you want to know something that might come from the combined efforts of Paramount and Warner Brothers when we're talking about bland shit that nobody wants?

Hit me. Taika Waititi is developing a potentially disastrous Fyre Fest musical. Okay. Yes. Just months after Billy McFarlane sold the Fyre Fest brand rights on eBay for a mere $245,000, the infamous event is being developed as a musical titled Fyre Fest.

The musical showcasing his awesome comedic brain. Yeah. That title. The project comes from the husband-wife production team of Watiti and Rita Ora. In a press release, the musical is described as not just a Greek-sized tragedy of one man's con, it's a satirical indictment of an entire generation.

If you stopped it right there, that also describes all of his directing efforts. Not all. Some. Most. It's about as wrong as a bad idea can go. Also applies. Yeah. Thor 2. God.

He's also currently attached to direct a new live-action adaptation of Judge Dredd. Something else that he wants. Oh, Dredd was perfect. Just leave Dredd alone. Leave Dredd alone. I, like, he has made one or two movies that I've actually enjoyed.

They tend to be off the beaten path, but most of his big-budget stuff is awful. Yeah. Awful. Yep. I still stand by The Hunt for the Wilder People is his best movie. All right. I like that one about the soccer team that nobody's ever seen that I reviewed on here a long time ago.

Yeah. Yeah. His old... It's all the... It's all the deep cuts. You gotta go to the Titans deep cuts. The indie stuff that he does that is actually pretty good. Yeah. That pirate movie, or series that he did on Max, was terrible. That was god-awful.

Yeah, that was really not good. That's really not good. Hence, it's canceled. Yeah. What's not canceled, fucking mind-bogglingly, to this day, I still don't understand it, Foundation is coming back for season four. What the fuck?

I'm going to talk about this a bit next week. Okay. Because guess who watched season three? Oh, you did. This guy. But did you watch season two as well? No, I completely skipped season two. Didn't bother.

Went back and watched season three, and I have to say, and I will expand on this further next week, I can't remember who on our Discord said, if you just watched this as a science fiction show and removed any reference to Foundation whatsoever, it's not bad.

Season three, I feel that way about. Oh, fuck. Oh, God. Who are you? I'm watching MTV, the amazing, you're watching Foundation. Okay, timeline has shifted. Absolutely. I swear to God, though, I felt dirty doing it, and I felt like I was cheating on you somehow.

You were. You absolutely were. I only did it in the dark of night, under a blanket. With a flashlight. With a flashlight. And I still screamed and yelled, please just name them other characters. Don't pretend. Okay.

All right. I'll wait for the full recap next week, then. Fucker. Well, Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav that we all love to hate. He says HBO Max is way underpriced. And you're way overpaid, you fucker.

Exactly. Compared to what Americans once paid for TV a decade ago, he noted, people shelled out around $55 a month. I don't know about you, David Zaslav, but I'm shelling out about $155 a month for fucking TV right now. Yeah. He assumes you only need HBO.

Yeah. Sorry. You know, maybe if you didn't screw up the Food Network so bad that I would be happy about it. But they've pulled everything I liked off the Food Network, like all the classic stuff that I was in the middle of watching that they pulled, asshole. So, yeah.

Go fuck yourself, David Zaslav. That's all I got to say about you. I can't wait until he gets fired. Oh, I'm going to have a party. I think I think Hollywood's going to have a party. It's going to be it's going to be like the Lakers winning the the the championship for the first time. The Highlander reboot still in the news.

More more people are joining that that I'm unfortunately probably going to have to watch it. So Chinese martial artist Max Zhang and Jimon Hounzu. Hounzu. I can never pronounce that guy's name, but he was he's a phenomenal actor.

The first time you probably saw him was in Gladiator, but he's been around forever. And people are saying, don't waste him. I'm like, well, if they got him for the one role that I think they got him for, they're going to waste him because that role is very small. The only black guy in Highlander. Go watch it again.

You'll see what I'm talking about. In some fun news, my friend Missy Pyle finally, after months of sitting on her hand, got her podcast out to the world. The Missy and Brooke show. So if you want some hilarity from a couple girls in Hollywood, some actresses, one comedian, they're both pretty damn funny.

But just a friend of mine who finally got her show out. The Missy and Brooke show. Go check it out. Very good. And a big thanks to Vinny over in Ireland because he sent me a, he said, he sent us a email about somebody from Limerick who was doing some crazy shit with the traders in Ireland.

