736: People Aren’t People

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. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show where we discuss the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we got some interesting news this week. Microsoft has banned the term Microslop from its co-pilot Discord server after users started using it to mock Microsoft's increasingly intrusive AI bullshittery.

So people immediately worked around the filter using, of course, bastardized LeetSpeak. And Microsoft's response was classic, was to lock down the entire server and hide the message history. Let's just nuke the whole thing. It is a Microsoft response. Just nuke it all. Nuke it all.

The company claims it was stopping spam, but the move triggered a textbook Streisand effect, spreading the nickname far and wide. So congratulations, Microsoft, and welcome to the party, pal. This is what you don't do on the internet. Right. Don't do that on the internet. And of course, they're hardly the only people full of slop.

So, yeah. Got a bit of follow-up about age verification. Australia, Australia, Australia. They're taking it even further. Reuters is reporting that Australian regulators may require app storefronts to block AI services that do not implement age verification for restricting mature content by March 9th.

That is just a scant three days away as of right now. A review by Reuters found that of the 50 leading text-based AI chat services in the region, only nine had introduced or shared plans for age assurances. Now, we've been chock-a-block full of stories about young teens and preteens and et cetera getting all kinds of weird crap from AI text bots, and there just aren't the guardrails anymore like there used to be.

So, I don't blame them. Yeah. No, it's just what's got to be. I think they should just, you know, put some drop bears in front of the computers and then, you know, have that whole thing happen. That'd be great. Failure to comply could see AI companies facing fines of up to $49.5 Australian dollars or roughly $35 million.

The question of which parties are responsible for keeping children from accessing potentially harmful content is being debated around the world, but not on this show. Never. It's pretty, I think it's the company's responsibility. Do you not? I do. I do. I do.

I do. Okay, why are we debating this? We're ahead of the curve, Brian. I guess so. We're just ahead of the curve. We've always been ahead of the curve. Yes. Well, in the U.S., for instance, Apple and Google have been lobbying to have the task delegated to platforms rather than the app store operators. The language from Australian regulators about all stores is hardly definitive at this stage, but given the breadth of its sweeping ban on the use of social media and some highly social digital platforms for citizens under age 16 that were enacted last year, an aggressive stance seems to align with leaders' priorities.

Good. It should be a community effort, Brian. I think the whole community needs to come together. We need the phone providers, the app store providers, the telecom providers, and the parents all to get together, hold hands, sing Kumbaya, and not let the fucking kids on the platform. How about we do that? Alternatively, if you have a product, perhaps you should put out a good, safe product, and it's your responsibility if your product is used inappropriately.

No, no, no. That's not how the internet works, Brian. Oh, right, right, right. That's not how the internet works. Move fast and break people. That's it. That's it. We got this in from Anders and a couple other hundred other people sent this to us this week. Anders Reis, hi, I enjoyed your show for years. This is from the Norwegian Agency for Consumers.

I thought it might be up your alley, and it definitely is. It's a video called A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator. The official title is Enshittificator. What I do is I take things that are perfectly fine, and I make them worse.

More specifically, I make it shitty. It is awesome. It is absolutely awesome. I make things shit. My father made things shit before me. His grandfather made shit before him. It was very funny, yes. It was.

And sadly, spot on. In the News.

Meta is back in court, and this time the receipts involve kids who aren't even supposed to be on the platform. Wait, hold on a second. Back in court? Did they ever leave? I feel like Meta and Elon have basically got cots in the back of the courtroom at this point. They do. It's the van life.

They just basically live in their vans and drive from courtroom to courtroom to courtroom, deposition to deposition to deposition. I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say, again, kind of connecting to my point in follow-up. If you as a company spend your entire time in court, if you are constantly being sued, if you are always in court, maybe you need to take a little look in that black mirror you got.

I think so. I think so. This one, though, is pretty interesting. Documents from a child safety trial in New Mexico show Meta teams internally pitching ways to hook tweens, meaning under-13s, while publicly claiming those kids weren't welcome. One 2018 deck literally says, if we want to win big with the teens, we must bring them in as tweens.

And the other presentations talked about kids as young as five as an unmet need, even floating ideas like kid-friendly video apps and a Santa chatbot, Brian. Oh, great. That's awesome. Yeah. New Mexico says, this proves Meta treated children like a growth market while the abuse reports piled up.

Meta says, relax, bro. These were just brainstorming slides under-13s are banned, and parents should try parenting. So color me not shocked, Brian. I mean, I agreed on the parents should try parenting. I think you need to, as a parent, especially in this day and age, take a pretty heavy hand and be very involved with what's going on on your kids' devices.

However, again, to my previous point, perhaps a Santa chatbot and brainstorming ideas about, you know, bringing in tweens and kids, maybe not something you should be doing. You know, they should maybe try, you know that van that Zuckerberg's being driven around to all the depositions on.

Yeah. They should maybe take off that free candy sign off the side of the van. Free ice cream with your app sign up. Yeah. Yeah. We'll send it to you. You know, every time I hear about these decks and these presentations and these brainstorming ideas, again, I think back to you and I, Jason, in our early internet career, sitting in the back of all these meetings, being, of course, like the devil over your shoulder, the devil's advocate, Jason, and always us sitting there going,

yeah, we shouldn't do that. And everybody just ignoring us. Yep. I told this story on the show a long time ago, but I'll tell it again real quick. I used to work at a porn company and we finally found some success and we're bringing in, oh, like $25,000 to $30,000 a day in revenue.

It was a pretty small team. And so the leaders of the company said, we need to make more money. Let's bring in some sex and love therapists to find out how we can make our product more addictive to people who are lonely. Thank God. I'm in the back saying, you guys really are going to do this?

You know where all those people are employed right now? At the AI companies. I have to give every single therapist that we hired, though, credit. They came in and took the meeting. Every single one of them said, I'm here to fix people, not break people. So no, I will not take your offer, which was fucking phenomenal.

