738: A Sprinkling of Random

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 DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Brian, we got a little follow-up this week and March 25th, 2013 was the day that we launched our first episode, How to Make Money on the Internet.

Have we figured that out? No. We have figured out what not to do. Podcasting. Definitely don't go into podcasting if you want to make money on the internet. Well, not necessarily true. You can get into podcasting if you appeal to the lowest common denominator, make shit up all the time, a la Joe Rogan, or if you're already a celebrity.

I was going to say, if you do the – what was her name? What was Neil Gaiman's wife that you always bitched about? Amanda Palmer. Oh, Amanda fucking Palmer. Amanda fucking Palmer. Yeah, yeah. If you build up an audience on mainstream media and then take that audience – And then complain about mainstream media.

Yes, exactly. See, that's also Joe Rogan. Yeah, exactly. That's all those guys. That's Tucker Carlson. It's everybody that built their audience up through mainstream media that went, fuck mainstream media, man. Yeah, we did it backwards.

We did it backwards. It's not working so well. And I just got to say, I listened to about 10 seconds of that episode. We were fucking terrible. It was awful. Well, we – We still are. Just – let's not, you know, mince words. We're still pretty fucking bad. But we were really, really bad.

Yeah, well, we kind of figured out the technical aspect and we stopped drinking. What do you mean, we? You still drink, but – Not on the show. Well, sometimes when we do a late night one, you still knock back a few. One beer. That's on you.

I'd be fucking halfway through the bottle if I was past four o'clock. Well, that's why I'm still drinking and you're not. That's true. That's true. Buzzing. Okay. A little actual follow-up here because, yeah, I mean, okay, so seriously, we're going into our 14th year.

I thought we'd already done – you know, I thought we were finished 13, but I remember that, oh, no, since you're into your 13th year, you can say you've been podcasting for 13 years. Some PR wonk told me that. I'm like, well, technically not really, but they're like, lie. I'm like, okay, now in my head, whatever.

I think at this point we should pretend we just started over. Right. We're brand new. I think we should. I think we should. Let's get some of that new release juice. Say fuck it. We'll just rebrand to grumpier old geeks. Right. And older. I don't know if that's possible.

So we've been talking about AI job cuts in the past couple weeks. And so here we go. Companies from Block to Amazon are increasingly blaming job cuts on AI, even when the technology had little to do with it, which we've said many times. A survey of hiring managers found 59% say that they highlight AI in layoff announcements because it sounds better to investors than admitting financial problems.

And only 9% say AI has actually replaced roles. Significant difference there. About 50%. A little bit. Yeah. So in 2025, AI was cited just 4.5% of the time for layoffs, while nearly 90% of executives say it hasn't meaningfully affected employment yet.

Yet. I said, but we're restructuring around AI. Sounds like growth, while we're overhired during the pandemic. Sounds like a mistake. Now, that said, Brian, I have had some time this past couple weeks to actually spend with actual AI, like top-tier AI coders who are using the tools and who know how to code.

Like, these are no-joke coders. And the shit that I have seen would make your head spin. It actually is going to start taking people's jobs really fast, really, like, really soon. Well, I think we knew that with programming, but it does bring up the whole, you know, downside of that, which is no junior programmers, nobody learning the ropes, and nobody who knows the basics, everybody just vibe codes in the future, and then what?

You're not going to need it. That's the thing, though. You're actually not going to need it. It is so good now. It is, I mean, we'll talk offline, and maybe we'll put together a special episode where you drink and I don't, and release it to the fans. But there is some shit that I have seen that is like, with the tools that are out there right now, for $400 a month, you can do an app a day, like an actual iOS app a day that is feature complete.

All you have to do is be really good about spec writing and knowing how to pit the two or three different LLMs against themselves, and it will do all the debugging for you. It's insane. It is insane, but it's all about knowing how to write a spec.

So programmers in the future are not going to be writing code. They're going to be writing specs, and that's what it's going to really come down to, and more about that in a little bit. Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. I was impressed. I was fucking impressed, and that takes a lot for me to be impressed by any bit of AI technology.

I was impressed and depressed at the same time. I'm like, you mean I spent 30 years learning that craft, and it is absolutely worthless now? They're like, Yeah, pretty much. It doesn't matter. We aged out of coding anyways, Jason. We're actually, probably, this is actually might even be good for us, because you know what we are good at doing?

Specs. Writing specs. Yeah. I can tell somebody else what to do all day long. Me too. I'm really good at that. Yeah. Oh, man. And there is now a global push to create an AI-free label, basically the organic food sticker, but for human creativity, which I said when AI first came out.

I'm like, there's going to be two things that we need to focus on, human created and people who are good at fact checking. So, these people are working on the human creativity side and the AI-free label. Now, the thing about this is, there's like a bunch of different groups trying to do this, and nobody can actually come up with what they can say is AI-free, because it is so embedded

in everything we do from, I mean, just basic spell checkers, which an LLM is just a spell checker on, you know, meth, steroids, ketamine, and whatever else you can throw at Elon that day. That's what an LLM is, but yeah. You know what would help with coming, well, first, two thoughts.

So, it's basically just like an organic food sticker, which means absolutely fucking nothing, because there's no real standard. There are standards for organic foods. No, there are absolutely standards for organic foods. There are a couple, but they aren't applied across the board, certainly not in the U.S. and other places. And then secondly, I totally forgot what my second point was.

Boom, gone. Okay, never mind. Here's my point about these people who are trying to make the AI-free labels. This is just another scam, because they're going to charge people to say that their products are AI-free. And I bet they'll use AI to determine whether the product is AI-free or not.

Actually, I did remember what my point was now. You know what would actually help us determine the difference and get rid of some of those gray areas like spell checks and things of that nature? If we finally brought back the difference between AI and machine learning.

Oh, well, that thing we talked about for years and finally gave up the ghost on? And everybody gave up on, and now it's all just blanket AI across the board? Yeah, that one. Yeah. A computer program is technically AI nowadays. That Texas Instruments calculator that you had in high school is probably considered AI by the standard of the day.

Because in my mind, there is a big difference between a spell check that's built in that that they call AI now, and using one of these things to generate images. They're completely different things. Absolutely different. And there's no doubt about that. There's a difference between I wrote half my song using one of these AI-generated song generators, and I was in Microsoft Word and fucking Clippy on steroids just corrected my grammar.

I mean, it comes down to what's a prediction engine, what's not a prediction engine, what is—there are nuances here, and I don't think that anybody is going to—how do I put this so delicately, Brian? Actually give a fuck.

There. I don't think they're going to actually give a fuck anymore. I don't think anybody does. It's going to be so embedded in the day-to-day life that we have that nobody's going to give a fuck. Yeah, I agree. So, if anybody tries to sell you an AI-free label, tell them, thank you very much.

You gave it the office, and go about your day. That's what I'm going to say. This was making the rounds, and it just—I threw it in here before it was hip. There's this video of Mark Andreessen that has been going around for a podcast interview he did where he talks about he's been saying that he has zero introspection and that the idea itself of self-introspection is a modern invention, which everybody on the fucking planet is called bullshit on.

And B, I want to know, A, what his nootropic stack is, because he looks tweaked out of his gourd when he's talking here. And how does he—he actually believes this bullshit, I believe, personally. The link will be in the show notes.

Maybe I'll put a clip in here for the peoples. But what you have to understand is this is the mentality that I've been railing against for this guy and A16Z since the fucking start. These guys are fucking weird, right?

They are. They are. All these guys, all the tech CEOs, they have way too much money. It reminds me—I used to listen to the talk radio station before that got killed in Los Angeles, and they had a symposium where there was a whole bunch of people on, and Adam Carolla was one of them, and this is before he went crazy.

He was kind of just the normal guy back then, and he was funny. And then they had this other guy, Frosty, from the Frosty, Heidi, and Frank show that I love, and they were talking, and Frosty was an older guy that's never gotten married and kind of schlubby, and his life was a total mess. I had a show?