But then I'm like, wait a minute, you buried the lead here. There's a traders Ireland. Turty tree in, tree leave. Immediately headed over to the Swedens and downloaded the first six episodes. So you know what I'm doing on Saturday. My God, you've gone around the world with this show.

Dude, I've seen every English language traders. There is every season, every minute of it. You get your AirPods three and you can listen to them not in the English language as well. Arriving September 19th. So I'll let you know. And more on that in the next segment.

But thanks, Vinny, for the, for the link. I am, we thank you greatly. Thank you greatly. It doesn't look as good as some of the other ones, but some of the low budget ones were pretty good. Traders New Zealand was phenomenal. It was the lowest budget out of the bunch, but I'm happy.

Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports, most dangerous strikers collide. Bare knuckle. Purple'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. Ups and doodads.

Well, Mac OS Tahoe 26 and iOS 26 are about to drop, Brian. I've been using both now for a little over a month at this point. Right. You're going to hate it. You're absolutely going to hate it. Great. I have, I have two, my two laptops are on 26 on Tahoe and my two actual production machines are on 18 and they're going to stay that way for a very long time because they work.

I haven't had any, any serious bugs with 26 or with Tahoe, but it's just, it's ugly. This liquid glass thing is ugly and clunky and does weird shit. It's just. You can turn it off though, right? Well, you can change it.

You can move stuff around. You can, there's things that you can, you can modify, but just the general vibe. I hate to fucking use the word vibe. It's been vibe coded. Yeah. The vibe of 26 is just left to center. You'll see what I mean soon enough because it's coming.

It's coming. In iOS 26, there are problems. It's gotten faster. It's gotten a lot faster. It works better. Not all my apps crash anymore, just some, but there are old apps like the Susie Cakes app. I need that to work so I can get my points so I can get my birthday free Susie Cake.

But fortunately they've, they've worked around that at Susie Cakes in the old days. But anyway, I digress. If you're in LA, go to Susie Cakes, best cake and cupcakes you'll ever have. Every single birthday for my kid. Oh, it's the best. While we were there. It's the best. Yeah. Susie Cakes. Oh, I love you. But there's just some weirdness with it.

It takes a little getting used to, but it's like every major iOS update, you know, I just say fucking bring back skewmorphic, man. Let's go. Give me the, give me the wood panel again. I miss that. Yeah. But you mentioned the, I know.

And you mentioned the AirPods Pro 3s. Yep. The Babelfish. Yep. Yeah. Apple's new AirPods live translation is rolling out, but with a catch. The feature works on AirPods Pro 2, Pro 3 and AirPods 4, translating English, French, German, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

But only if you're paired with an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Here's the snag. It won't work if your Apple account is registered in the EU and you're physically in the EU thanks to Apple intelligence being blocked over regulatory concerns. That means an American in Spain can use it, but a German in France cannot.

Apple hasn't said when the restriction will be lifted. They should just say that, well, Apple intelligence isn't a thing. So let's just go back to the way things were. That's true. I guess I'm going to have to order a new AirPods Pro then because I've got the original. I'm on AirPods Pro 1. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You need it to. So it won't work for me. And I'm going to Paris later this year, so that would be helpful. Oh, definitely. Definitely. Parley vu? Yeah. There you go. Well, Vimeo is set to get a new owner, Bending Spoons, the parent of Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, and fellow video streaming platform, Brightcove, all of which have been driven into the ground, plans to take the company into private ownership in an all cash $1.38 billion deal.

Share stockholders will receive $7.85 per share, quite a bit more than the $4.82 Vimeo closed out on Tuesday. Of course, it jumped after the takeover. Directors unanimously approved the takeover because they're getting money out of something they never thought they would. Exactly.

Ka-ching. Yes. So Vimeo has not been doing much. I mean, they've pivoted back and forth over the years, but they've always been more than ninth fiddle to YouTube. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but as a utility company for video, they're fantastic, you know?

Yeah. You know, in the movie industry, in the TV video industry, people use Vimeo all day long. But yeah, the public, not so much. And I saw this in the news and I realized I will have to wait for a U.S. or Canadian release on this and get it for my kid for Christmas because it would be fun.