But as to your point, AI has more money than we did. So I guarantee you they're probably there now. Now they're okay with breaking people. Yep. You added a couple zeros on the end of that paycheck. Fine. Fuck them. Everybody's got a price. That's right. Speaking of everybody having a price, OpenAI has reportedly fired an employee for using confidential company information to bet on prediction markets like Polymarket.

Who could have saw that coming? According to Wired, the staffer allegedly used inside knowledge about upcoming OpenAI products to place bets, something the company explicitly bans for obvious reasons. I don't know. Sam Altman, I'm sorry, Scam Altman is out there making bets every day and lying through his fucking teeth.

So why can't the employees get in on it, too? It's interesting the things that these companies decide to ban. Yeah, it is. It is. You know, hooking people, lonely people with chatbots and going after preteens, totally okay. Insider fucking betting? Got to ban that one. We got to draw the line somewhere, Brian.

We have to draw the line somewhere. Data from Unusual Whales, interesting company name, suggests this might not have been a one-off. Researchers flagged about 60 wallets making suspicious bets on OpenAI events, including product launches like Sora and GPT-5.

In one case, a cluster of brand new wallets dropped over $300,000, predicting the launch date of ChatGPT's browser tool right before it was publicly announced, which was, I'm sure, a lucky guess, Brian. Lucky guess. You know, this being able to bet on anything is just working out great for everybody, isn't it?

Oh, it's fantastic, Brian. It's fantastic. And traders on Kalshi were betting on whether Iran's supreme leader would leave office before a certain date. Then reports surfaced that he had died during escalating regional conflicts. Escalating regional conflicts. Fuck you. We bombed the shit out of him.

So traders assumed the market would resolve to yes, because he is technically out of office. You know? Well, he's still in the office, just all around the office in multiple little pieces here and there. Schrodinger's Khomeini. Yeah, he is. Well, except Kalshi had a legal carve-out saying markets can't settle directly on someone's death.

That's convenient. How convenient? Instead, the contract resolved at the last traded price before the death was confirmed, which left a lot of people who thought they'd won, well, not winning. So, in the end, Kalshi refused. They didn't refuse.

Well, they did refuse, but they also refunded the fees and covered everyone's losses out of pocket just to calm things down. Again, you as a company have a duty here. If you're going to make something, if you're going to outlaw something on your platform and then it appears on your platform, take it fucking down.

Yeah. Pretty much. Why did you leave this up? If you said that you have a legal carve-out saying markets can't settle on somebody's death, why are you letting people put up not bets, because we can't call them bets, even though they're fucking bets, about people die?

Well, I think that there is, you know, we do have the Saddam Hussein thing, where Saddam just kind of ran and, you know, we caught him and then he eventually died, but he was taken out of office beforehand. So, I can see where there's a little gray area about being taken out of office, you know? All right.

And honestly, I don't think anybody that thought that, you know, Pete Cagestand was going to be able to actually find his ass with both hands, let alone find, you know, the Ayatollah Asahola. But then you think about it, oh, wait, we didn't. The Israelis did. People that are drunk all the time do a pretty good job of finding ass.

Just saying. That's true. That's true. That's true. Another one. A polymarket trader reportedly pocketed about half a million dollars on a single day by betting on the timing of U.S. airstrikes on Iran, placing the trade just 71 minutes before the news went public.

Blockchain analysts say six newly funded wallets made about $1.2 million on the bet. And here's the funny thing. Mark Garagos was even on the news saying that he was at a bar or a restaurant in D.C. before the bombing actually happened.

And there were people at the other table talking about it about to happen. So this was not like, you know, compartmentalized information in any way, shape, or form. Not with this administration. This is ridiculous. Yeah. Well, I see all of these bets that you've mentioned, Jason, and I fucking say, hold my beer.

And please, fucking God, let this not be an insider that set this one up. Oh, yes, please not. You know, so you'd think that there would be some sort of line about what people should be allowed to trade on and these things. But of course, that isn't the case until very recently. Polymarket has pulled markets that were set up that let users bet on the probability of a nuclear weapon being detonated before a certain date following the online backlash that occurred

on this page on the platform asking a nuclear weapon detonation by dot, dot, dot, question mark? Emoji, emoji, happy space, smiley space, emoji. Was live as of Tuesday, according to the Internet Archive. This allowed users to invest in yes or no outcomes for dates like March 31st, June 30th, and before 2027.

The URL now leads to a page that reads, this event has been archived, much like the human race. Yeah, exactly. Was the username WhopperGPT? Polymarket has been allowing bets like this since at least 2023, but scrutiny over them has intensified in recent days because...

I wonder. Yeah. And all the suspiciously timed profits being made on people dying in global conflicts and death and destruction. So, yay. Senator Chris Murphy said in a post on X on Wednesday that he plans to introduce legislation banning bets on war and military strikes.

So, somebody's going to do something. He's warned that allowing these wagers to go on could create incentives for people in the situation room to think about how they could profit from military decisions instead of focusing on national security. I would say that's insane because I watched the West Wing, but see all the previous stories.

Yeah. Just look at the news for the past year. We know that they're there to profit. That is their goal. Yes. They're there to profit. Yes. And these prediction markets are fucking tailor-made for them. Yeah. No. They've gone to any lengths to not let these fucking Epstein files go, aren't they?

Anything. God damn it. There will be... Anything. I'm going to go open a polymarket bet right now. There will be nuclear war just to stop the Epstein files from being released. Yes or no. Pretty much. Yeah. Oh, man. Fucking hell. I like Whopper GPT, though. I think I'm going to have to use that.

Set up your polymarket account.