Yeah, kind of. And Adam Carolla said, you know what the problem with you, Frosty, is? You've got nobody helping you steer the ship. You're steering your own ship, and you're making bad choices constantly. You need a wife to call you on your bullshit. You need a friend to call you on your bullshit.

All these fucking rich guys, they have no one that calls them on their bullshit, and they just fucking feed off the insanity that they've created, and they've got yes-men around them all the time. And they just start to believe their own shit. Nobody tells them to shut the fuck up.

Nobody tells them, you look like shit in that shirt. Don't go out in that. Nobody. The problem is, is that these guys have all the money, and the people want to be around them because they make more money. So, there's a case to be made here where, Brian, if you look at the trends over when we started this show, the tech optimists versus the tech pessimists are doing financially way better than we are.

We didn't go in for the Bitcoin. We didn't go in for the NFT. So, we didn't make our bag because we were actually speaking truth to power, which, at the end of the day, will get you in a fucking garage. So, you know. Well, and as a bit more follow-up and tying into both psychopaths and people just going in to make more money, the hat tip to Joseph who sent this one.

But this is something we were beating the drum on, and he said, this is a new and unsurprising twist to polymarket betting. Who would have thought that it would eventually lead to death threats when money and gambling are involved? And this is, gamblers trying to win a bet on polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story.

And this is a Jewish reporter. Betters are using death threats to try to get the Times of Israel's military correspondent to change his report on a missile impact in central Israel. This is his alarming account. The link is in the show notes. And who could have saw this coming, Jason?

Who could have saw this coming? Me, you, anybody that listens to this show. First off, there's a gazillion problems with betting anyways. And again, another thing we've been beating the drum on on the show, sports betting has gotten out of fucking hand. I kind of understood the initial beginning sports bet because there are outside reasons for teams to want to win, for both teams to always want to win.

So you're betting on an unknowable outcome because both sides are actually trying. The problem with being able to bet on anything is there aren't any stakes a lot of the times. And you can basically throw things. You can throw your fights. And we're going to see this.

We are seeing this. We're seeing insider trading. We've got to stop this. It's ridiculous. People are going to die. Oh, yes. People are probably already dying. Did you see that the news came out today that the Major League Baseball Association, the MLB, has signed a $300 million deal with Polymarket?

Yes. So what are you going to do, Brian? What are you going to do? Be angry, as per usual. Perfect. That's our bread and butter. Angry and poor. Not a lot of bread and not a lot of butter. Yeah.

I can't believe it's not butter. In the news.

Okay. Speaking of people who can't afford their bread or butter, Atlassian is the latest tech company trimming headcount in the name of AI. Yes, here we go. The maker of Jira and Confluence say it's cutting about 10% of its workforce, roughly 1,600 employees, as it, quote, unquote, rebalances for the so-called future of teamwork in the AI era and pushes harder into enterprise sales.

Now, the layoffs are mostly here in North America with additional cuts in Australia and India and will cost the company up to $236 million in restructuring charges alone. That's expensive. CEO Mike Cannon Brooks insists this isn't about AI replacing people, just changing which jobs are needed.

Okay. Nice word salad there, Mike. Investors seem fine with that explanation, nudging the stock up slightly after hours. Meanwhile, the company's CTO is stepping down and the restructuring is expected to wrap up by the end of the year. Now, Brian, I've been forced to use Atlassian software many, many times in my career.

Same. And I'd be fine. I'd be fine if they cut 100% of the workforce personally. That's just me. You know, the thing is, I haven't used any of their software since they started pushing AI into it. So I'm sure it's a gazillion times worse now. It's hard for that thing to get worse.

Confluence. Oh, my God. That was terrible. Yeah. I just remember, written in Java. Written in Java and nothing ever fucking worked. Nothing ever worked. What do we have next? Well, Meta could be preparing for one of the largest layoffs in its history, according to a Reuters report.

The tech giant is planning to cut about 20% of its workforce, according to outlet sources. They report that Meta's top executives have told other senior leaders to start planning how to pair back. In the latest financial report, the company's employee headcount was $78,865 as of December 31st, 2025, while revenue reached nearly, let's see, we have to do a bunch of layoffs.

Revenue reached nearly $60 billion for the fourth quarter and more than $200 billion for the entire year. Of course, we have to remember that Mark Zuckerberg decides to pour that money into the now shuttered fucking pantsless bullshit VR space.

And paying gazillions of dollars to AI people to come and start their other crap. So, there you go. I'm doing a little back of the napkin math here. $200 billion divided by 78,865 people equals $2,535,979.20 per employee is how much revenue they made.

And I guarantee you, those employees, they do not make $2,535,000 per employee. So, yeah. No, they do not. And again, to use the phrase that we just meant, we have been using the bread and butter of Meta, Facebook, the Instagram, fucking useless these days.

Oh, yeah. Nothing but ads and reels. I have the few people's updates that I have seen have started posting about what are we even doing here. I don't see anybody's updates anymore. It's nothing but a fucking ad and reels serving machine. There's no point on being on these fucking things anymore.

Yeah. I mean, you're just being sold to. And a couple of people I've talked to, their ROAS for ads on Meta and Instagram have dropped through the floor. That was the thing. Like, the return on ad spend a couple of years ago was actually really good. You could expect, you know, a couple hundred percent return. You know, you spend $1,000, you get five back based on what you can sell.

And now it's, like, barely breaking even. So people are starting to leave because of that. Because there's nobody there anymore because everybody is just not getting what they want. Well, even if they are there, you don't see their updates anymore. You just don't unless you go out of your way to find them. Like, most people I know now will pop it open for a second, will scroll for, like, five seconds.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing close. That's it. Well, now it's just basically entertainment. You open it because you're bored. That's it. You open it up and it's just like, hey, guys, I got nothing to do for 10 minutes. What am I going to look at? And then you get sucked down the rabbit hole for two hours, a la TikTok, and that's how they make their money.

It's just basically they've monetized boredom to a different degree from what it used to be, which was, let me see what my friends are doing. Completely different product, 100%. These are absolutely not social networks anymore. They're not. No, they're not. No, they're just media companies. That's it. They're just media companies.

Yeah. Well, speaking of meta, according to reports, a meta engineer let an AI agent answer a technical question. The agent impersonated the engineer, gave bad advice, and boom, sensitive user data was exposed to unauthorized employees for about two hours. This is great. This happened on the internal Slack channel.

Like somebody posted the thing. The agent actually like there was just this whole like three's company moment. And then the AI agent actually went back to Slack and replied to the original poster and gave them some advice. And then that person took the advice like it was the other poster and then did it, and it fucked everything up.

Woo-hoo. Yeah. Oh, God. And earlier this year, another meta AI agent. How far we've come, Jason. We used to have to rely on humans to do that. Oh, yeah. I know. We used to have interns. This was an intern fuck-up. And now you can't even fire the intern. We're going to give the intern five million GPUs to do it even more.

Yeah, if you remember earlier, another meta AI agent got access to an exec's inbox and promptly deleted everything while being told very politely to stop. Now, this is where this is wrong. It wasn't a meta AI agent. It was OpenClaw that this person just said, here, let's try and clean up my inbox.

They're like, okay. And this is the paperclip problem. It's like, I want you to make paperclips. Well, then the death of the universe comes while the AI is still making paperclips. They're like, we'll clean up your inbox, all right? Select all, delete. That was it. Define clean. Job done.

It's a scope. Again, you got to scope it out properly. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So now meta is bringing in signal creator Moxie Marlin Spike to bolt encryption onto its chatbots because apparently the solution to AI chaos is more AI, but encryption this time.

But here's where it gets fun. Meta is quietly backing away from one of Zuckerberg's old promises because back in 2019, he pitched a privacy-focused future for Facebook. Back when it was still Facebook. Yeah. Built around end-to-end encryption. So even meta couldn't read your messages.

And Messenger eventually did get encryption by 2023. Four years, I'd like to point out, four fucking years. But Instagram, not so much. Now, the company says it's abandoning plans to roll out encrypted Instagram DMs altogether, claiming very few users opted in.