Japanese toy maker Takara Tomi is releasing a Pokeball virtual pet toy so you can fulfill your dreams of carrying your favorite Pokemon around with you everywhere. Right now, it's a Japan-only release, but the product page does show it has an English language option in the menu. Pre-owners are open, though currently sold out on Amazon Japan, and it will ship on October 11th, according to Essential Japan.

It's going to cost around 51 U.S. dollars, but who knows what tariffs factored in? That's going to be fun. Per the listing, there are seven partner Pokemon you can care for. I'm not going to read them because I don't know how to say any of them. I can get my son in to do that. Pikachu! If you touch the device, they react.

Pikachu! And there are 150 other Pokemon to interact with. Anyways, it looks pretty cool, and my kid's super into this stuff, so Christmas is writing itself. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave.

With Dave Bittner. Hi, Dave Bittner. How are you today? Well, hello. Have I graduated to being a man who needs no introduction? These intros are getting shorter and shorter every week. Next week is going to be, hey, fucker. Hey. You're the one that said, hey, I'm in school with, hi, Dave, so I've been trimming them down because it did take three minutes at one point, and we lost most of the segment.

It's all good. It's all good. I'm fine. It's good. It's good. Good to be back. Yeah. All right. Excellent. Been a card a week, huh? Oh, my God. We'll get to that. Yeah. Okay. Let's start a little bit light. I watched a movie with my son this week that I'm sure both of you have opinions on because we were certainly of an age when it came out that I think it probably means a good deal to all of us, but so I want to get your thoughts on it.

Have you watched recently, and what are your thoughts on The Princess Bride? It is probably in my top ten favorite movies, I think. It's probably on that list. I remember going to see it in the movie theater when it came out, and the reason I went to see it is that my boss, where I was working, I was working at this retail nursery, like with plants and things, and he said, you've got to go see this movie called The Princess Bride.

He said, I know it's called The Princess Bride, but it's got everything. You just trust me. Go see it. And I got one of my buddies to go see it, and we went, and we enjoyed it very much. And the other thing I remember is as the credits were rolling, my friend leaned over, and he said, you know, the music really sounded like that Dire Straits guy.

Yep. And sure enough, a little while later, Mark Knopfler's name scrolled by. So, yeah, I mean, thumbs up. To me, Princess Bride is everything a movie should be. No notes. Actually, not true.

One note. But I'll get to that in a second. Jason, what do you think? It's a classic. I mean, it is in my top ten right next to Pulp Fiction, which is a strange pairing, but I think they're both perfect movies. That's a hell of a double feature. It is.

Yeah. Is there any crossover? Are there any actors who are in both of those films? I don't think so. No. No. No, I saw it in the theater, too, though, with my dad, because my dad was a Rob Reiner fan, so he's like, we got to go see this. So it was important that we saw it right away, and we did.

And it was, even back then, it was a perfect movie that didn't, I didn't know what the hell it was when I walked into it, and I walked out going, that was a great movie. And to this day, I probably know all the dialogue backwards and forwards. You do, trust me, because I have not seen this movie in probably two decades, and it just all instantly flooded back to me watching it with my son, who absolutely loved it, which is great.

Definitely, I would say Rob Reiner's second best movie, only beaten by the almighty Spinal Tap. But yeah, it's an absolute classic. I mean, you will watch it, and just, it doesn't matter how long it's been since you've watched it, you will, beat for beat, be able to say every single line. It's phenomenal.

Yeah. It's phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah, this day's number one, because I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I didn't really actually like Spinal Tap that much, so. Okay. Well, you know, you're a contrarian by nature. I am, I know. I hate the Beatles, and Spinal Tap didn't really, I didn't get it, so, yeah.

I say that on the day Spinal Tap 2 comes out great. Oh, I know, and I can't wait. So, my only. So, what's your note, Dave? Well, getting back to the soundtrack, I think, so, Princess Bride was a low-budget movie, and Mark Knopfler wrote the soundtrack for it, and it was all done with synthesizers.

Yeah. It is not recorded with an orchestra, and the only thing that I think could improve Princess Bride is if they went back and re-recorded the soundtrack with an orchestra. Now, there are, you can go to events with local symphony orchestras where they will play the soundtrack with a real orchestra, and that is on my list, because I think that would be perfection.

But there are times when it really sounds like 1980s synthesizers, because it is. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. That's my only nitpick for that. Yeah, and I have to say, just because you pointed it out, it is very low-budget. Don't expect much from the effects.

