743: Category Five Dystopia

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. Got a little follow up real quick, Brian. I've mentioned my bankruptcy bullshit that I've been dealing with for quite some time now. I had my trustee meeting this week and it went swimmingly. So thanks for everybody that was asking about it and wrote in and sent me nice words. So it's not often that people are congratulating you on being broke as shit so i really appreciate it hopefully it's a once in a lifetime thing oh let's let's let's hope i don't trump this and have to do it like eight or nine times drop okay let's get into the shit since we've said the name which should not be mentioned yeah actually we have some pretty innocuous follow-up uh comparatively speaking uh before we get into the insanity that was this week we've been talking a lot about the age verification plans there's studies coming out some saying they don't really do much the kids are too smart as we argued we're trying to catch the dumb ones and that mostly works on them but anyways sony is adopting a new age verification policy for playstation users in the uk and ireland this is the first i've heard of a gaming company actually kind of leaping all the way in at least a big one like sony they're not making it a blanket requirement, but steps to confirm age will be needed to access communication, broadcasting, and certain in-game features beginning in June 2026. Includes essentials for online and social gamers such as joining parties, voice chatting, text messaging, or using third-party chat programs such as Discord. Some in-game communication tools like chats or sharing user-generated content will also only be available after an age check is completed. That makes sense. Don't send the Dickie, unless you're old enough. Yeah, I'm down with that. And you know, for us old people, I think the online voice chat will actually probably get better because it's the damn kids that drive you crazy in the games. So I'm down with that. Six, seven. Oh, F you. And the Turkish parliament has voted through a bill that would ban all children under the age of 15 from using social media. As part of the legislation, social media platforms will be required to enforce age verification measures on their apps, providing parental control tools, and react more quickly to harmful content being posted. Good fucking luck. Yeah, it's funny, too. The way that story wrapped in the notes here said the Turkish parliament has voted through a bill that would ban all children under the age of 15. Period. No more children under 15. That'd be fine. Well, hey, you got one, so. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, that's in Turkey. I'm not there, so. Okay. You ain't in Turkey, Turkey. Well, let's just start the fun. A year ago, Anthropics chief information security officer warned that fully autonomous AI employees would soon be operating inside major companies, complete with roles, memory, and system access. I know it's shocking, Brian, but that didn't happen. I know. Instead, so-called agentic AI systems are still struggling with reliability, security risks, and limited real-world usefulness. Extremely limited real-world usefulness from what I can tell online once you get past all the hype bullshit. Yeah. Studies suggest these systems may never reach the accuracy needed for critical business tasks. Also, CEO Dario Amadei predicted AI would write most code within months, but research is showing AI tools can slow down real developers. You know, not your vibe coders, but real developers slows them the fuck down. So the bullshit tsunami, Brian, is coming home to roost, and we're going to get balls deep into it shortly. Well, let's start right now. Speaking of the bullshit tsunami, this one comes from, shockingly, Elon Musk. If you bought a Tesla from before 2023, not all that long ago, in the hopes that a future software upgrade would render it capable of unsupervised full self-driving, the as-yet unrealized dream of a truly self-driving car, in other words, that's never going to happen. and Elon Musk admitted it on an Erlings call on Wednesday. Never for those cars. Never. It's possible you might be able to get a hardware upgrade rather than having to trade in your Tesla for a new one, but from the sound of it, that would involve retrofitting hundreds of thousands of cars with new computers and cameras, and it's going to be a colossal new project for Tesla, which could barely manage their own projects right now. The full self-driving hardware package, known as hardware 3 was standard until hardware 4 came what about hardware wars came along in early 2023 although it took until may of that year for hardware 4 to reach all models unfortunately hardware 3 i wish it were otherwise but hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised full self-driving musk said during the call on wednesday pissing off millions of shareholders and owners we did think at one point it would but relative to hardware four it has only one-eighth the memory bandwidth of hardware four customers have voiced frustration about tesla not delivering full self-driving and tesla faces a class action lawsuit in australia australia alleging that despite i always start to go into the uh monty python australia australia we love you every time i say it anyways there's a lawsuit in australia because basically you said that it's full self-driving and it's not. Seemingly in an effort to stave off customer revolt over the revelation