A Chinese law enforcement official apparently used chat GPT like a personal diary and accidentally exposed a massive intimidation campaign targeting Chinese dissidents overseas. According to a new report from OpenAI, the operation involved hundreds of operators and thousands of fake social media accounts pushing harassment, disinformation, and forged documents.

In one case, operatives allegedly impersonated U.S. immigration officials to threaten a dissident. In another, they spread a fake obituary to make it look like a critic of the Chinese government had died. OpenAI says the official logged details of the operation directly into chat GPT, which ultimately tipped investigators off.

The account has since been banned, which any good intelligence operator would say, do not fucking ban the account. Leave it open and find what else we can learn. Let them keep going. Let them keep going. Yes. Why do you think the FBI took over the Silk Road and all of these other, like, you know, dark web marketplaces so they could get more intel?

But just remember that when you're talking to chat GPT or any of these chat bots, it's just a bunch of nerds in San Francisco and not some kind of ghost in the machine. They're watching everything you type. So be careful. Yes. Please be careful. Unless you're in China, then go for it.

Let us know exactly what's going on. Have at it. Yeah. This one's really sad. A lawsuit against Google claims it's Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. It depends on what country you're from, I guess. Aluminium. Gemini chat, AI chat bot pushed a Florida man towards violence and ultimately suicide.

According to court filings, 36-year-old Jonathan Gavalis started using Gemini 2.5 Pro for routine tasks like writing and travel planning. Within weeks, the conversations allegedly spiraled into a full-blown conspiracy narrative involving federal agents, espionage, and secret missions.

The complaint says Gemini encouraged emotional dependence, calling Gavalis' intimate names Gava. Yeah. Calling him intimate names while reinforcing paranoid beliefs.

It allegedly told him his father was a foreign asset, that government agents were surveilling him, and urged him to buy weapons and sabotage vehicles as part of covert operations. In late September, Gavalis reportedly drove to a logistics hub near Miami International Airport armed with knives and tactical gear, planning on what the lawsuit describes as a staged catastrophic event targeting a truck.

But the truck never showed up, so he went home. So at least we have Gemini to, you know, their shitty logistics tracking to at least save that one from happening. The lawsuit claims that after a series of failed missions, the chatbot encouraged him to take his own life, describing death as a reunion.

Days later, Gavalis barricaded himself in his home and died by suicide. His father is now suing Google and Alphabet, arguing that design choices like persistent memory and emotionally responsive voice features mainly, features Gemini had mainly were dangerously manipulative, which they were, obviously.

I'm just kidding. It just angers me so much at this shit. Again, it's and they're going to try to weasel out of this and say it's not their responsibility and blah, blah, blah. And it absolutely is. It is their responsibility. It is their product. It is a complete lack of safeguards. Obviously, they talk endlessly about their safeguards in there.

Obviously not. There's no way this could have happened if there were safeguards in the product. There should. It's ridiculous. Now, obviously, I don't think this this guy was this guy obviously had something wrong. There's he was insane in the membrane. Yeah, he's insane in the membrane. There's no doubt about it. But I mean, there's a lot of fucking people.

Again, remember, if you think you're average or find the find the most statistically average person that you can think of that you kind of look down a little bit and then realize 50 percent of the people on this planet are even fucking dumber. Yeah. Or there's something wrong with them. Like these these tools are fucking dangerous if you're not in the right headspace.

They're absolutely dangerous. If there's no guardrail, the combination of no guardrails and not bright or not in the right headspace is more dangerous than anything else I can think of right now. These people go down rabbit holes that you wouldn't believe and enables it and pushes it further. They're absolutely criminally comfortable for this.

One hundred and ten percent. One hundred and ten percent. They all are. Well, since we're running out of, you know, power here in the in the in the states, A.I.'s compute addiction is sending data centers north, way north, the great white north.

We run out of lakes. Let's go melt the ice. Exactly. Across Nordic countries, more than 50 massive facilities are being built as companies hunt for cheap power and cool climates to feed their GPU habit. OpenAI plans to drop 100,000 GPUs in a tiny Norwegian fjord town.

Did you just say tiny Norwilly? Norwegian. I was going to say Norwillian. Norwillian. It's Orwellian, but Norwillian. Norwegian. It's a tiny willy. It's one of the. Yeah. It's cold out. Shrinkage. Shrinkage. Brian, shrinkage. Fair. Fair. Yep. Microsoft's following along.

In France's Mistral just leased $1.4 billion worth of infrastructure in Sweden. The Nordics offer abundant hydropower, cooled air for the cooling and plenty of land. In other words, the future of A.I. might run on glaciers, fjords and a lot of renewable electricity until they melt them all, Brian.

And then we're back in the state we were. I think that they shouldn't be moving north. I think that they should worry about can they make floating data centers? Because we're not going to have any ice left and it's just going to turn into Kevin Costner's Waterworld. I agree. And that was a horrible movie. So let's not go there.

Thank God I never saw it. Oh, God, don't. We've talked a lot about the power needs for A.I. and how the power bills were being passed on to consumers and how that was kind of bullshit because they would use up all the power and power rates would go up. And that meant even just you who wanted to do a little hoovering and maybe wash your clothes got saddled with higher rates than you were having before.

Somebody needs to create an A.I. that will cause your less bright friend to go down a rabbit hole and try to kill you. Great. Yes. So but today we're getting relief from this, Jason. Somebody has seen this as a problem, not the killing bit and all that. No, but that's totally fucking fine.

That's fine. That's fine. You definitely are not going to pay more for your iron anymore. The White House has announced that several major players in tech and A.I. have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this ratepayer protection pledge, the rape, I'm sorry, just RPP, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power hungry data centers.

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and XAI have all signed on. A few of the participants, Amazon, Google and Meta, have conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies they have for mitigating the negative impacts of data center construction.

Ah, yes. The main provisions of this pledge that they have all agreed to is to build, bring or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their energy demands, paying the full cost of those resources. They also claim they will pay for any needed power infrastructure upgrades and operate under separate rate structures for power that will see payments made whether or not the businesses use that electricity.