They're horrible, if you've, by chance, never seen this movie, but it doesn't matter. It actually works that the effects are horrible, and it's low-budget. It makes it a better movie. I would hate to see, if somebody tried to George Lucas this thing and go back and redo all the effects, it would destroy half the impact of the movie.

Right. Yeah. There's something, it's part of its charm. Mm-hmm. That it looks, parts of it looked like it was in a studio on a soundstage. And I guess, I guess part of being along for the ride with this movie is your suspension of disbelief.

Yeah. Right? That's part of the fun of it. Yeah. And yeah. I will say, the drawback of watching it again now, after so many years, was like, holy shit, I'm old. Yeah.

Because you look at, you know, you look at Robin Wright, now Robin Wright Penn, you know, you look at, some people are gone. Mandy Patinkin, like, you know, wow. He's not gone, he's just old. No, he's just old. You know, even the kid, what's his face from Wonder Years, I can't even remember his name.

You know, he's our age. Fred Savage. He's our age now. So, you know. Right. It's a little crazy for that, but man, it's just such a great movie. Have either of you read the book? I have read the book. It's very good. Yeah, it is. But I prefer the movie, to be honest.

It's one of the few times I would say that. I think you're right. I think you're right. I think the movie is better. It is a good book, but the movie's better. Yeah. All right, let's get to horrible shit. I saw this over at 404 Media, and it's called It's Just a Mess.

23 people explain how tariffs have suddenly ruined their hobby. And it talks about the end of the de minimis rule and how it's really wreaking havoc on things that you wouldn't really expect. Knitter, please. Yeah. Seriously, knitting. I had no idea how much knitting and cosplay were being affected by this, as well as retro gaming and fencing for some reason.

But I wanted to see if you guys have been affected by this yet, anything. Because I know, Dave, you're a hobby, man. You've got all your ham radio stuff and other predilections. So I didn't know if there was anything that you ordered from across the sea that has really hit home yet.

And you too, Brian, even though you're in Canada, you've already had this problem, but... Right. It's probably easier to get things in Canada because they're sending it all to you all instead of us now. Yeah. It's easier to get things from Europe here. That's for sure. Because that's really ramped up because Canada's made a decision like, screw you guys down there.

Right. We're going to make better deals with Europe. So it's easy to get stuff from Europe. Unfortunately, I would say, you know, if you go to the global superstore that is Amazon, it's very difficult to get products because everything comes from the US. And it's all, I got hit with tariffs on stuff that I bought for my wife for her birthday.

I paid double the price for some stuff that I was getting. So yeah, I can see that. So, but it's got to be horrible in the US. It's just got to be horrible. I haven't seen anything yet, but I don't know that there's anything that I've ordered directly from China since all this went into effect.

And you're right. I'm expecting it to hit me in my ham radio hobby because that's mostly where that happens. So I'll order some weird antenna or cable or connector or something like that. And it'll come in a funny, oddly labeled package from China, right?

Yeah, yeah. With all the weird stickers on it and yeah. Right. It says it contains something that is completely not what it contains. You know how often that happens. But yeah, I don't know. I think, look, this is what we're in for. And it's probably going to get worse before it gets better.

I've definitely noticed just in general. Do you think it's going to get better? Yeah, it's so cute. That's true. Oh, man. Okay. But everything is more expensive.

I've definitely seen that. I'm noticing how much, how many, what I'm noticing is how many things that used to be under $10 are over $10 now. Right. Eggs. Yeah. I was at the, I was at the CVS last, or earlier this week.

I was getting my COVID shot and my flu shot and, uh, which. Get them while you can. Exactly. Exactly. That was my plan. Uh, and so far we can get them here in Maryland. So I'm, and the, the fine gentleman who gave me my shots said that people had been coming in from all over from, even from out of state to get their shots.

Uh, because at that point I think Pennsylvania was not allowing or just didn't have availability. Um, anyway, I, as I was waiting to go in to get my shot, I was sort of standing there looking at some of the things on the shelves. And it just struck me that things that if you'd asked me, what does something like this cost that would be, I'd say, Oh, under $10, $8, $7.

They're like $11.50 now and $12.00 and so that creeping, um, inflation is, is definitely happening, happening all over. Definitely. Have you seen any of it, Jason? No, I haven't because I.