Which, of course, tends to happen when encryption isn't the default, and most people never dig through the settings because the default is to give everybody everything and leave it open ass to the wind, you know? So meta says you can still get encrypted chats on WhatsApp, but Instagram is going to stay as is.

So there you go. All right. Well, Instagram may be finally loosening one of its oldest rules, but only if you pay. Meta is testing clickable links directly in post captions for users subscribed to Meta Verified.

They're taking a page out of Elon's book right here with Twitter verified or X verified or whatever the fuck. So historically, Instagram forced creators to shove everything into the infamous Lincoln bio, spotting an entire ecosystem of shitty fucking tools like Linktree, which we should have fucking built.

We made fun of Linktree when it came out, and we were fucking stupid. I'm like, that's blog rolling for Instagram. They're just going to bake this shit in. This will never be a, oh, wait, that's a hundred million dollar business right now. Fuck me. Yeah, so, well, in the test, creators can add up to 10 clickable links per month inside the captions.

And the feature currently works in the mobile app, but not on the web. And Meta hasn't said how widely it's going to roll out. So the platform that broke the links in the first place will now sell them back to you, starting at about 15 bucks a month. That's about a buck 50 a link. Yeah, great. Yeah, that's worth it.

Actually, probably is. It will be for some people. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

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Well, let's go back to lawsuits. OpenAI has been hit with yet another one, and this one's pretty heavy from what I remember from my childhood. It's the Encyclopedia Britannica. Those things add some F to them. I got a set. I got a set in the house. It is really fucking heavy. Yeah. They took legal action against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright and trademark infringements.

More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its copyrighted content at a massive scale when training its AI models. And not just with training. The Encyclopedia company claims that ChatGPT's responses to users' queries sometimes contain full or partial verbatim reproductions of Britannica's copyright articles.

Duh. Along with claims to copyright violations, Britannica also argued that OpenAI was responsible for trademark infringement. According to the lawsuit, ChatGPT generates made-up content or hallucinations and falsely attributes them to Encyclopedia Britannica.

First, I've heard that tact. That's bad and that's good. I like the way they're going after this. It is juicy. So they are seeking an injunction to prevent OpenAI from repeating those accusations. And we don't know how much money they're going for, but I'm 100% behind the Britannica on this one.

Go for it. Oh, yeah. Go for it. Go for it. Yeah, that's a really good, interesting tack is that, oh, you're diluting our brand and our trademark based on your, you know, non-deterministic output. Yes. The Britannica never said to add glue to pizza.

No, it didn't. Oh, wait. That was Google. Anyways, after ByteDance suspended the global rollout of its new C-Dance 2.0 AI video generator over the weekend, because people were basically using it to create insanely realistic movies and trailers and stuff with copyrighted material and Tom Cruise and everybody else.

C-Dance 2.0 opposes a direct threat to the American intellectual property system and more broadly to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community, Senators Marcia Blackburn and Peter Welch wrote in a letter to the company. They're trying to shut it down immediately because they are worried about AI companies training their apps on copyrighted materials from artists, actors, and filmmakers without permission.

A little late to the game. Yeah. We've been talking about it for a couple of years now, but now you're worried about it. Welcome to the party, pal. They cited C-Dance AI examples, including an AI-generated Thanos and Superman battle, a rewritten Stranger Things ending. I wonder if I could do Battlestar.

Oh, yeah. Can we fix Battlestar and can we fix Lost? Those are the questions. You know, if they can fix those, C-Dance might be okay. Yeah. And the famous fake Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt battle that went viral. So we'll see what happens. Those guys are hurting financially, so we need to make sure that they don't lose any coin out of that.

Well, that's the get richer problem here. After pulling C-Dance 2.0, ByteDance said over the weekend that it respects intellectual property rights. With a straight face, they said that. And that it is taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likenesses by users.

They called the pledge a delay tactic to continue to abuse the innovators and profit from their successes. And that it's regard for American IP as part of a larger trend of artificial intelligence companies stealing protected work at the expense of the creative community. Again, welcome to the parties, pal.

So I would like to say if any of these LLM companies and frontier model companies actually give a shit about copyright, don't train your model on copyrighted material. Yeah. Simple enough, right? Yeah. But they're not going to do that. So, yeah. No, of course not.

All right, let's get some more fun news here. This is no AI involved in this one. Trump media burned through over $712 million last year while bringing in 3.7. That's right. They turned $712 million into $3.7 million. Now, technically, they should be an AI company with this kind of burn rate.

You know, this is open AI level and anthropic level burning of money. But, yeah. So the stock is cratered. It's now down under $9 from a high of $80. And because the company has been dabbling in prediction markets, buying up Bitcoin and now jumping into nuclear fusion.

Just what I want Trump media to have their fingers in is nuclear fusion. Portfolio. Quite the portfolio. Yeah. Let's throw some shit at the wall and see what sticks. And apparently, nothing. Now, just a reminder that the Trump media was basically created to bilk the MAGA faithful.

Please invest and give us your money. We don't actually care if this does anything or makes any money. Why don't we care? Oh, I don't know. Because according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is set to receive a total of $10 billion in the deal that allowed TikTok to remain in the U.S.

If this isn't grift, I don't know what is. The new investors' required stakes in the U.S. entity of TikTok have already paid a $2.5 billion fee to the administration when the deal closed in January. But the Wall Street Journal's latest report noted that the group of investors would continue to make payments until the total hits $10 billion.

To better contextualize the recently revealed $10 billion fee the Trump administration is receiving, the U.S. entity of TikTok was valued at $14 billion by Vice President J.D. Vance. So, wow. Yeah. Yeah, 80% of the value of the TikTok deal is given back to the Trump administration.

No, there's nothing wrong with that. No, this is completely normal. God forbid a fucking Democrat would do that. Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ. Can you imagine if Obama did something like this? Can you imagine? Pitchforks. Yeah. If Obama forgot to tip the guy at Starbucks, then we'd have fucking insurrection.

He wore a tan suit. Oh, my God. And they freaked out. This is unbelievable, Griff. Unbelievable. He forgot to salute one time, and then there was three hours of Fox News coverage on it. Now, lest us forget, this isn't the only thing that has happened.

Last year, the administration invested $8.9 billion into Intel and received a nearly 9% equity stake. And, of course, he got the Boeing 747-8 as a gift from the Qatari government in May. Totally normal. Totally normal. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, what's wrong with that? Brian, what's wrong with that? It's business, man. Just bidness. Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of business, back in 2010, remember Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates when she was Melinda French Gates still? I'm trying to remember 2010 and be back there.

Well, they launched the Giving Pledge. That was the idea where billionaires promised to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. Remember that? Yeah. I can think of one person that may be on track to do that. One. Just one. One.

And she's the wife who just got all the money. She is awesome. We'll get to her in a second. Yes. More than 250, though, wealthy families eventually signed on, including Mike Bloomberg, Mackenzie Scott, and Sam Altman. But the vibe has shifted hard in the past few years. New signups have slowed to a trickle because some billionaires are quietly backing away.

And at least one, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, actually unsigned the pledge entirely. Wait, did he go through his email, find the DocuSign document, reload it, and unclick on signature? I think so. I think so. So they're saying that part of the shift is political because in the current climate, billionaires are less interested in nonprofit philanthropy and more interested in direct influence.

Give me a fucking break. Bullshit. Like, oh, oh, I'm sorry. The direct influence is funding elections and pushing policy through their businesses, not giving the money away to people on the street. Mackenzie. So some people, including Elon Musk, argue their companies themselves are philanthropy.

Um, yeah, dude, this is this is the Andreessen cocktail speaking whatever they're on. Ketamine dreams, baby. Yeah. Others like Peter Thiel have been actively encouraging people to ditch the pledge, calling it an Epstein adjacent fake boomer club.