that hardware three packages will never be capable of unsupervised driving, Musk has described the following program, which will probably go as well as his diners. For customers that have bought full self-driving, what we're offering is essentially a trade-in, like a discounted trade-in. For cars that have the previous hardware, we'll also be offering the ability to upgrade the car to replace the computer. So you bought full self-driving and now you have to spend more money to get full self-driving. Yeah, pretty much. But it's discounted, Brian. He also threw in this curveball. You also need to replace all the cameras, unfortunately, to go to hardware four. In other words, your car has to be retrofit with multiple new parts in order to even stand a chance of ever receiving a software upgrade that still doesn't exist that will enable Tesla's unsupervised full self-driving mode. He claimed on the call that they plan to create micro factories or small factories concentrated in population centers where Many production lines will change out the hardware. What are the chances of that ever happening? I am going to go place my CalShe bet right now. Yeah, go on CalShe right now. You know, but they do have all those assembly lines that were making Cybertrucks that aren't making those anymore because nobody wants those. So maybe they can retrofit those to do these. To do the retrofit for the retrofit for the retrofit to get the thing that doesn't exist. Yeah, to get the software that doesn't do the thing that the software said it's going to do. Which doesn't exist. Holy shit. Wow. and people call him a fucking genius in the news okay brian we have a full-on category five dystopia about to hit us and i think the news kind of bears that out this week so let's get to it and any other ceo in history would have been fired by now exact from what we just talked about but elon is making sure that he can never never ever get fired at SpaceX after it goes public. So SpaceX plans to retain Elon Musk's control after it IPOs, which is coming soon, by issuing dual class shares that give him and a small group of insiders super voting power. Now that's about 10 votes per share, while public investors receive shares with just one vote each. And since Elon has the lion's share of the shares, you know how that works. And that structure ensures Musk maintains effective control over major decisions, board elections, and company strategy, even after going public. Now, it's worth also noting that that doesn't mean just SpaceX, because if this goes through, he will, of course, wrap all his other companies under the SpaceX banner, retaining his superpowers over all his companies. Yeah, the only one that's missing at this point, I think, is Tesla, because XAI is under there, Shitter's under there. So that's why he's been consolidating for a couple years now with this in mind. So the company is targeting a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion in a $75 billion raise, which would make it the largest IPO in history. And Musk will remain. He'll be CEO, CTO, and chairman. Give me a fucking break. And lord of the manor. And lord of the cock ring. Yeah. Whatever. So here we go. New financial disclosures show SpaceX generated $18.67 billion in revenue in 2025, but posted a $4.94 billion loss, largely driven by heavy investment in AI infrastructure tied to its XAI business. Starlink seems to be about the only thing profitable right now, offsetting those losses, because he's still trying to spend all the money on the big spaceship that keeps crashing over the Caribbean. So he's basically, he's Zuckerberg-ing it. So, you know, because Mark is the, nobody can get rid of Mark Zuckerberg. He wants to be unkillable too. So there you go. Clash of the Titans. from the who could have possibly seen this coming files, prediction market Kalshi has taken action against three political candidates, alleging that each was engaged with insider trading of information about their own campaigns. The company has implemented new rules last month aimed at preventing politicians and athletes from placing bets on events they can control, and it said those guardrails helped to flag the trio of these cases. These three candidates, and I want you to pay attention, listeners, so you can vote these motherfuckers out, are Mark Moran of Virginia, Matt Klein of Minnesota, and Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas. Kalshi reached settlements with Klein and Enriquez, both of whom cooperated in the platform's investigations. Each will face a fine of less than $1,000 and suspensions from the platform for up to five years. Moran's case has resulted in a disciplinary action with a five-year suspension and a fine of more than $6,000. And get this, he then posted on X about the situation and claimed, this was essentially a stunt to see if he'd be caught and to highlight how this company is destroying young men yes i did i did my illegal actions for you the children i bought all that cocaine just to point out the flaws in the system out of your nostrils and put it into mine because i'm a fucking hero yep that's it that's it and i'd like to point out that all of these fines are not government mandated fines these are fines by the platform because there's no regulation on this shit well if you think uh if you think that was fucking with these markets a hair dryer was allegedly used to rig a poly market bet on the weather at charles de gaulle airport in paris according to a report by