Jason has no hobbies. I, yeah. That's not true. That's absolutely not true. I know. Jason has every hobby. That's right. Jason buys everything. Yeah. Nowadays, Jason buys nothing. So that's, that's why I haven't noticed it. I'm, I'm, I'm on a, yeah, I'm in a forced hiatus.

Jason's true, Jason's true hobby is holding onto things just long enough so that he can't return them. That's about it. Exactly. Yeah. That sounds like my wife. Like, I absolutely need you to go to the store today and return this.

Why today? I'm busy. It has to go today. Yeah. There's no minute like the last minute. Yeah. That's about it. That's about it. No, I'm, I'm, I'm going through all my old tech. And using that to play with now, because it's like, you know, no new toys are coming for quite some time.

So I got to play with the old ones first. Yeah. All right. Well, I put this story in here just because this is something that you and I and Dave, we've been talking about in this segment for quite some time. Uh, we started talking about it when some of the first, uh, first voice AI stuff came out and we theorized, well, what would happen if somebody just fed all of our shows into these things and started running their own shows?

Well, it's happening. Uh, maybe, I think, who knows? Uh, heated chatter about a new AI podcast startup has been going around the podcast community spurred by a Hollywood reporter piece, drawing attention to its existence. It's called inception point AI co-founded by former Wondery chief operation officer, Janine Wright.

And they're basically, I put the whole article in here, but, uh, um, they're basically just spinning up shit tons of AI podcasts. Apparently right now they're only going out through Instagram stories or something like that. As the article points out, there's a whiff of bullshit to the whole story and it's hard not to wonder if the company is actually real at all.

Uh, but, uh, they say they're doing it and it's just a bunch of crappy AI bland podcasts being put out and doesn't really matter how many people listen. Because if you put out 10,000 podcasts and three people listen to each, you're getting a lot of listens, right?

So that's the theory. So they've got, uh, they've got characters like Nigel Thistledown, who's a nature expert, Ollie Bennett, an offbeat sports commentator, and Claire Delish, whose food focus suggests her to be a synthetic semi-norsat type. Oh boy.

Okay. So it's here. Garbage. Maybe. It's just the, it's the podcasting equivalent of spam, I guess. Just volume, volume, volume. Yep. Which makes it even harder for us normal folk to try and get a leg up. Okay. Great.

So he, that brights co-founder, William Corbin, who serves as CTO, told the Hollywood Reporter that Inception Point AI is publishing more than 5,000 shows and more than 3,000 episodes a week. And its content has supposedly garnered 10 million downloads since September, 2023.

Fuck you. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess that is this, I mean, obviously it's already been hard for, for all of us. We, you know, we survived the celebrity influx, but now we've got the AI influx coming. Is this just a smash and grab?

Yeah, 100%. Because I can't imagine it's, I can't imagine it's sustainable. Nope. It's just, yeah, we're just going to come in and crap all over everything and grab the pennies that we'll get. Because it's just volume. There's no, obviously, there's, in this entire description here, there's nothing about quality or even caring about the content.

It's just churn, churn, churn. Yep. Yep. It's easy to build, too. It's really easy to build. That's the, that's the annoying thing. It's, it's, it's easy and it's cheap to build. So I just saw 11 Labs this week created a new voice changing tool where basically you can take anybody and go from male to female, add accents.

Like this total morphing thing that the product that they came out with. And I was like, I was going to try it, but I'm like, it's just going to make me sad. I don't want to. It's just going to make me sad. Right. And I don't want that. So this guy makes me, it doesn't make me sad.

This makes me mad. Yeah. That's, I've had a week. I've, I've, I've, I've, I've had a hard time finding joy in much of anything. Yeah. That's why I might want Princess Bride again tonight. There you go. But who, but who could be the, who could squeeze this?

Who could stop this from becoming a thing? Could the, could, could someone like YouTube or it could someone refuse to publish these? Well, platforms could, yeah, refuse to carry them. And I guess, I don't know if they are or not, but again, they point out like you can't find these podcasts anywhere outside of the company's official Instagram account, which makes me go, well, who's fucking watching this?

Is it bots watching bots? Is it really a podcast if it's on Instagram? No, it's not. If it's just on Instagram. That's, that's, that's your, that's your pedantic argument about it. No, it's no, that's an actual argument. A podcast has to be in, in a certain, at least available in a fucking podcast player.