Well, how about you release that list and then we'll talk about it, Peter? Yeah, we'll talk. We'll talk a little more. Let's let's get a little more info first. Yeah. Uh, well, that criticism actually lands a little harder thanks to Bill Gates, his reputational baggages from his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and all of the shit that just came out about him and the Russian hookers and the STDs and all the good stuff and his wife leaving him because she knew all about it.

Oh, dearie, dearie me. So, yeah, billionaires are going to billion and they're going to take their money back and they're going to go play in their own playground and just say, no, we're not giving any any of it away except for Mackenzie Scott, who is the hero of the fucking universe. The more I read about her, the more I love her.

She's wonderful. I don't know how she tolerated that fuck nut for as long as she did. No, no, I don't either. But speaking of that, fuck nut, the Washington Post just ditched flat subscription pricing and went full uber surge mode using AI to decide how much you personally should pay.

Based on your data, location, reading habits, even what device you use, the algorithm figures out exactly how much it can squeeze out of you before you bounce. Well, the company's being vague about how it works, but experts say this kind of pricing can get uncomfortably invasive. You fucking think?

And they're pulling in everything from your zip code to inferred income. Now, hold on a second. Yes. To be fair, in the old days of subscribing to a newspaper, they also knew your zip code because they delivered it to your house. That's true. But did they change the rates on how much they charged?

They did not. Just clarifying. Just clarifying. But let's not make it a data invasive problem here because they've always had that data. It's the way that they're using the data. They're using the data. Yes, exactly. Yes. And they also didn't tell what phone you had inside of your house to tell if you are an iPhone or an Android if you could pay more or less.

Yeah. So now we're all going to have our burner Androids for cheaper subscriptions and we're all going to use our VPNs and come in from Namibia. And yeah, this is the only way we're going to get cheaper subscriptions. This is the nightmare. This is what we thought that AI would start to be used for.

And this is the bullshit that is coming. Yeah. We are at end stage in shittification. Well, speaking of end shittification, Adobe has been in shittifying for quite some time and they've finally gotten their hands slapped for it.

They've agreed to pay the U.S. government $75 million to settle its lawsuit over the company's alleged harmful approach to subscriptions. Everybody expect your $1.50 that we'll get from that. Oh, wait, no, we won't get any. We won't get a penny. The suit started in 2024 when the U.S. Department of Justice and the FTC filed a joint complaint alleging the company deliberately made it difficult to cancel subscriptions and obscured the frequently expensive early termination fee customers had to pay to get out of annual subscriptions that are paid monthly.

While we disagree with the government's claims to deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter. We disagree, but have $75 million. Because we think you're wrong. Yeah, and they're giving it directly to the Department of Justice. And by the way, that should have another zero at the end of it, at least for the trouble that they caused with this.

This is another grift. It's just going back. It's just, I'm surprised they didn't buy it in DJT coin, you know, to pay their bill because this is such a lowball bullshit fee. Bullshit. It's total bullshit. And, you know, the article just goes on and on about all the stuff that we talked about, the dark patterns that they were using and how they've modified things to make things more streamlined and transparent just because they got caught.

That's why. Yep. That's it. I've been in this loop with them. I'm sure you have too. It was a nightmare. Multiple times. Not only personally, but then I was also managing Adobe subscriptions for the company that I was working at for a while and trying to add and remove subscriptions was a nightmare.

Total nightmare. Oh, wait. Sorry. Adding subscriptions. Super easy. Super easy. Super easy to add. Yeah. Yeah. God forbid you want to downgrade. There was a fine company who used to advertise on this show who did temporary credit card numbers, which I'm not going to mention them because they're no longer advertisers on this show.

You know who you are. Come back. We had a good partnership, you fuckers. We gave you a lot of users, too. Lots of people who still use your program still talk about it. But so I would create a card on that service, swap it out for my Adobe subscription card, then cancel it and turn it off.

And then, you know, that's how I would have to cancel my subscription on Adobe. That was it. You know, you have to make a fake credit card or a temporary credit card. It wasn't fake. It was a real credit card number. And then actually have it switch over and then cancel it. It was ridiculous. And by the way, that still works.

For a lot of different things that are hard to do, that they say, well, will you call us to unsubscribe? I'm like, no, I'm just going to change my billing and kill the card. That's it. That's what you do. Yeah. So this is a new AI app that just came out yesterday called Google Stitch.

This is the basically the vibe coding of design work now comes and it came from Google. This is Google Stitch. And it's interesting. I have not played with it yet. And but in looking at it, I'm very fascinated because as a as a an ex engineer, you know, my design skills are not the best.

So this basically lets you, you know, vibe design your app that you're vibe coding over here with Gemini and Codex and Claude and all that shit. And so you have a nice pretty front end over here. Now, I'm dying to try this because they have they've actually put out a new file format called design.md.

Now, I don't know if you if you're deep enough, Brian, into actual AI coding or using much of the agents or stuff like that, because generally when you start a project, you create an agents.md file, which, you know, gives your agent marching orders on what it can do, what it can't do, what it should do, what it shouldn't do.

And there's skill sets for different things. So this is just another layer of that telling the telling the LLM what it can and can't do. The one thing, the reason I'm really kind of pointing this out is this is the first time I've seen an AI tool set come out that actually has instructions and a user manual, the link in the show notes.

If you go to the go to the show, there's actually a page that tells you how to use the tool because none of these other fucking LLMs have fucking instructions. There is no manual. It's like, here's a chat box. Type some shit. I'm like, OK. Yeah. But how does it work?

How do I make it work better? Oh, wait, there's no instructions. Yeah. So I think at least from that point, Google's done a fairly good job. I guess, you know, coders, we just like to tinker. Designers need actual handholding and instructions.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. This is pretty cool. Like it just generates a whole bunch of CSS for you. Yeah, that's I would definitely try this out if I had a project to do it with. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to be trying it out. I've actually got a project that I'm working on that I'm going to use it for. And it's nice because you can do website or application.

So yeah, I saw the split between it. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. There'll be more coming soon on the stuff that I'm working on because I need to make something. And I'm telling you, Brian, you will shit a brick if you could see the stuff that's going on. It's it's actually impressive from a coding standpoint.

From everything else standpoint, I fight with these things all day long because it's like they don't I say one thing and it tells me one thing. And then the next sentence, it tells me the actual actual opposite. I'm like, why do these things non-deterministic output?

Brian, I have to remember black box, man. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of sprinkling of random in there. A lot of sprinkling of random. Now, speaking of non-deterministic output, Brian, password creation. You would think that using an AI to create your passwords would be awesome because every time it should give you something completely fucking different and random.

The sprinkling of random. It should be great. The sprinkling of random should be epic. It is apparently not. Not when it sticks a finger in instead of a letter. Yeah, that too. That too. VQ2, poop emoji, finger, eggplant.

No, that doesn't work. But, you know, so when you ask your LLM, like Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, all of those major ones to generate a password for you. It's still a prediction engine. So it is going to go back to the well and start.

It finds the most popular basic password. So it gives you one, two, three, four, five. That, yeah, even if you give it specific instructions in your agent's MD file or whatever your MD file is, yeah, you're going to get the same shit. So these things are like a boon for phishers and hackers.

So people can totally tell now that you're not actually creating a random password. And, you know, the cybersecurity firm Irregular did the test on this and said that, yeah, they're not – it's not good. They're very predictable. There is no random – there is no good seed.

Like, I forget, who's the company in San Francisco that has the wall of lava lamps? Oh, crap. I can't remember anything. I see it in my mind. We use them every day. But anyway, the wall of lava lamps that they have a webcam pointed at to actually generate randomness for their seed, for their, you know, random seed generators.

This just goes back to the LLM well and said, let me predict exactly what everybody else would predict. And so the determination was use 1Password. Yes. That's it. GOG.show slash 1Password if you would like to go try them out. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace.

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And when you're ready to launch, use code grumpy to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash grumpy. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle.

Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line. When the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Cullen.