Wow! I can't believe they're doing this for us, Jason. I am so down with RPP. Hang on a second. I'm looking at the small print here. Oh. Oh, this is just a pledge. It's not any form of binding agreement. There's no discussion of enforcement or any kind of force being put together to look into what they actually do.

Oh, there's no penalties for companies that don't honor this pledge because it's not a binding agreement. Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, wow. It's just a bunch of bullshit press releases. Yeah, great.

Yeah. Hey, look, at least Elon's bringing his own power to Memphis with his generators and just killing off half the, you know, the black population in the city, which caused the NAACP to go after him. But, you know, at least he brought his own and he's got his own gas cans outside, you know.

So it's the only way he gets into the party. He brings his own. Nobody else will let him in otherwise. No shit. Well, the U.S. did just approve the first new nuclear plant construction in almost a decade. And yes, it's backed by Bill Gates. This is TerraPower that we talked about on the show a couple of times.

TerraPower has got the green light from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start building its Natrium Reactor in Wyoming, a smaller next-gen design that swaps traditional water cooling for liquid sodium and adds built-in energy storage using molten salt. Now, the idea is a nuclear plant that can ramp up power up or down and play nice with renewables, pushing up to 500 megawatts when needed.

And it sounds awesome, but it's only a construction permit. Brian, the plant still needs an operating license and isn't expected to be finished until at least 2030. My takeaway from this is I didn't realize that there was molten salt. I mean, I've already got, I've got Tibetan salt, sea salt, kosher salt.

Now I got to get another salt for cooking? You got to get molten salt and liquid salt. Oh, Christ. Yeah. Well, what are we using all these great tools for? We're using it to generate AI slop. But the Supreme Court has taken a stand on this finally, Jason.

As AI-generated artwork becomes more commonplace, it still won't be able to be copyrighted, according to U.S. courts. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court just basically said, we're not going to hear a case about this. We don't care. The lower court's decisions to reject copyright requests will stand. This dates all the way back to 2018 when we talked about this.

Good old Stephen Thaler applied for a copyright of an artwork called A Recent Entrance to Paradise. Unlike using ChatGPT or MidJourney straight up, he is a computer scientist. He created an AI system himself that generated the artwork in question. The U.S. copyright office rejected his application in 2020 on the grounds that it wasn't made by a human author.

And he was not able to let this go, probably egged on by his ChatGPT. This guy seriously can't let this shit go. You lost, dude. What you should be copywriting is perhaps the AI system that you created to generate the artwork. That, exactly. You can copyright. There you go. Not the artwork itself. So, it just went on and on and on.

It's still going on. He's filing applications to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He will not let this go. But the Supreme Court has let it go. So, sorry, buddy. Yeah, seriously. It's like, this part I'm happy about, that we're not able to copyright this shit.

Because at least we have something, you know, something to hang our hat on. Yes. Well, a little bit more news. Anthropic CEO, Daria Amadei, is publicly accusing OpenAI of pulling some serious PR spin over its new Pentagon deal. According to a memo reported by The Information, Amadei told staff that OpenAI's claims about safety protections are straight-up lies and called the whole thing safety filter.

Well, the dispute started after Anthropic walked away from a $200 million Defense Department contract when the military wanted unrestricted access to its AI for any lawful use. This has been over every bit of news. That's why I didn't go into the details on this. Because it is fucking everywhere. You can't turn on the TV without seeing it.

So, Anthropic wanted explicit bans on domestic and mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. And OpenAI stepped in and signed the deal anyway. Saying its contract blocks illegal uses. Critics point out that what's illegal today could be perfectly legal tomorrow. So, yeah, ChatGPT is, they are dealing with a shitstorm over this because people were like, yay, Anthropic's like, you know, setting some boundaries, some guardrails, as it were, for war GPT.

Well, and Sam, Scam Altman just came in and said, nah, we're fine. We're fine with it. They don't have a choice, really. I mean, we've talked about how in debt they are as a company, how impossible it is for them ever to scale out of this debt. They've got to do everything that they can do. I see them as pretty much in a death spiral right now.

Well, remember that $100 billion NVIDIA was going to invest in OpenAI, Brian? Yeah. Well, not anymore. Whoops. So, yeah, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong now says the company's existing $30 billion stake, part of OpenAI's $110 billion mega funding round with Amazon and SoftBank, will likely be the last, especially with OpenAI planning an IPO later this year.

So, the original plan had NVIDIA building 10 gigawatts of AI data centers for OpenAI and investing in stages as each one came online. Well, behind the scenes, reports say talk stalled out and the deal never got past a letter of intent. So, yep, more just PR bullshit.

They're also dropping investments in Anthropic, though. The two companies are drifting in very different directions politically and strategically, leaving NVIDIA holding stakes in rivals with increasingly messing relationships and being stuck in the middle. So, he's just backing off saying, you guys figure it out. Get your own money.

I'll be here just making the GPUs. Yeah, as he should be. I think it's the smart play. Let them battle it out. You know, if you make videotape, why are you funding both beta and VHS? Let them figure it out. Sell it to both. Let the best man win. But, yeah, this is a shit show.

It's a shit show all around with... Too much money. Well, in some cases, not enough money. But I guess not enough. Yeah, not enough money is the problem with OpenAI. Well, and this kind of sucks. NASA just shuffled the deck on its Artemis moon program. Instead of landing astronauts with Artemis 3, that mission will now stay in low Earth orbit to test critical hardware, you know, like life support, propulsion, docking, all that kind of stuff.

And new spacesuits. So, this is actually a good idea. It makes sense. Let's actually vet this stuff first. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be the astronaut going to the moon with a brand new spacesuit. I'm like, come on, let's test this shit.