the telegraph yes you can place bets on the temperature at charles de gaulle airport in paris french authorities note that the official temperature readings at the airport spiked twice in the past month, reaching levels much higher than expected. The gambling site relies on readings from temperature sensors, and the one at Charles de Gaulle Airport is on a public road with no buddy impeding access to it. The operating theory is that someone snuck in and used a battery-powered hairdryer to bring the recorded temperature up well beyond the actual heat outside. Meanwhile, the Polymarket page indicated less than a 1% chance of the airport exceeding a particular temperature. And successful bets on these fluctuations netted an unknown user around $34,000 because they went out on a road with a hairdryer and gamed the motherfucking system. Hey, man, good on them. Good on them. I say. If something can be rigged and there's money to be made, it's going to get rigged. Humans are going to human. Yep. Yep. All right, let's get into the... But you skipped the best part. polymarket didn't force them to return the money they got to keep it so that's where i'm saying good audio yeah all right yeah temperature hey look temperature went up that's all that mattered nobody said it had to be at like god's will yeah was it was there force majeure involved i don't think dyson's will apparently yeah although those are pretty expensive air dryers i know my wife oh 34 000 is only going to get you like five of them anyways let's move on to the ai mess despite the months-long feud between anthropic and the pentagon the nsa is using ai's company's news mythos preview according to axios the news comes days after dario amati met with the white house chief of staff susie wiles and other officials reportedly to discuss mythos the white house later said that the meeting on friday was productive and constructive and when president trump was asked about it he said he had no idea no shit according to Axios sources the NSA is one of the roughly 40 organizations Anthropic gave access to Mythos Preview and one said it's being used more widely within the department too now hold on hold on aren't aren't they still uh you know uh bad actors sued yeah they're bad actors the Pentagon and they're getting they're suing the Pentagon and that's still going on right so as far as I know that's why nothing has any fucking rule of law anymore because if you're you know if you're a supply chain risk and the fucking NSA is using you are you really a supply chain risk whose supply chain are we risking yeah that's the question well we'll see uh apparently i mean we've kind of said that you know mythos came out with quite the press release saying that they were uh it was too dangerous to be released ever which is obviously not true since people are using it and uh it's kind of a bit of a pr thing but apparently it is helping uh it helped mozilla uh using mythos helped Mozilla's team find and patch 271 vulnerabilities in the latest release of the Firefox browser. The blog post from Mozilla feels like a positive sign for Anthropics Project Last Wing. Mozilla also noted that in its time with Claude Mythos, the AI wasn't able to turn up any bugs that a human wouldn't have been able to find given enough time and resources, which indicates the AI is presently able to do more to crack cybersecurity protections than a person can. But of course, they did it much faster. Right. But they didn't. Here's what we also don't know. Did they try and run Opus against it? The only reason Mozilla might be running, you know, Project Glasswing is because Anthropic gave the two of them for free because Mozilla doesn't have any money because 271 vulnerabilities is one more vulnerability than the 270 people that are left that use Firefox. Just saying. I got a little icon in there. I just never launch it. Good to know I have 271 vulnerabilities sitting there because I haven't updated. You better update that bitch. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. 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The New York Times Wirecutter has named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash GOG, code GOG. Well, from the Physician Heal Thyselves category, Anthropic is investigating potential unauthorized access to its clawed mythos model. That has been touted for its ability to find cybersecurity flaws. Maybe you should turn it on itself. because somebody got in. No, this one is genius. I got something to say about this. Go ahead. Several unauthorized users who reportedly have a private chat on Discord supposedly gained access to Mythos through a developer portal and by making an educated guess as to where the model might be located. That same group may also have access to other unreleased anthropic models, according to the report. This is a bit, this reminds me a bit of like when you wanted to get into somebody's images and they had a WordPress site and you just start guessing what the folder was. Just go to wp-content slash date slash, you know just run through that uh so yeah yep it got hacked it didn't it didn't get hacked brian it did not get i want to i want to clarify this they guessed the url based on the structural layout of all of the previous urls before them this is where experience comes into play you know these are just these these guys who are vibe coding everything that work at anthropic and you know they're just these are just people who have not been through the shit like