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

Media Candy. Well, it's been March break here. So the kid has been out of school, and we took a little trip and watched quite a lot of movies, a lot of kids' movies. So I've got a couple bits of reports here. Zootopia 2 has come out.

Zootopia 1 is something that I missed the first time around. My kid wasn't old enough, but we watched that a little while back. Very good. Zootopia 2, excellent. These are fantastic efforts. Fantastic Disney movies. Really well done.

Really funny. A lot of good jokes for the adults in there. Fantastic stuff. We also, I discussed that we had watched Shrek. Finally got my kid to watch Shrek recently and how it didn't really have legs. It wasn't as funny as one remembered it being. We watched Shrek's 2 and 3 over the break while we were on our little vacation.

And I'm happy to report they get better as they go along. Oh, good. They figured out the secret sauce. They figured out to actually put jokes in there and put a lot of stuff for the adults in there. So progressively funnier as they go along. Well, and you pointed out in Shrek 1, Puss in Boots wasn't even in it.

So the addition of Puss in Boots, I think, actually raised it probably, you know, 10%. It does raise the bar quite a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And I also mentioned recently that I had gone back to the West Wing well just to have it on in the background late at night to soothe my soul a little bit. It was on Netflix for a couple months for the entire time that I've been watching it.

And apparently it had just shown up on Netflix when I started watching. And just as quickly, poof, gone. This is the media landscape that we existed. It just disappeared after a couple months. And now it's back apparently on HBO Max. So I was able to find it and just had to remember where I left off and off I went again.

So, but I do love the hat switches that go on with all these things. It just disappears. Anyways. Star Trek, Starfleet Academy season finale aired. So I was able to cancel my Paramount for the time being, which is nice. Good. At least until Strange New Worlds comes back.

You know, they were able to solve the Molecular MacGuffin. They had a somewhat of a happy ending, I suppose. I thought it was very nice. They didn't really tease too much about what would be coming in a second season. Although we know we are definitely getting one. Overall, now that the season's over, what do you think, Jason?

I can't remember what the season finale entailed. I completely, I watched it. I cannot remember a goddamn thing from it. So I'm going to have to watch it again. What you mostly got out of it was Giamatti doing an awful lot of chewing on scenery, which was glorious.

Okay. Yeah. I need to watch it again. I think I was, I think the melatonin was kicking in for the evening and I just like, I just phased out. I had a phased transition. That's what I did. All right. We'll catch up on that one next week after you've seen it again then. So we can do our end of season wrap up.

Okay. Okay. So you talked about HBO Max and I would say that some of the things that you can get on HBO Max right now are Dune and Dune 2 and that miniseries. So I would recommend getting those before Dune Part 3 comes out because the official teaser trailer dropped this week. You've got till December 18th to go watch all of that stuff again.

Did you get a chance to see the trailer, Brian? I did. It wasn't bad. The thing that bummed me out, though, is he's basically announced this is it. We're not going to get, we're not going to get fucking crazy Leto putting sandworms all over his body and becoming a giant worm, which is, I was just gunning for this.

I wanted it. I wanted it so bad, but he's going to stop doing the movie. He stopped in the books after this one. So, all right. Yeah. It's kind of a bummer. It looks great. Like the other ones, it looks great. Soundtrack's going to be amazing. It's going to be a feast for the eyes. And it starts 17 years after the, after Paul Atreides takes the throne.

Now here's the other really bummer. I mean, it's a, it's a bummer that it's ending. Sure. The real bummer is Rebecca Ferguson has one scene in the movie and they put it in the trailer. So, okay. Yeah. I mean, she's, she's my favorite. She's beautiful, but we should get a lot of Anna Taylor Joy or whatever her name is because she's playing Alia, I believe.

So. Okay. Yeah. Okay. We'll see. I see. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it. I mean, it's next generation, man. But I mean, in the book, she's, she's in quite a bit, which is kind of a bummer, but you got to cut something. It's a movie. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure it's only going to be three and a half hours long. If the other ones are any, any, uh, bellwether, uh, paradise, paradise has been renewed for season three at Hulu.

Um, I am, we're coming up to the end of season two on, uh, yeah. Um, uh, I really liked season one. I really liked season one and season two is back out in the real world after things have fallen apart.

And it just turns into a mediocre fucking dystopian. It's a hexcape. It's not even a hellscape. It's a hexcape. Right. You know, it's just not that great. And it's predictable. And that, the only thing that has really made season one so good was, is the first episode at Graceland.

That was fucking phenomenal. Uh, but the rest of it so far has just been mediocre dystopian bullshit. I'm not, I'm, I'm not loving it. I'm not loving it at all. Um, you're not a big anime guy, are you, Brian? No, I'm not. Okay.

I found a movie that was, uh, I think this came through Gizmodo. It's called Mars Express. I think it came out in 2023. And they were saying that this movie should be up there with the pantheon of great anime movies like Akira and all of those movies. So I was like, okay, I'll check it out.

I haven't watched a good anime movie in a long time and I have to concur. It is damn near a perfect movie. Guess what it has on Rotten Tomatoes, Brian? 100%. It does have 100%. Good guess. I clicked on the link. You probably clicked the link in the show notes. So, um, yeah, I finished watching it last night.

Highly recommend it. It's only an hour and a half long. Great storytelling, great visuals, just great all around. Appropriate for kids or is this an older thing? Hell no, not appropriate for kids. Good to know my kid is starting to get into anime. He likes all that stuff and vetting all that stuff is a fucking pain in the ass.

Yeah, no, this is, this is a daddy, this is a daddy, uh, you. So, yeah. Yeah. And in the big news this week, Nathan Fillion has announced that Firefly will be coming back as an animated series with the whole cast. And how is it going to be the whole cast? You say, if you've seen Serenity and you know that Wash dies and all the other multiple characters die.

Well, they're going to set this new animated series between the end of the series and the beginning of the movie. So, Wash gets to come back because he's important because everybody, he was everybody's favorite fucking character and Joss Whedon killed him. Um, so we're going to see how this plays out. Uh, you actually have a story coming up, uh, about, uh, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I'm going to let you get to that one next and then I'll talk about my other story because these tie together very tightly. See, I knew this, uh, I was never really all that into Firefly nor was I really all that into Buffy. I know that you were into both, uh, but, uh, so Buffy was supposed to be coming back as well.

It was going to be Buffy new Sunnydale. Uh, they announced all of it and, uh, Sarah Michelle Gellar was back. Chloe Zhao was going to direct it. She's fantastic. How, how interesting is this going to be? Pretty cool. Uh, no, canceled. Announced over the weekend while Zhao was at the Oscars and Sarah Michelle Gellar was doing something else.

They seem to have timed it to make sure that they were busy and wouldn't be sitting around making angry TikTok reels or whatever the hell you do when you get pissed off about this sort of stuff. Uh, that didn't work. It did not work. Sarah Miguel, uh, Sarah Michelle Gellar had got ahold of the people at people and, uh, she informed everybody.

We had an executive on our show who was not only, not only not a fan of the original, but was proud to constantly remind us that he had never seen the entirety of the series and how it wasn't for him. So you got somebody like that on board who kind of killed it, uh, from music world.

I know how this works. If, uh, you had an A&R agent that signed your band and he quits or gets fired and you get replaced by somebody that doesn't give a fuck about you, your career is done. Yeah. So. Yeah. And that was just part of the story. Yeah. The bad executive, but also I hear the script was shit and Chloe Zhao was completely not what a right fit for the type of production that it needed to be completely wrong style.

So the whole thing was kind of an active mess. So the executive might've been right. The executive actually might've been right. They, well, they, it was wrong for Hulu to put that executive in, in charge of that property. You need somebody who's a fucking fan of that series to, to, you know, spearhead that. You're like, Oh, let's put a devil's advocate in there.

No, that's not what you do with, with, with a beloved series like Buffy. You don't fucking do that. Um, here's the problem that, that Buffy is going to face and Firefly are both going to face. And I'm going to be probably a little bit indelicate here, uh, the guy who made both of those, the guy who was canceled actually was the creative force behind those shows and was the spirit of those shows and trying to do those shows without him is probably not going to work.