If you can, if it can only get it on Instagram, then it's an Instagram show. That's the difference. If you could get it on a podcast player and Instagram, then it's a podcast. But if you can't get it on a podcast player, then it's not a podcast. Yeah. So that's not pedantic. That's just, you know, it's gotta be available on a podcast player. So it was just for my clarity, Jason, are you saying that there must be an RSS feed?

Not necessarily anymore because you can get them through Spotify, which is technically a podcast player. Now, and some of their shows don't have RSS feeds, but they also do have RSS feeds. You can't plug an RSS feed into Instagram to listen to your podcasts on. So, you know, anybody that runs a discovery mechanism, like, like a player, like Overcast could block them.

Apple could block them at their, at their discovery level. There are many places they could be blocked at the discovery level. If they had an RSS feed, you could put that into your podcast player directly and play the podcast. But, you know, the discovery engines are what it means. Which is potentially why they haven't done that yet.

But again, it boggles my mind that if they're only on Instagram, the company's official Instagram account, how the hell have they gotten like 10 million views? How? It reminds me of those scams. And you guys might have a better memory of this than I do.

But there was a scam type where someone would put ads on a web page and then drive traffic to that web page. And like, you know, it was just a, this, they were getting paid for the ads getting clicked on. But of course, the traffic was fake.

And, but if you set it up in such a way, you could automate it that it was profitable. Right. But it was sort of an endless loop back on itself. Does that ring a bell at all? Yeah. I remember hearing about that.

I mean, there's been the same thing even in, you know, streaming music. There's been, you know, so-called artists that have put out like 32 second songs and then just set up a bunch of computers and bots to play them over and over and over and over and over again to get pennies on the, you know, pennies.

Right. From heaven. Yeah. Lots of people doing this kind of stuff. So it's, it's, it's an unfortunate, as all this stuff has gone. I mean, Jason and I were talking about this years ago. It was like, as everything is getting easier, we're getting more and more shit and more and more fucking scam artists come into.

Everybody comes in and just goes there. Here's easy money and just kind of destroys the playground. Carpet baggers. Yeah. Yeah. Carpet baggers. And by the way, this is a podcast because if you just search for Nigel Thistledown inside of Overcast, you get garden quiet, please.

And join the delightfully eccentric Nigel Thistledown on whimsical world of gardens, a six part journey through the enchanting art and history of English gardening. And it's just a six part series, but it's there. It's, it's, it is a podcast, not just on Instagram. They're out there now.

Yep. They're out in the wild. So flipping this on its head, if someone comes across this, downloads it, listens to it and enjoys it. Do we have a problem with that? I guess not.

You know, and what I'm curious about is like, is, is the content itself also AI generated? I must be. I mean, it has to be. And wouldn't the next step then just be like, let's feed the, okay, let's do a tech podcast. Let's feed the AI every single episode of Grumpy Old Geeks and every single episode of, you know, five other tech podcasts.

And then, then let's have our AI spit out a new tech podcast. What happens when they start getting better and training their data? Hey, hang on a second. Are they training their data on us now? Do we get our $3,000? Here you go. Let's see here. Step into the whimsical world of Nigel Fissletown, your charmingly eccentric AI host, who brings centuries of God and wisdom without the mud on his feet.

Okay. There you go. AI host. He's leading with it. Yeah. Yep. So. Yeah. Well, I guess if people want shit, they get shit. Yeah. It is a gardening podcast. So, hey, there is poop involved in gardening. Okay.

What else we got? Let's move on. I'm just, yeah. So, what happens when the AI tells people to plant, grow, harvest, eat, and smoke poison ivy? Right? Well, we've already got that with mushrooms in the Kindle store.

You know, there's a guide to, there's a gardening guide to mushrooms that would kill people if they actually followed the advice. So, it's already happening. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yep. All right. Let's move on. Yeah. Let's. Let's. So, look, earlier this week, we had a big Apple event.

I don't know if you guys watched it, skimmed it, whatever. Read the headlines. Yeah. I see. I saw what they released, but I didn't. I can't watch them anymore. They're just kind of ridiculous. Okay. I think so. I skimmed through it. I had it on in the background.