we have exactly and know that, you know, you got to change some shit up because if it's just, you know. When I was doing web development and, you know, we'd have to put things online for clients and clients could never remember usernames and passwords. So you kind of give up on that. And I learned really quick that you don't put it on, like, say, Coldplay.com slash dev. Because as soon as you do that, those images appear on every fan site known to man. So you start doing things like Coldplay.com slash FuckNut25. There you go. and even that can still get put so you then you got to put your ht access in with your robot rules your robot exclusion rules but the best thing to do is just to send them a user and password that's encoded in the url that they can then look at which used to be able to do in the old ht access days i don't know if you can do that now but you know but see the still the thing is it's like we learn shit like this the hard way so there's now this is a new generation doing the same shit that we did but with much higher stakes and much bigger fucking paychecks exactly well today amazon announced that it will invest $5 billion in Anthropic, as long with as much as $20 billion in additional payments if certain milestones are met. This news follows the initial $4 billion investment Amazon made in Anthropic back in 2023 and a second $4 billion round from 2024. On Anthropic's side, it is committed to continue use of Amazon's custom Tranium silicon for its AI models. This latest agreement will see Anthropic promising to spend more than $100 billion on AWS technologies over the coming decade. So you invest, that's roughly five, 10, another 12, let's just go all in. So 25 and another eight, $32 billion to get them to spend $100 billion on your tech. But it's a bet because who knows if Anthropoc will be around. Yeah, we'll talk about that shortly. All they're doing is betting. Amazon, if you want to make money, just go to Polymarket and bet on temperatures at Charles de Gaulle and fly a fucking couple of your jets over that thing That all you gotta do oh man yeah this is it the fake math the fake math we talking about that and it also just it's everybody just throwing fake money at each other making deals for like fake money you give me this and then you'll get that later and blah blah none of this is ever going to happen right but the thing with amazon is they actually have real money to put behind anthropic who's who's going to give them back fake money by using amazon it's just basically they give it to them and say Can we have it back now? That's it, you know, just running the numbers. Because it's all about data centers, Brian. Now, more than 3,000 data centers are planned or under construction across the U.S., and a new report warns the environmental cost could be massive, massive, I tell you. Just 11 gas-powered facilities could emit over 129 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, more than the entire country of Morocco. But make sure, make sure you don't use any more of your plastic straws. Oh, God, no. We can't get plastic straws anymore. We got to have the metal ones. Dude, you can't even get plastic garbage bags in California anymore. It's only paper. It's only paper. That's right. We all got to do our part, Jason. We all got to do our part. Yep. Fucking joke. It's a fucking joke. This whole fucking world is a fucking joke. Oh, would you like me to continue? Please do. I've got more. I've got more. So XAI has been pulling millions of gallons of drinking water daily from the Memphis Sand Aquifer to cool its facilities. Don't take showers more than five minutes. Don't be in your shower for more than fucking five minutes, people. Do your part. So all while indefinitely delaying a promised $78 million water recycling plant that was meant to offset that usage. $78 million seems like nothing compared to what these people are spending. So what are they holding back for? Because that would do something good, and it doesn't do anything for them except for maybe decent PR if anybody notices. Yeah, well, it's not working right now because local officials and community groups say the project was oversold with construction now stalled and no timeline for completion. Meanwhile, XAI continues to scale aggressively, including plans for additional data centers nearby. And it even reports significant as it even reports significant financial losses. Well, maybe you should lose 78 more million dollars just to make the people around you happy so they can take a shower and scrub off all this shit you're putting in the air from all those fucking methane generators that you're using. Just saying. But, Brian, it gets better. At full build out, its operations could consume over 10 million gallons of water per day. Just let that sink in. 10 million gallons of waters per day for Grok, the AI that nobody even wants, let alone the ones that people actually use. And this is going to be in most of it's going to be most permanently lost to evaporation. Now, they should, you know, reclaim it and send it to the people so they can take a shower. That might be something. Turn it into gray water. I don't know. Make sure you get those low flow toilets. I swear to God. You got to get the low flow toilets and make sure you replace your old dishwasher with the new one that uses a lot less water because it's really going to make a fucking difference. We did just replace our dishwasher with one that uses less water. That's just because