No matter what you think about Joss Whedon, it doesn't matter. Those were his creations from his mind. And that's what made those shows, those shows. And this is also my theory as to why we may never be seeing Good Omens 3. They said it's coming out. David Tennant made a tweet.

They said it was coming out. We shall see. We shall see. We shall see. But yes, when, when the heart and soul of a show goes away, yeah, you can, you can hire some writers to kind of keep it, but you don't have that spearhead behind it to really guide the ship. And that's a fucking problem. Yep. So, yeah.

So, yeah, I, you know, like I said, people still listen to Michael Jackson. So maybe they should just let him come back and do the fucking shows and go back away and hide in a cave again. I don't know. I think you have to be dead. Oh, that's, that could be it. So, too bad.

This is real quick here. V for Vendetta, 20 years old. I cannot fucking believe V for Vendetta is 20 years old. I watched this movie in the theater two times on opening weekend when Bob Fogarty and I went to the Dignation recording in Reno, Nevada, and we were so drunk, we couldn't go snowboarding with everybody.

So we decided to spend the weekend in a, in a, in a dark movie theater to recover. I just, I'm, I'm just gobsmacked that this movie is 20 years old. I just, it's a great movie. It is a great movie. I highly recommend it. It has legs go. And especially it has more legs. Now, if you go watch, I don't know, anything outside that's going on, it really kind of is a, is one of those predicting bellwethers.

So there you go. Enjoy it. The dark side with Dave. Welcome to the dark side with Dave with a podcaster who never sleeps. Dave Bittner. Dave covers the daily cybersecurity beat on the cyber wire, bust scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yellen on caveat, digs into industrial security on control open, still shows up to stir up trouble and only while we're in the buildings and I need to take a breath.

Hi Dave. I need to take a nap. Yeah. Yeah. Hello, Dave. Good to be back. We've missed you. Well, thank you very much. I missed you guys too. So nice to see you all. All right. Let's just get into it.

I have a hat tip and this should be to, to likeoid on our discord channel. This should be a good news for you, Dave. And it certainly is for me of all the media and properties that, that my child has gotten into. Nothing has stuck as much as gravity falls with him.

And I have you to thank. You're the one that recommended that show to us. So I'll send you the bill for all the books that I've purchased. Yes. Yeah. I mean, we have gone through absolutely everything that there is to go through with gravity falls. He's watched the show multiple times.

He's gotten every single book that has been released so far. And now there's a new one coming. And this one's quite pricey, but I already know I'm buying it. Disney has announced the upcoming September 15th, 2026 release of The Art of Gravity Falls, a 252 page art book that delivers the definitive visual history of the series.

But as per usual, it's not just that. There will be new content in there. The book will reveal the true origins of Gravity Falls with series creator Alex Hirsch, returning alongside co-writer Rob Renzetti. This will have never before revealed developmental art from Alex Hirsch's personal archives, including the first inklings of the characters and world lost episode ideas, cut jokes, deviously hidden Easter eggs.

My God, those Easter eggs in the books and the translations that my kid has been doing. Yes. Every single one of Mabel's sweaters and much, much more. So very exciting stuff. I assume your family is still into this enough that this will be on your purchasing list as well.

Oh, yes. No, the timing works out. It'll either be on my son's birthday or Christmas list for this coming year. And that's just an excuse because I'll look forward to checking it out as well. Yeah, but yeah, it really is a remarkable show in terms of being a gift that keeps on giving.

It really has had legs compared to a lot of other things. It's curious that Alex Hirsch hasn't really done much since then. He did some stuff with Owl House, which is another fun animated series. We watched all of that. Yeah.

But, you know, I don't know. And I don't know if, like, you never know if... Is he difficult to work with? Was Disney difficult to work with? Was it both of them? Like, you'd think something successful like Gravity Falls would lead to follow-up projects, but it hasn't so far.

I don't know. Sometimes that's just kind of what you got, too. You got, you know, George Lucas. We had Star Wars, and then we got Howard the Duck. Right. True. You know. True. Yeah. So, yeah. He's been kind of tangentially involved with, like you said, Owl House.

I think he had some hand in Amphibia, which is another series, which was also fantastic and loved. Yep. So, you know, it's, yeah, it's interesting. But Gravity Falls is definitely one of those things. Although that does bring me up to my next point, the way in which kids consume media these days.

As compared to us, you know, we had our one episode a week on Saturday morning cartoons or things of that nature. Now it's all streaming, all available 24-7. As many times as you want to watch it, binge it, watch it all day if your parents let you get away with it.

I've just experienced, obviously I've experienced that with a lot of shows with my kid, but he just recently, the flip switch for the Muppets on my kid. That new show that really did it. We have seen every single movie. We have watched every single episode of every single show, except for the old stuff, because he hasn't quite gotten into that yet.

We've even, you know, Muppet Mayhem, all of it, nonstop, burn through it, watch every single piece of media that can possibly be consumed about this, watch trailers, watch extras, watch behind the scenes. Holy crap, kids consume things way differently than we did.

And I'm curious as to how that's going to affect them. Or will it? Or is this just the world now? Well, first of all, congratulations on your success as a parent. Thank you. That your child is consuming quality media.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess, did this start with VHS, where you could consume something over and over and over again? I didn't really have, yeah, I mean, VHS came along, well, I guess a better way to say it is, with our families obtaining a VCR, which was, I think, kind of late in that cycle compared to a lot of folks, because VCRs cost a lot of money.

So I don't recall ever having a movie that was like my go-to, shove it in the VCR and watch it over and over again, kind of thing. We did, but it wasn't, I guess the difference would be like, even the videos were incredibly expensive, or you had to go rent them, you know, from Blockbuster or whatever.

But, you know, it was your expensive VCR and then your $89 copy of Star Wars. So you had a copy. You didn't have all three movies, the 75, you know, VHSs that would have been the Clone Wars. You know, it's just that they have everything on tap so easily now.

You couldn't do that back then. And things were more special events, I feel like. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I don't know if it's a bad thing. My son's certainly having a blast. And, you know, it's up to us to limit how much he can watch, and we do that. But it is strange to just watch the obsessions, like, flare and then burn out generally really quickly.

It's some things like Gravity Falls or Muppets that don't. They keep going back to that well. But a lot of stuff, it's just like, it's a month. I've seen absolutely everything. I will never look at this again or think about it. Yeah. Yeah. The thing I wonder about, and something I've noticed with some of my younger co-workers, people who are in their 20s, is that they are proudly ignorant of having, proud of being

ignorant when it comes to pop culture knowledge. And in thinking about that, I credit a lot of that to the fact that our generation, in the evening, sat down with our parents to watch TV because it's all that was on.

And if you wanted to watch something, it had to be something that everyone agreed upon. And usually, your parents would choose anyway, except for, like you mentioned earlier, Saturday morning cartoons. So, we all had this shared pop culture thing, like TV shows that we probably, like shows like All in the Family and the Mary Tyler Moore show and things we probably wouldn't have watched as kids, but we did watch because we sat down with our parents.

It was the only thing that was on and we only had one TV and all that sort of stuff. So, I think today, the 20-somethings who grew up with their own mobile devices, they had access to whatever they wanted, like you're saying, all the time, and they weren't forced into that thing of spending that time with their parents or their siblings.

Right. So, that those cultural things didn't get absorbed, multi-generational cultural things didn't get absorbed in the same way that, like, us, me being forced to watch Bob Hope specials, right? Yeah.

Hee-haw. Hee-haw. I had to watch Hee-haw. Right. The Lawrence Welk show. I talk about Bob Hope specifically because a Bob Hope special would stretch back all the way into vaudeville, right? The people you'd have on that show, you know, Bob Hope with our special guest, Milton Berle.

I was going to say Milton Berle, always Milton Berle. But we knew who those people were and we knew a lot of the classic routines and things and the setup of those old-timey kind of jokes. Yeah. Because of that. And I don't think they're forced into that these days.