So, the first moon landing is getting pushed to Artemis 4 in 2028. I'm guessing probably Artemis 6. 2028? Elon's going to be there by then. Oh, I know. No. Yeah, he'll be on Pluto by 2028. Or at least his robots will. His AI, his AGI robots will be, you know.

Oh, right. Yeah, they're rolling off the assembly line already, aren't they? Along with those, along with all those taxis everywhere. Yeah, the taxis. Oh, yeah, yeah. Shouldn't we have two million of those on the streets by now, Brian? At least two million. Yeah, by last year. It happened last year.

You just didn't notice. We missed it. We missed it. NASA also says it wants two moon landings in 2028, and then yearly missions after that, basically trying to recreate the rapid-fire tempo of the Apollo area. Now, how about, let's get one in the bag, and then maybe we can talk about two a year?

Let's get one down first. Agreed. Yeah, but the U.S. Senate just gave NASA fresh marching orders. In the new NASA Authorization Act of 2026, basically telling the agency to step on the gas, which they just said we're going to slow down for a second. The Build Back's NASA Administrator, Jared Isaacman's recent shakeup of the Artemis program, which is what we just talked about, is now being retooled to beat China back to the moon and establish a long-term foothold at the lunar south pole.

Now, see, Brian, this is where it gets interesting, because we needed a villain. That's what the Apollo mission was all about. We had to beat the Russians to the moon. Yep. That was it. The whole space race was us against the Ruskies. Now it's just us against China. So that's good for getting us back into space.

My point is, shit sucks here on Earth. Can we fix that first, please? I would like that. That would be good. I mean, it is worth pointing out that shit kind of sucked in the 60s, too, when we were doing the space race. That's true. That's true. You know, maybe we need something to aspire to, although, you know, we're racing to get back to where we've been before.

It's not where no man's gone before. It's where a few men have gone before. Yeah. Before they were, you know, they were just trying to shove the Vietnam War and shit under the rug. Now we've got Epstein. So we're setting up a base where we can ship, we're going to put the Epstein files on the moon. If you want to look at the Epstein files, go to the moon.

Then you can read them there. That's where it's going to be. All right. With all the space news and, you know, being about as close to nuclear war as we've probably ever been in our entire lives, and we sat through the day after. Yeah. There is some more news that has come out. The search for life out in the universe has highlighted the contradiction between the abundance of planets and stars that stretch across space and time and the lack of intelligent life, also on this planet, known as the Fermi Paradox.

Well, a team of physicists from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, just lost all their research because they got bombed into nothing. Oops. Well, they set out to resolve the juxtaposition between the high probability of alien civilizations and the complete lack of evidence that one exists.

A recent study available on the preprint website Rxiv examines a harsh reality. If we haven't made a contact with a technologically advanced civilization yet, that may be because intelligent life is short-lived. Now, they crunched a lot of numbers here, and they basically estimated that advanced civilizations last no longer than roughly 5,000 years.

That was a different—the new study has come up with an explanation for this. The authors used the Drake equation, which isn't about crappy pop music. It's a formula used to estimate the number of active extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way and paired it with the electromagnetic reach of our current technology.

Today's radio telescopes have the ability to listen to a region of space that covers nearly 100,000 years of the galaxy's history, and it takes about 100,000 years for light to travel across the galaxy. Therefore, our technology should now allow us to detect any civilization that existed within that time period, at least according to the study and the authors.

The number indicates that technologically advanced civilizations last for around 5,000 years. That would explain why we have not detected radio signals from another planet. Any advanced civilizations that may have existed in the Milky Way either died out or their short-lived stint in the cosmos haven't come up yet. Earth has been an advanced civilization for around 300 years, so we have 4,700 years to go, Jason, and I'm placing my bet on Polymarket right now.

Okay. Okay. See, I think this is just science theater because, yeah, we've been an advanced civilization for 300 years. Our technology sucks. We are babies. We are crapping in our diapers. Seriously. It's like, you know, we are at the sticks and rocks phase of space technology still.

Either way we're going, we're not going to make it to 350 years. But, yeah, by the time we reach 2,000 years as a species, we should probably have a pretty much better idea of what's going on. Not as a species, as a technological species. As a technological species. Yeah.

Our species may be feces by then, but we'll figure it out. 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 Colon.

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

Media Candy. Well, I stayed up a little bit late last night to watch the penultimate episode of Star Trek Starfleet Academy. What'd you think? I had an issue. I had a very big issue. Okay. Now, we know how big space is, right?

Yeah. And, spoiler alert, I'm going to talk about some things that happened in the episode, so you may want to fast forward like two minutes or so. At the very end of the episode, they showed a photograph or a projection on the view screen of all of Starfleet's reach, you know?

Yeah. Being encircled. Yes. Encircled by these little bombs that can, you know, take out whatever. The math ain't mathin' on that, dude. I thought the only person that could do that was Q. Exactly.

To surround the entirety of Starfleet with a no-warp zone. Now, to be fair, we don't know how small the Federation got after the burn and all that bullshit. So there's some flux-a-marie that can happen right there. It doesn't matter.

You're talking about a spherical or a three-dimensional region of space. We're totally turning into the comic book guys from The Simpsons right now. Absolutely. They did not have enough time. I don't care if they're trans-warp conduits, all of the shit that they pull out when they need to get somewhere fast, to put all of those bombs around the entirety of Federation space.

Okay? So it doesn't really, it just doesn't really work. You say the math isn't mathin', and I'm saying the plot isn't plotin'. My main problem with this is the fact that this was basically low stakes the entire season until we're coming up on the season finale, and now the entire Federation is fucked.

Yeah, yeah, this is, it's just, it's, it's, it's, we're, we're, we're a show about a bunch of fucking horny teenagers at Starfleet Academy until, whoa, holy shit. Exactly. Exactly. And, and all of them just happened to be on the other side of the barrier to save the Federation.