our old one broke. Now, here's where it gets even funner, Brian. I know funner is not a word, but I'm bringing it back. Startup founders are burning cash on AI instead of hiring humans, and it's called token maxing. Yes, token maxing. It's an AI trend that treats massive compute bills as a badge of honor. Make sure you work extra hard for your company. Put in those extra hours because they're going to take care of you. You got to work. You got to do your best for that company until they fuck you. Yep. One CEO bragged about $113,000 monthly AI invoice for a four-person team, claiming those tokens now handle engineering, marketing, and more. Now, look, Brian, I will write shitty code all day for one-tenth of that. Yeah, but nobody wants to Jason max. No, they don't. Nobody wants to Jason max. God damn you, Brian. Jason maxing. We have a show title. Ah, damn it. now see inside companies like meta dashboards reportedly track employees token usage reinforcing the idea that more ai spend equals more productivity but this is what a lot of these dumb little fuckers don't quite understand is it's easy for meta to say that because they own the model and the infrastructure you don't you little shit so stop stop wasting money and hire some goddamn people or get a real idea because the ai company that you're running is generally just a wrapper for another fucking foundation model. And you don't own anything because you're building your entire company in somebody else's backyard. Back to the same thing we've been saying since day one of the show, just AI wasn't around then. Yep. Same thing. Yeah. And they're about to have a real fucking reckoning because the era of cheap AI is starting to get priced to what it actually costs. Yes, that's right. We've, Brian, we've said that it's coming. We said it's coming. It's coming. It's coming. It's finally fucking here. It's the Uber model. It's always been the Uber model. We're going to price cut ourselves underneath the ground. We're going to make everything so cheap. First taste is free. Have at it, people. And now we're going to screw you. yep and here's the fun part uh anthropic and open ai are tightening the access and pushing users off their generous free tiers after agents like open claw started hammering their systems now these people have been saying agentic is coming agentic is coming the world is going to be great well oh first no we had uh agi agi is not going to work okay let's agentic yes agentic is got ag in it we could still keep that it's got an ag and an eye it's got to go down the line a little bit but so they fucking got it now open claw was was you know and here's the funny part you know open claw was the big you know agentic thing that you could go buy a four thousand dollar mac mini and run yourself to delete all your emails and probably ruin your life with so open ai goes and hires the guy that made open claw for like a hundred million dollars and just the and the product has just been nobody cares about it anymore because everybody else has run out their agentic ship because agentic ai is just another fucking wrapper around more ai to to run more compute. The problem is that they didn't really count on the fact that, oh, shit, everybody's going to use our product now. And we know every time somebody uses that product, it costs them more money than they're getting paid. So AI is moving. It's like new order single. Yeah, exactly. They're basically selling Blue Monday on vinyl here, people. Yep. We lose a dollar on every order, but we're going to make it up at scale. That's right. So yeah, all the AIs are moving from flat rate free access to token based. That's it. And it's happening everywhere, everywhere. It's not even the paid where you're getting crunched on now. I've been using Claude recently to help write our social media updates, right? And it was always like I only make 10 queries to knock out all of our social media updates for the week. Obviously, I edit them. I don't take them as is. But anyways, I ran about 10 queries to knock out the whole week's worth. And that used to never be a problem. Now I can only do like six. And then it cuts me off. so now yeah and you just and by the way here's the tip for that use uh use one of the older models it doesn't cost them as much to run so you get more shit yeah you know don't use the latest opus use the sonnet and it still works here it just comes back a little bit slower and honestly i found it better when i had to use it so i i was that that program that i've been working on my um uh xcode project the the iphone app yeah i i would run it for sonnet for like five hours trying to get stuff done and I would just watch TV while it ran. And then I flipped it over to Opus one day to see how much better it was. And my, the meter that shows you how much you have left on your, on your quota went from this to full in about 45 seconds. So I'm like, not going to use that one anymore. So I think everybody's going to have to be dialing back because it's, it's coming down to it. Like people are going to have to go back to actually doing the fucking work again, Brian. I know it's going to be difficult. It's going to be difficult because everybody's been lazy maxing. And by the way, last one on this, Microsoft is going to shift GitHub down to, they're going to token base too. Everybody's going to token base because they can't afford to keep running these free ones. The quotas are going to get smaller and these token maxing guys are just going