Yeah. It's the same, like, you know, I'm thinking like old-school Hollywood Squares. You know, you watched it because you didn't have a fucking choice. Right. There wasn't anything else on. Right. But you were indoctrinated into this kind of grander pop culture that everybody, a shorthand that everybody knew and understand.

Maybe that's why we're so stratified these days. Maybe that we don't have the shared touchstones anymore. We don't, we're not coming from the same place. We all go down our own rabbit holes, not just with media, but with news, with everything. Yeah. Because, you know, in my world growing up, I never, ever would have wanted to have Ruth Buzzy in my life.

But now I know who that is. Aw. Who was the guy with the confetti? Oh, yeah. And whatever his name was, he was the most annoying person on the fucking planet. Not Charles Nelson Reilly. Yes. That was a different guy. No, not Charles Nelson Reilly. No, he had, and he had a terrible toupee.

Yes. And he would come on the gong show and places like that. What the hell is it? Oh, it's going to drive me crazy now. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, you know, who would choose such a thing? But we all knew what it was. We all knew it. And it still sticks in our head, even if I can't remember the guy's name.

Rip Taylor. Rip Taylor. There you go. I know it's Rip Taylor because I just Googled confetti guy, and he was the first thing that came up. See, I was thinking Paul Lind. Paul Lind was the guy I was thinking about, too. Yeah. Center square, please.

Yeah. See, we all know it. We all know it. It's crazy. I don't think kids have anything like that right now. I know, because I've even asked my son, like, you know, do your friends watch the same shows? And sometimes they do. They convince each other to watch things and say it's really good.

But in general, they all watch completely different stuff. Hmm. Do you think, I know my son, my youngest son, who's 19 now, much of the media he consumes are podcasts. Hmm. So, I wonder if there's commonality there, but...

Maybe. Hopefully, it's not Joe Rogan. No, it's not. It's not. No. Hey, you know, it's a real-time social experiment, and we'll see. Yep. I hope I don't. May I be dead.

Well, speaking of dead, I've talked to you guys before about my idea of why haven't they reinvented the zombie genre yet because of EV vehicles now? I know they're silent running. And Daniel writes in, sorry, Jason, but Kia Australia already did the EV zombie apocalypse.

It's worth watching, even if it's an ad. And he sent the link to the ad, and the ad is, shh, it's zombie-proof. And it's a funny ad. Yeah. I thought they did exactly what I would have done. So, I mean, I would never buy a Kia, but otherwise, it's a great ad. So, I highly recommend.

Link will be in the show notes. Check it out. Thanks, Daniel. Yeah. And I'm not mad at that. I'm glad somebody did. That's all I wanted. I wanted somebody to take it and run with it, and they did. Yeah. There you go. See, that's also where we are today. If you think of it, chances are someone has already done it. Or there's porn of it.

Well, there's that, yes. Yes. There's that rule 42. Rule 13, I believe. Isn't it called 13? No, I'm not sure. I mean, shouldn't it be rule 69? Yeah, it should be. I forgot my 4chan rules, I'm sorry to say. Yeah. Yeah.

I had to memorize 12 steps, and the 42 rules of the internet went out the window. I put a link in here for a website page, whatever, that grabbed my attention in the past week here. It's called The Last Quiet Thing, and it's from someone named Terry Godier, I guess it is.

And it starts off with a little comparison between a simple Casio watch and your Apple watch, a tip of the hat to whoever built this website that the Casio watch actually shows the correct time while you're scrolling it by.

But I found it really interesting and worth my time, and it's all about how much everything demands our attention and our time these days when they didn't used to, because everything's connected.

I wrote a thing about this on Facebook and Mastodon about a week ago, just how it seems like everything is demanding your attention and trying to extract as much as possible out of you. And this is a little study on that. And I found it thought-provoking and worth sharing.

So it takes a few minutes to scroll through, but I think it's interesting. I don't know if you guys had a chance to check it out. I did. It's beautiful. Very cool. Absolutely beautiful. It's funny. I think this must be in our, now that we're old and we have the collective zeitgeist, unlike the kids these days, there must be something in the air about this, because I read your thing when you posted it.

It was wonderful. Even before you had posted that, my wife and I had just been having a lot of discussions about how frustrated we were with how much time and effort is involved just with the upkeep of all the digital things that we have now. Updating the apps and then going back and checking the settings, because now it stopped working the way that we wanted it to work.

And now there's an update and it doesn't do the same thing the way that we wanted it to do that it used to do. So now we have to figure out the new way to do the thing that we wanted it to do. And not only do I have to do it for me, now I have to go to my parents' devices, my mom's device, and then I have to go around and reset all these. And it's so like, all these things that we're supposed to make our lives easier and better are sucking the fucking life out of us.

Yeah, it's true. It's true. And yeah, I mean, surveillance capitalism. Yep. And I think partly what is so frustrating is that we grew up in the era where there was much hope that this was going to lead to the exact opposite of what it's led to.

Yeah. And so we were there. I guess we feel as though the promises that were made to us, they were lies. Well, it's what Jason and I always say on this show, too. It's like the internet. Oh, my God. This wonderful device that is just going to – the entirety of the world's knowledge will be available to anyone for free.

We will be able to discuss in deep thoughts about the things. We will move humanity forward. We get fucking shitty memes and surveillance capitalism. That's what we got out of it. Yeah. Be careful what you ask for. Yep. Yeah. And as I'm trying to build some new projects, I'm going back to not so much about features as about feelings.

I remember what it was like when I – with new technology, what I felt like when I had it and trying to, you know, recreate some of those feelings, not just the features, because the features are all different now. Features are – the internet as it was is dead. Forget it. It has been killed.

So – and software, as it was, was killed. But trying to rekindle some of that wonder that we used to have and how does that work is kind of what I think about a lot nowadays. And this thing really just hit home. It's just like, oh, my God. So much work that we put into this shit that we pay for. It's like, oh, I pay for the job that I have now.

Right. It sucks. Oh, by the way, they're stopping letting you pay for it. Now you have to subscribe to it. Yeah. Yeah, now I've got to subscribe. Right. And it's more if they know exactly where I live. Right. There was a thing I saw about a week ago. It was some YouTuber who – unfortunately, I don't remember exactly who it was.

It wasn't someone who I regularly watch, but somehow it was brought to my attention. I want to say this person was a woodworker or something like that.

And they had put out a little piece about – sort of lamenting how much AI had ruined so much of YouTube and that the legit publishers, small, medium-sized publishers like himself, the minute that they publish something, it would get sucked up by some AI that would then take the transcript, recreate it, generate graphics,

and basically do its own version of whatever they just published just to generate clicks and traffic and bleed off some of the interest in whatever that topic was. Right.

And – but the phrase he used as he was looking toward the future that caught my attention was, he said, I hope we're heading towards an economy of authenticity where there is a market for real things, for authentic things, where things that are not generated by the machine have extra value.

So, yeah, we were talking about earlier, there's a push for AI-free labels, but, of course, that's becoming mired down a bit with definitions and et cetera, et cetera. But, yeah, I think we're going to see that. I hope we're going to see that. I know our generation, those of us, and most of our listeners want that.

I'm curious to see if the younger generation give a fuck. Right. Right. They might not. They might not. They might not. And that's their world to live in. Until it comes down to making their own living. Right. Okay, so what are you going to do now, then? They're going to complain about how much – when we're all in old folks' homes and we insist on having face-to-face conversation with real human beings, they're going to roll their eyes as olds.

Yeah, I subscribed to your AI avatar for you. Why don't you just use that? Right, exactly. The robot cat is in the room. I don't understand why you're so needy. Yeah. Because it needs to be updated and the Bluetooth failed and I have to reset the Bluetooth. So, it just sits there licking its balls and I can't get it to come say hi to me anymore.