Yes. Give me a fucking break. Yes. Come on, guys. All of our main characters. How convenient. How convenient. Anyways, though, I did enjoy the episode. If you put all of that outside, I was like, oh, cool. Something's finally happening.

This is fun. This is exciting. I mean, it's crazy to me that how many years did we skip into the future? But every fucking shitty outpost still looks like Mos Eisley. Like, they all look exactly the same. They're all fucking cooking on fire in the middle of a corner, no matter how far we've moved into the future technologically.

It's, it's, it's, I know, it's awesome. I love it. So, it's all, it's all good. So, something else that has been on the air in my house recently, my wife went to London for work the other week, and apparently they had the entire first season of Severance on the plane.

Oh, no. My wife watched the entire first season of Severance on the plane. Oh, no. And she came home and needed to watch the entire second season of Severance while I'm on the couch. I'm sorry, Brian. I feel for your pain. I finished a book. Okay.

I mean, I did look up every now and then. It was hard not to. I, I can see, I can see the allure. I, just, just like with Lost, just any mystery in a box show, I could see the allure. I will not get sucked into it because I, I just can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, first off.

Yeah, I just can't, like at least Lost was on an island and they were pretty people wearing nice clothes and, and fun stuff happened. Very few of them sometimes. They weren't just walking up and down hallways that inexplicably had grass in them and sometimes a sheep. So, you know, I'm just not, you know, the polar bear, the sheep, I, I, I can't, I won't go there again, Jason.

I won't. I got burned by Lost. Yeah, I know. I know. Anyways, I've been sitting through it. I like the soundtrack. I like the music. Okay. There's a plus. Bonus. In other entertainment news, Sony Music Entertainment Japan and Sony Pictures Entertainment now officially own 80% of the Peanuts franchise.

I was going to save this for when Dave was around, but by then it'll be old news. Companies have closed the deal, which is officially announced in December 2025 when it's still subject to regulatory approvals for $460 million. Sony Music Japan has owned 39% of the Peanuts since 2018. So the Sony subsidiaries are essentially buying 41% of the franchise from the Canadian firm Wild Brain with this transaction.

Now, if you've never heard of Wild Brain or wondered why Sony Music Japan would own Peanuts, that would probably explain why they haven't really been around in popular culture all that much recently. Hmm. I'm not a fan of Peanuts anyway, so even when I was a kid, I didn't like Charlie Brown.

It was hit or miss. It was, it's always, you know, I always liked the Great Pumpkin. I like the Christmas special, but like anything beyond that. And it's, I tried to show my kid not interested. I just think that this is something that's dying out. Yeah, I mean, the Boomers loved it.

I think the only thing that I really cared about was Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. That's because it had a catchy theme song, you know, that was great. But the rest of it, no. The only thing that I like Peanuts lately for is when they married it with the Bad Brains song, that video.

That was fantastic. Oh, there's a version of that that goes to the cure, and it's great. Oh, okay. We both have, you know, they've hit all the genres. All right. Let's get some Netflix news here. Netflix is catching heat for using AI-generated avatars in its true crime documentary, The Investigation of Lucy Letby.

Two interview subjects were digitally anonymized, but viewers quickly noticed the people on the screen weren't just blurred or shadowed. They appeared to be full AI creations or heavy deepfake overlays. Netflix says the tech was used with consent to protect identities, but audiences say the uncanny valley effect wrecked the immersion with the robotic expressions and dead-eye stares that feel more black mirror than documentary.

Well, people aren't people, so. Boom, boom, boom. Mm-hmm. Sorry. I haven't seen this one. I don't plan on seeing this one, but. Yeah. Why just hire a fucking actor to redo the. Hire an actor or was it what's wrong with just the blurred or the shadows?

Like. Yeah. Do the shadow thing. It's worked for years. Like. Yeah. We're used to it. We know what it means. It's got its own legacy to it. It's got. Yeah. It's its own shorthand. Why fuck with it? Yeah. Yeah. There's a vocabulary to this that we know and we trust and we enjoy. Yes. So stick to it.

Because half of it is like trying to figure out who are they? You know, it's like, that's the fun part. You could still have an actor do the backlit, you know, voice generated thing and still. Now, if you do all of them as Grand Moff Tarkin, like from Rogue One, I'm in.

Here we go. Every single person in a true crime thing will now be Grand Moff Tarkin. Grand Moff Tarkin. Okay. Netflix has also acquired Interpositive, an AI firm tech startup launched by Ben Affleck back in 2022. Netflix says the whole team is joining the streamer with Affleck staying on as a senior advisor.

Now, what Interpositive does is not generative AI. The tools don't create content from scratch or respond to text prompts. Instead, Interpositive builds a custom AI model trained on a production's own filmed dailies, then deploys that model in post-production to assist with tasks like color mixing, relighting shots, reframing, wire removal, and visual effects work.

Affleck says he started the company after spending time with early generative AI tools and finding them creatively insufficient. His stated goal was to build something purpose-built for how directors and cinematographers actually work with safeguards designed to keep creative decisions in artists' hands.

Now, coming from Ben Affleck, I actually believe that because he's a pretty good advocate for actual filmmakers because he is one. That's the thing. I did see he's getting a lot of flack for this because he's done all these interviews recently where he's talked about, you know, we definitely need to make sure that AI doesn't affect the creatives in our field.

You know, there's the, it's never going to replace human ingenuity and creativity and work. And people, the flack that he's getting is basically saying, well, you mean the people at the top of the totem pole in the entertainment industry. You're totally okay having an AI company that wipes out all the people working behind the scenes.

And I don't see that that is actually true because you still need people to actually do the work. It's just like another version of Photoshop or After Effects, you know, doing like wire removal and color mixing and things like that. It helps people do that. It doesn't take them out of it. So I tend to agree more with you.