to be out on the street because they never learned how to code in the fucking first place. Yep. All right, let's switch to other types of dystopia. the Department of Homeland Security is reportedly developing smart glasses that could be used to collect intelligence on immigrants and U.S. citizens. That's great. Wonderful. Devices would help ICE agents identify illegal aliens from a distance by capturing video and comparing it to biometric data like facial recognition and walking gait, according to budget documents. DHS wants to deploy ICE glasses by September 2027. This will make surveillance of U.S. residents ubiquitous, according to the report, which is goddamn dystopia. Yes, it is. It might be portrayed as seeking to identify illegal aliens on the streets, but the reality is that a push in this direction affects all Americans, particularly protesters. A DH lawyer speaking on the condition of anonymity because nobody wants to be on camera anymore because this is getting ridiculous. So, of course, this is worrying civil liberty groups who will do fuck all about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to say this was an Engadget article, but this is from Ken Klippenstein's newsletter. Highly recommend people go find that on Substack and subscribe. He's a fantastic journalist. I give him a few bucks a month. He does great work and you get all this stuff like straight from the horse's mouth. But just I just want to put in a plug for Ken there because he does he runs a fantastic I mean, fantastic newsletter. Yeah. And in case you haven't gotten around to reading Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zemiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, because why would you do that to yourself? The company best known for supplying AI-driven defense and surveillance software to the likes of the U.S. Army, ICE, and the New York Police Department shared a 1,000-word ex-post last weekend covering its main points. It is a manifesto of staggering proportions that made me want to vomit in my mouth. Yeah, that's about it. These people should be in jail. yeah for many reasons for many many many reasons but yeah links in the show notes if you have not read this and you should uh this is this is their plan this is what they want and it is as again as dystopian as it can possibly be this is what they're heading for this is why they're plowing money into trump people this is why they're backing politicians this is what they want read it read it something else you need to read and buy some booze before going to bed because you're probably going to need it yeah and something else you probably want to read and i've got no real commentary on this other than boy oh boy it's it's eye-opening uh this is an article over at the atlantic what i learned about billionaires at jeff bezos's private retreat and if you think that they're billionaires are just like us they are not no they're not they are not even human not anymore not anymore so now i i want to i'm trying to end the news on some highlights and uplifting things you know that's what that's my goal now it doesn't always work but so i found yes so if your brain feels like it's been marinating in tiktok sludge scientists at uc santa barbara may have a fix and it's not logging off it's watching weirder stuff in a study of about 500 people just seven minutes of experimental animated shorts boosted creativity and conceptual expansion, while standard viral videos did basically nothing. So put on Twin Peaks. There you go. Participants who watched the artsy clips were more creative, wrote more creative stories and showed more flexible thinking, even though they actually liked the junkie videos more. Doritos are delicious. Broccoli is good for you. Exactly. Although I like broccoli too, but not everybody does. Maybe that's why we're the hosts. The theory, ambiguous, challenging content forces your brain to work instead of just doom scrolling grooves deeper. So there's a short video in the article. They list the short video site that they used. I went and I watched some stuff on there. And it's great. It's actually fantastic videos on there. And you can watch them on the crapper and then come out smarter and happier and lighter and actually more creative. I should put a few of them in the show notes that I liked. there's some there's some really really really good stuff on there highly recommended but i this makes sense it makes sense your brain is actually working yeah and uh i found this to be a feel-good story as well this came from a friend of the show ross who sent this to me uh this is a story over at wired the scammer used an ai generated maga girl to grift super dumb men a med student said he's made thousands of dollars selling photos and videos of a young conservative woman he created using generative tools, and he's not alone. That's great. Yep. Grifton the Grifters. Indeed. Indeed. And the final feel-good story, just to end on a good note, the jaw-dropping iPhone video of the Earth setting behind the moon is rightfully breaking the internet. There's a link over at Gizmodo. You can find the video anywhere. Watch it. It's beautiful. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. 