And the things that caught my eye were AirPods Pro 3, which I have ordered. Jason, I know you mentioned you've ordered some as well. Mm-hmm. I would get them in like a week or so. Yeah. You're not going to get them, Brian? No, I am because I'm on AirPods 1, AirPod Pro 1.

So, it's time for an upgrade anyways, and I want the translation. I want to see how that works. Yeah. Yeah. Better check to make sure your phone is compatible. It is. That's what you need to look for. Okay. I'm good. Yeah. Sweet. The other thing that I usually keep my eye on with these announcements are the things with the camera from both my past career and just my current interests.

And the longest, and the year after year lengthening of the telephoto capabilities is something that I keep track of and I enjoy, and it is something that does prompt me to upgrade. This is an in-between year for me, so I'm not getting a new phone this year.

But the thing that caught my eye and disappointed me was Apple saying that the new iPhone 17 Pro has an 8X telephoto lens with, wait for it, optical quality zoom.

Yeah. Which is BS. Right. It is a- Just like unlimited bandwidth. Right. It is a 4X lens, optical lens, but they have a 48-megapixel sensor on there, and they're doing a digital zoom, you know, a crop.

Just cropping, yeah. Yeah, they're just cropping down to 12 megapixels to get the 8X telephoto. Right. So you're not getting a 48-megapixel 8X photo out of this thing. What bothers me most is the marketing BS, calling this an optical quality zoom when it's really a digital zoom.

Like, come on, guys. You can do better than this. The other thing that actually made my jaw hit the floor was that the new iPhone 17 Pro, thanks to this new device from Blackmagic, can be genlocked, which means you can be synced into a multi-camera studio environment with time code as if it's a studio camera.

Yeah. This is bonkers. Yeah, it is. Absolutely bonkers. And it's just the kind of thing that the crazy Australians in Blackmagic would come up with, and I love it. And I wish that I had a use case for it because it's pretty darn cool, but amazing.

Amazing. You can genlock an iPhone. Give me, I mean, what will they think of next? It's funny. It's like nowadays, if I had to build my studio again, I would just buy iPhones. Right. You know, buy iPhones and some tripods and you're done. Sing them all together. Boom. Bob's your uncle.

Yeah. I saw someone out recently who had a pair of iPhones and they were bungeed together in a cross. Yeah. Did you see that? I saw that. Yeah. Yeah, so you can get portrait and landscape at the same time. Right, right.

And what it reminded me of is back at sort of the tail end of my video days when I was doing camera work, I had a shoulder-mounted HD camera that I would shoot with. But then I'd stick a GoPro up on the lens shade of the camera, the very front of the camera, and just roll that while I was rolling.

So in addition to everything I was shooting, I had an ultra-wide version of everything I was pointing my camera at. I'm seeing a lot of that happen nowadays. People are taking Osmo Pocket 3s and putting them in a cage and slapping them onto the side of their DSLRs or whatever they're video shooting with.

So they have that as the backup video, and it's also stabilized. So they get a twofer, and then they can take the video from the Osmo straight out and put it – and feed it out to a live stream, you know?

Right, right. And all these jerks are running around Disneyland. Yeah, exactly. It's true. Well, the last thing I wanted to touch on today, Brian, you said it's been a heavy week, and I concur just all the stuff that's going on in the world.

But I also got word yesterday that a longtime dear friend of mine passed away on Tuesday. He had brain cancer, which I think mercifully took him very quickly. I did not know that he was ill with the brain cancer.

When I last spoke to him probably about a month ago, he had not yet been diagnosed. What stings especially about losing this friend is that the last time we spoke, we both agreed that we were going to be intentional about getting together in person because it had been too long.

But, you know, we had one of those because you never know kind of conversations. We're both at that age where, you know, every day is a gift, and he's gone. And so the thing I've been thinking about is this notion of don't postpone joy because you don't ever know.

And it's so easy to put things off, you know, I know it's a cliche, but eat the ice cream, you know, buy the thing you want to buy and call your friend. Tell the people you love that you love them.

Order that gen-locking iPhone. That's right. Order the gen-locking iPhone and the AirPods Pro 3 because you never know. Oh, so my heart's been heavy with that over the last 24 hours or so. I was just a very kind, gentle, good friend, and he's gone.

And so I'm just really tired of 2025 punching me in the gut over and over again. I lost my father. I lost another dear friend. I lost an aunt. And then this one yesterday, this is too high a body count for any given year.