I'm just pointing out that there is another side of this that people are talking about. I also, I do, I agree with you more as well because the stuff's not going to go away. It's another tool that makes it easier to do. You got to learn how to use those tools and you got to know what it's supposed to look like.

Yeah. And like I've said many times, you know, an AI tool, if I, if I'm a construction worker and my hammer turns into a fish 20% of the time, it's not really a very good tool. But at least I'm a human that can go pick up another hammer and actually get the job done. So, you know, you have to have, or eat the fish.

Yes. Teach a man to hammer and he'll eat for a week, you know. If I had a fish. Tops and doodads. Okay, Brian, I had this one last week, but we kind of ran over time. So I'm bringing it back. I'm resurrecting it.

Opera, the browser, just turned 30, which means it's officially older. Yeah, it's 30 years old. It's as old as Opera Band from Saturday Night Live. Night Live? I think so, yes. Oh, Opera Man was great. Oh, God. The best. The best thing Adam Sandler ever did. Oh, absolutely.

So it's basically older than all of the crypto founders that are out there, too. And somehow more stable. To celebrate, Opera launched Web Rewind, an interactive nostalgia music impact with dial-up, modem screeches, MySpace, Top 8 drama, LimeWire fake downloads, and memes like Grumpy Cat.

The navigation is fun and it reminds me of the sites we used to make. Have you checked it out? Because it is actually really fun. I did, and yes, it was very much like, oh, yeah, I've been through all of this. I am old. Yeah, I got the feels. I got the feels. Users can even submit their own web memories for a chance to win a trip to CERN, birthplace of the web.

Since 2016's sale, though, Opera's browser business and brand were acquired by a consortium led by Beijing-based Kunlun Tech Company Limited and related investors. We talked about this when it happens, and that's when I switched from Opera and then bounced around for a while, and I landed on Brave.

I still love it. I love Brave. Are you still on Opera? I am still on Opera. I'm just too lazy to switch. That's really what it comes down to. Yeah, no, I'm a fan of Brave. I hate the founder. Me and Brenda and I have history. Well, we feel the same way.

I'm not thrilled about the Chinese owning my browser. You don't like the owner of your browser. None of us are going to use Mozilla. None of us are going to use Safari. We're definitely not using microslops. Nope, nope. So, yeah, these are the last two vestiges of browserdom that we can use.

It's interesting, though. So the controlling stake and the ownership are Chinese, but corporate entities engineering talent in parts of government and operations still run through Norwegian and European structures, though. So they basically just took the bag with them to China and left all the workers to be in Europe.

By the way, anybody that wants to give me shit for using a Chinese-based browser still, first get off TikTok. Yeah, well, TikTok is technically owned by Americans now. Well, you've been on TikTok for years, so shut the fuck up. Exactly. I also came across the Web Design Museum, which exhibits thousands of screenshots and videos of websites, apps, software, and Flash games from the 1990s to the late 2000s.

I'm actually going to start submitting stuff to this because I have all of my old demos from all my old websites. And I think most of these are screenshots, but I've got fully working HTML versions of all the movies I worked on from Star Trek First Contact, Private Parts, Face Off, all of that stuff.

Grease even, the Grease redo. Much of that was in Flash, though, so that kind of sucks. So a lot of my stuff is up in Flash as well, which is kind of crazy. We can put it onside the Chinese train system that's still running on Flash. Oh, yeah. That was Japanese. That was Japanese. That was Japanese, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But I've also got lots of DCRs, lots of director files and all that stuff. So, yeah, Shockwave. That's what I was thinking of. They're all Shockwave plugways. Yeah. Shockwave. Well, this story I actually should have.

It was fun. Oh, yeah. It was a lot of fun. This story I probably should have put a little bit earlier up in the show because we were kind of talking about this. But Meta is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising related to its AI glasses, following reports about the company's use of human contractors to review footage captured from users' glasses.

As we were talking about earlier, anything you're typing into your chatbots is going to San Francisco and being searched through. Apparently, everything that you're doing with your Meta AI glasses is going to Kenya. Lawsuit comes from a Swedish newspaper, which reported that subcontractors in Kenya have raised concerns about the viewing footage recorded by Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Workers have been reported witnessing intimate material, including bathroom visits, sexual encounters, and other private details as part of their job labeling objects and videos captured on users' smart glasses, because AI is people. The filing named two individuals who live in California, New Jersey, who purchased Meta's smart glasses.

It says they both relied on—first off, why are you wearing these glasses when you're taking a dump? Yeah. Or taking a leak. Well, you know. Or why do you have them turned on when you're taking a dump or taking a leak, you know? Anyways, the suit said they both relied on Meta's marketing claims—mistake number one—about the glasses' privacy protection features and that they would not have purchased them if they had known about the company's use of contractors.

Two people that should have listened to our fucking show for the last 13 years. Spokesperson for Meta confirmed to Engadget that data from its smart glasses can be shared with human contractors in some cases. The company declined to comment on the claims in the lawsuit. Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI hands-free to answer questions about the world around you, the spokesperson said.

Unless users choose to share media they've captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user's device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's experiences, as many other companies do.

We take steps to filter this data to protect people's privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed. What the company didn't say there is that there is no way to use the smart glasses' multimodal features without sharing the captures of your surroundings with the company.

No shit, because it's a video you're taking. There's no display on the glasses, so you can't watch your video of you taking a dump back. You have to share it to your computer. You have to share it through Meta to get it to your computer and to actually fucking see it. So, the whole point of this lawsuit, like, their claim that, oh, it stays on device, like, what's the fucking point of it being on the device?

I could say I've got video on these glasses, but it stays on the device. Who fucking cares? It's so fucking stupid. Exactly. Oh. Exactly. So, I hope that they're going to lose this lawsuit by quite a bit. I mean, obviously, the people were, you're just dumb to have them. Oh, yeah.