Right. That's why. I'm laughing at the notion of robot cat balls. It's coming. Trust me, it's coming. That's the latest show my kid's into. Yeah. Right, right. So, again, I came across a video that sent me down a little bit of a rabbit hole and I suspect this might resonate with the two of you.

I was thinking this week about Evel Knievel. Do you guys remember Evel Knievel? Of course. I was a little too young on the cusp for that, but again, shared cultural knowledge, obviously I saw it. More his later joke incarnation, Super Dave Osborne resonates a bit more with me than Evel Knievel, but yeah.

Yeah, and Super Dave may have been more successful than Evel in the long run. I don't know, but Super Dave was very funny. What started this was, I saw a clip that I've included here that was Craig Ferguson telling an Evel Knievel story.

It was basically about how Evel Knievel was doing one of his jumps and he knew he was going to miss and he missed and he crashed and the people come over to take care of him when he crashed. And the first thing he said was, get the girls out of my hotel room because he was afraid his wife was going to find out that he had girls in his hotel room.

She knew, she knew. I'm sure. But Evel Knievel was so iconic and looking back on it, it seems to me like it was so of its time that you had this one stunt person who would do stupid things, amazing, mostly he'd jump his motorcycle over city buses or over things.

And half the time he would crash, I think he was in the Guinness Book of World Records for Most Broken Bones or something like that. He was certainly in the running. But we had hour-long shows. I linked to one of them. It was like an hour, extraordinarily highly rated, wide world of sports on ABC that was an hour long, all leading up to Evel Knievel.

Three channels, Dave. Three channels. Evel Knievel jumping over a string of buses, whether or not he would make it. And I guess, so I've been thinking about this. I guess part of it was the simpler time. All of us kids had bicycles, so we pretended to be Evel Knievel, you know, building ramps and jumping over things, jumping over each other on our bicycles.

There were Evel Knievel branded bicycles. Also, the Evel Knievel stunt cycle was an amazing toy. The stunt cycle is it. That's it. The stunt cycle. Great toy. I mean, a classic toy that lived up to the hype because that was a fun toy to play with right up until the moment you got sand in the gears and then it stopped working.

But what a great toy. And to this day, there are people still making YouTube videos about making the stunt cycle jump over things, which I think is great fun. So this got me thinking, like, does every generation have an oddball thing that attracts a lot of attention and society really only needs one of them?

Right. Like, we had Evel Knievel. There was we only needed one of them. I'm sure there were other people who tried to be the stunt man. Evel had a son named Robbie Knievel who tried to follow in his father's footsteps and had some success. But, like, we needed one Evel Knievel, and that's what the world needed, and we were happy with it.

And it got me thinking, like, is Weird Al that way? I was going to say, that was my next one, is Weird Al. Yeah. I'm like, if I had to pick one, it'd be Weird Al. Yeah. We've got one Weird Al, and I hope to never live in a world without him because he's delightful, and I feel like we need him.

But I don't think we need two Weird Al's. We don't need a weirder Al. Right? Or Weird Ali, you know? Weird Al-esque? Yeah. I don't know.

So I was just sort of thinking back about Evel Knievel and how singular he was, and I don't know if, Jason, you remember, it was heartbreaking when I remember my dad coming to me and telling me that Evel Knievel had been put in jail because he had, like, beat up his manager with a baseball bat or something.

And so suddenly— I don't remember that one. I don't remember, like, anybody telling me that. I mean, I do remember it from the Being Evil documentary, which I highly recommend, the 2015 documentary. Fantastic. Gives you the whole run of Evel Knievel's life, and you can't go wrong with that.

But, yeah, I just remember sitting there on Saturday mornings watching him on the Wide World of Sports. Right. And that was it. You know, it was just so great. Yeah. Yeah, it was just like an hour of waiting for him to, like, come on, let's go, jump, jump, jump. Right. And I'm sitting there cranking the thing on my— The buses are moving into position.

Yeah, and I'm sitting there with my stunt cycle, just revving it around the room, like, can we go? Let's go, you know? Yeah, yeah. Dandy Don Meredith here with Evel Knievel. And, you know, well, Evel, what do you think? Well, I think I'll make it, Don. Well, let's see. And we just were glued to the set.

Yeah. Yeah. I put some links in the show notes, too. They're still making the stunt cycles. There's a company that took over the mantle and have a couple different versions of the stunt cycle that you can get. Yeah. And they're in stock. So, there was the stunt cycle.

There was the chopper version of the stunt cycle. I hated that one. Yeah. It would always just wheelie out of the gate, and it would never work right. Yeah. You had to tape, like, weights to the front. Yeah. No, it wasn't good. There was the dragster that had—the cool thing about the dragster was it had a parachute. And then there was the—what was it, like, the Evel Knievel action van, something like that?

It was basically an RV with his stuff on it. That's when he got canceled with all the kids in the back. Right. I think you could park the motorcycle inside or put it on the roof or something like that. But, yeah. It didn't say free candy on the side, but it was pretty close. Right. Right.

Exactly. If you shook it, cocaine would fall out. All right. Well, this is a fun trip down memory lane. I will not be with you, gentlemen, next week. I'm going to be at the RSA convention in San Francisco, which— Oh, it's that time again, eh?

It is that time of year, and it's always fun to be there, but it's not fun getting there. The six-hour flight is a lot, and the older and grumpier I get— Especially nowadays. Right. Well, that's the thing. Everybody's been telling me I've got to get to the airport super early because of all the TSA folks who've been sick because of their— Because I'm not being paid, so— Because I can say paychecks.

Yeah, I can understand. They're sick out, you know. Yeah. So, we'll see. Hopefully, smooth travels, and I'll have a time in San Francisco, and we'll see. Have a great trip. So, see you guys in a couple weeks. All right. Use the AI that tells you where all the man poo is.

So, you can avoid it. Oh, well, you know what? Actually, before we go, there is a new—what do they call it? Like a company store at Lucasfilm in San Francisco. Oh. Oh, okay. I know where you're going. We want to report. Right? Yeah. I already looked it up.

It's like a four-mile Uber from where I'm staying, so hopefully I'll have an hour or something. Hopefully. You can't get there. Do or do not. There is no try. Exactly. Exactly. I am so hopelessly overscheduled for this trip, but I will—all right.

All right. Goals. You can cancel something. Something's not important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. TSA sick out. Right. All right. See you guys. All right, Dave. Have a great trip. Closing shout-outs! Over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers, Mirjana and Akos.

Thank you very much, and we'd also like to thank Heather, Jeff, Francesco, Amanda, Philip, Sylvia, Chris, F.A., and Ross and Rafal. So, thank you all very much for your continued support and new support on Patreon. Thank you. Thank you. Patreon. Whatever. Patreon. Whatever. The money.

The money thing. The money thing. The other money thing. PayPal. We got a donation from Tom, and Dennis sent us $25. Thank you both so much. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Over the tip jar, we've got Sean and Theodore. So, if you would like to jump on the bandwagon and keep the show on the air, and we need you to keep the show on the air, go to gog.show.donate, where the links will be to every which way you can get to us and give us your hard-earned money a little bit at a time.

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So, it doesn't matter to us one bit whatsoever. Exactly. And just before we started recording, we got some sad news. Rest in peace, Chuck Norris. I know I saw on the news yesterday that he was rushed to hospital. And when you combine in your 80s and rushed to hospital, that rarely is a good outcome.

So, unfortunately, that seems to be the case. We don't know too much about it. The family is, you know, to the typical request for privacy at this time. But that just means TMZ will report something tomorrow, because that's the way it works. That's the way it works. That's a bummer. That's a bummer.

I'm surprised. Will Shatner actually outlived him. I didn't think that was going to be the case. I think Shatner's going to outlive everyone. It's Shatner versus Sulu at this point. I was listening to the TV in the background the other day, and I just heard, it's Will Shat coming to you. And I'm like, you're actually going by Will Shat now?

Why not? God. When you're in your 90s, you're hoping you Shat. Who gives a Shat? Yeah, that too. Until next time, I'm Brian Gilmeister. I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 738.

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