And I'm quite done with it, Universe. So thank you very much. Please move on to someone else. I'm sorry to hear it, Dave. That's a lot. By the phone. Yeah. By the phone. By the phone. That's right. I'm not waiting until next year.

I'm getting the phone right now. Clickety-clickety-click. Order. Go get that R2-D2 and Star Wars or Stormtrooper outfit. Get it today. Go to Home Depot. Get that R2-D2. You may not need the phone, but you need the R2-D2.

I do need the R2-D2. Yes. Believe me. I am buying the fucking R2-D2. There's no... The only question is whether I'm going to buy one for work and for home. That's the only thing. Do you have an expense account?

That's a very good question. I mean, I do have a credit card. There you go. And I would be very hard to fire. I don't know, man. We just talked about AI podcast hoats.

That's true. That's true. I don't want to jinx it. I don't want to jinx it. You're right. I didn't say that. Edit that part out, Jason. I don't want to put that out into the universe. That's the last thing I need. Yeah. That's what will happen. Your new host at the Cyber Wire, Texas Maximus.

Right. I'll be fired tomorrow, and then I'll live to be 100, so I can stew in it all that time. They're just going to keep you the same. It's just Dave is going to be spelled D-A-I-V-E. That's right. Robo Dave. Yeah. All right, gents.

I'm going to go try and experience some joy. Yeah. To better weeks for everybody. Take care, everybody. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got a couple new patrons. Rodney, James, and Demetrio. And Sane, up their pledge.

Thank you very much. And our faithful subscribers, Chris, Andrew, Maddie, Dobie, JS, Tim, XZ, Julian, Todd, and Fernando. Thank you all so much for continuing your patronage on Patreon. Yes. And over at PayPal, we've got Ralph, Miles, and Shari.

Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Roger and John. Hi, John. He'll get it. No new, no, no merch. No merch. No merch. Oh, by the way, we have been having problems with, which is probably why we have no new merch.

There's been shipping issues because, fuck, government. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. So they're trying to figure out how to get shit to the U.S. and other places. I just got to notice this morning that T-shirts that are coming from the EU will now be routed through either Spain or Latvia because apparently they found some loopholes, so we'll take whatever they can give us.

But I'm going to be retooling the shop a bit this week anyway to kind of highlight what goes where and move some stuff around and maybe add a few new designs. Hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Brian, you a little busy this week? Come on. Okay. Let's go. We'll try, we'll try, we'll try. And we got not one, but two new reviews, Jason.

Oh. The first is from MattC29, five-star review. Stay grumpy. I first started listening to GOG in my 20s. I just turned 41. Oh, fuck. Well, that bums me out. No regrets, five stars. Well, thanks. Thanks.

That and that in the corner will buy me a Geritol. And Diablo writes in with a five-star, funny, irreverent, and informal. This is one of the two or three podcasts that I always make time to listen to every week. The two co-hosts of the show do not suffer fools gladly.

Their down-to-earth reviews of tech, tech leaders, and the horrible economics of startups are always fair, honest, and relevant, and frankly, funny, even when they're castigating some wannabe tech titan. Occasionally, some politics creep in, but real-world politics do affect tech, and in my opinion, it's an appropriate amount.

Thank you, Diablo. Regular contributor Dave Bittner of the Cyber Wire and many other awesome InfoSec-related podcasts contributes to the great, but increasingly misnamed, security, ha, segment. I always feel more informed about tech news, tech in general, and even if I disagree with their opinions, it's still an awesome show.

I like the show so much, I've been a patron subscriber for several years. Well, thank you so much, Diablo. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And speaking of Patreon, if you would like to help support the show, because we are a 100% listener-supported show at this point, go to patreon.com slash GOG, and you can't sign up for as little as $3 a month.

And if you sign up for the whole year, you get a discount. But you can give as much as you want. Hint, hint, the Gold Monkey Package is very nice, I hear. And you get the show a little bit early, in high definition, and ad-free. All right, until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 713. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Pretend we're an AI company and we need a couple billion. Come on. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show?

Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll love you for it. And swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts? Feedbacks? Cool links? Feedbacks? We need feedbacks. Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact.

And hey, don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review and we'll read it on the show. Oh, and guess what? We've got GOG merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show. Stay grumpy. I can't believe you fucking watched that shit.

It wasn't bad. Traitor. Traitor. You're the traitor.