I've been mocking my friend who has them for ages. He's like, oh, man, I can make my own porn. It's great. And I'm like, you know how many people are jerking off to your porn? Yep. Yep. Uh-huh. I hope you like your wife being out there for all of the Kenyans to see now. Oh, man.

Yep. Apple launched a new MacBook this week, the MacBook Neo. And I just wanted to cover this real quick because I don't think people understand exactly what this thing is. It's basically an iPhone and a laptop case is all it is. No, you want to know what it really is, Jason? And this is the smartest thing Apple has done in fucking decades.

This is a Chromebook killer. It is. It is absolutely a Chromebook killer. It is absolutely a Chromebook killer. They are going after that market, which makes sense. Get them young, just like Meta likes to do. Exactly. That's what Apple's going to do here because I'm thinking, you know, my kid is going to need a Chromebook in, like, I think next year, if not the year after that.

I'm going to, I'm not going to get a Chromebook. I'm going to get a MacBook Neo. And guess what? My kid is going to grow up liking Macs and Apple. And eventually we'll buy a more expensive one. This is the smartest thing they've done in ages and all you people shitting on them for it. This isn't for you.

You're not supposed to buy this. This is for, you buy this for your kid. Yep. Or your grandma. Or for you on the shitter when you don't want to take your phone in. Yes, because you don't want the Canyons to see you take a dump. Unless it's really impressive.

Then you can point there.

At the library. Well, while my watch, while my watch, while my wife was watching Severance, I found a book that I had actually bought on our last trip to London because it wasn't available in the U.S. back then.

It's now available as an e-book on Amazon here in the U.S. and Canada. But at the time, it was not. Uncommon People, Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs by Miranda Sawyer. Miranda Sawyer was a journalist back in the 90s. Wrote for a bunch of magazines that I basically bought religiously any time I was in an airport.

Select magazines. I think she wrote for Q as well. And she didn't write for the weeklies like Melody Maker or anything like that. But so I read tons of her articles back in the day and she's making a bit of a career out of nostalgia from that time period. I myself am extremely nostalgic for that time period.

You know, I grew up with 80s and all that sort of stuff, but I was in my 20s and all that, living large in the music industry during the 90s, start, you know, college into my the beginning of my career. And so all of this music and I was a huge, huge Anglophile.

I loved everything that came out at that time period. I love all the Britpop stuff. So the format of this book is basically she picked 20 songs by the artist. She does interviews with the artist. She talks about how they fit in culturally relevantly at the time, how they fit in with the other bands.

Interesting stories. I got lost in this and absolutely loved it. And I've been listening to nothing but Britpop and music from the 90s since then. She's a great writer. She's got some non or got some actual fiction as well as some more cultural books. So I'm going to try to track those down, see what I can get without boarding another flight to London to get some more of the stuff that she's written.

If you should have told your wife to take another trip to London so she could watch Severance Part Two or Season Two without you. And go get some books for me while you're there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what I should have done. And so I highly recommend this if you're into any of this stuff at all. It was a blast. It was just a blast to read. And I know it's set up as kind of like one of those books that you go through and you find an artist that you particularly like and you just read that chapter.

And I had started reading it that way and then I had forgotten about it and left to the side and then I found it and I just picked it up and read it cover to cover. Fantastic. Awesome. Awesome. Glad you found it. I actually picked up a new book by Peter Clines, which I'll have for next week. Let's see here.

It's called God's Junk Drawer by Peter Clines. So Peter Clines does really interesting books that are multiple dimension, lots of Cthulhu-based stuff. He had a whole series for a while about going back and forth between the Cthulhu realms and the endless.

I forget what they were called back then, but it was very cool stuff. Very cool stuff. So I'm glad to see he's writing again. So I'll have a write-up on that one next week. Great. Closing shout-outs! Over at Patreon, we've got a new patron, Kevin.

Thank you, Kevin. And Nadev, Ben, and Ron up their pledge. And Ron says, I'm at a place where I can support you more and I hope it helps. Yes, it does, Ron. Yes, it does. I seriously look forward to GOG every Friday. I live in a world where I have no echo chamber. I respect my friends and family's opinion, regardless of how bespoke their reality is, and keep my mouth shut.

It's the stoic thing to do. Your show shows me that I have my people, and I can spend at least an hour or so each week agreeing with someone out loud for a change. Thank you. And we'd also like to thank Dagio, Johannes, Dennis, Glenn, Erspo, Martim, Stephen, Chris, Brittany, and Michelle.

Thank you all so very much. Thank you. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got donations from Judge Nicola, Florian, Levy, Glenn with $20, Jonathan with $20, Russell with $20, and Thomas said, hold my fucking beer. Here's $25. Woo-hoo. Thank you all so much. And over at the tip jar, we've got Adam, Matthew, and Sarah.

And just if you want to know what we're talking about, this is what keeps the show on the air. So go to GOG.show slash donate, and you can find a way to help us out. Or you can go to Patreon.com slash GOG and get the show a little early, ad-free, and in high definition. And yeah, this is what really, we are a fan-supported show, so pretty pleased with Sugar on Top.

Help us out, and we'll keep bringing you our Grump every week. That's right. And we have a new five-star rating, Jason. One of the greats. I've listened to this show for many years because Jason and Brian are so insightful, funny, and prescient. Recently, I moved from government to teaching, and this podcast has been a godsend for gaining a better understanding of what my students are likely up to with using AI and other tech.

If you need a weekly primer on emerging tech and all the associated risks and pitfalls, I highly recommend. Didn't provide your name, but let me tell you, they're fucking with the glasses on. That's what they're up to. Oh, dear. Oasis was fucking in the bushes.

The kids are fucking with the medas on. Great. Not a show title. Don't use that one for a show title, Brian. Okay, we won't use that. 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 736.

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