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That's Shopify.com slash grumpy. moving from our real dystopia to sci-fi fake dystopias a hat tip to jansu on our discord silo season three just got its apple tv release date and first trailer it will be premiering on july 3rd on apple tv and the trailer link is in the show notes i of course watched it having read the books, I kind of, I know what's coming. There's no real surprises here. I'm a little worried about this season because for me, this show is 99.999999999% Rebecca Ferguson. Yeah. And most of this season will not be about Rebecca Ferguson's character. So I'm sure they're going to work her in because they know that she's the big part of this show too. So I think we're going to be bouncing back and forth between the timelines a lot. But, you know, I love the show i i love both seasons i can't wait for the third regardless of what's going to come so yeah i'm i'm just amazed that it's july 3rd this year i thought it was going to be another three years the way they've been making tv lately so that's good that's good yep uh and we've also been waiting for jessica jones to show up in daredevil and she finally did for about 17 seconds which is what we predicted and it was fine it was a good 17 seconds it was great i i love her i bring back jessica jones for god's sake bring back her own show yep yep she's still a badass still looks great and we did get a little little tease on one of the the agents that he might not be what he looks to be like human so that was that was a good that was a good little they slid that in there very subtly i thought that was pretty good they did they didn't beat you over the head with it which is what they usually do with daredevil yeah yeah and i gotta say after this season i think i don't think there's any any you know toothpaste left in the tube not daredevil this is not not unless they bring back all four of them together again. But who wants a Fist of Fury guy? Yeah. All right. What else we got? Well, Amazon is here to remind you about its very expensive Rings of Power TV show, which in a surprise move is apparently dropping its third of five planned seasons earlier than expected. The report comes from The Hollywood Reporter and is yet to be confirmed by the streamer, but a source close to the production told The Trade that Rings of Power Season 3 will be arriving later this year rather than the expected 2027. release date. Season 2 wrapped in October 2024, so instead of three years, we'll only be waiting two. God damn. I mean, it's a pretty show, but let's let a fire under it, guys. Let's go. Let's go. At least it's coming. I like the show, so we'll see. Jumping forward several years from the events of Season 2, oh my god, I have to go watch Season 2 again. You got me into it, and I gotta say, I fell in love with it, and then I was very bummed that it was over, so that sucked. I think it's a fun show, and they definitely spent a lot of money on it. It's very pretty. Yeah, speaking of pretty fun shows that you should never watch the very end of, Battlestar Galactica is coming back to streaming services finally. I don't want to spoil it for everyone, but there was no plan. I'm just telling you now. So May 1st on Paramount Plus and Pluto. I have the entire series and all the miniseries and everything on my hard drive because I went to Sweden because I was tired of it not being on streaming. But yeah, I got to tell you, Brian, it's a great show. It is a great show. There are some definite like stinkers in there. But that first season is fucking solid. It is so solid. Highly recommended. If you've never seen the Battlestar Galactica reboot, you just gotta, you just gotta. Yeah it great even with its flaws One of my favorite bands of all time has come back Dead Can Dance have returned with Death Cults the latest entry from their newly launched run of monthly 2026 releases So instead of putting things out on streaming services and all that these are all being put out exclusively through Bandcamp thus forcing me to sign up for Bandcamp for the first time ever. They have not announced a new full-length album alongside the singles. There's two now, and the official framing remains a month-by-month release starting rather than a traditional LP rollout. The strange thing about this is Dead Can Dance has always been really two people, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard. So far, the songs have only involved, as far as we can tell, Brendan Perry. We don't know if Lisa Gerrard's involved. We don't know if she will be involved. There's no public clarification whatsoever about if she's involved or not. She actually hasn't posted anything on her private, not private, on her own socials other than some other stuff that she's involved in that isn't Dead Can Dance. So who knows what's happening, but the songs are great, so I don't care. It's been such a long time. The last album that they released was back in, I think, 2020 or something like that. And then they were going to tour and I had tickets and then pandemic. So tour was canceled and then tour was reannounced and pandemic came backish. And so tour was canceled again. Then the tour was reannounced and I had tickets and then canceled because of health issues. And nobody said what the fuck was going on. This band has been a mystery forever. I don't care. There's new music. Whatever. I'm happy. Well, here, Brian, from the description that you just told me, I'm really worried that there's going to be another fucking pandemic now. So thanks for that. Because every time they make new music, it seems like the world falls to shit. We don't need an actual pandemic. Have you seen who's in charge of health and human services in your country? Yeah. It's a fucking walking pandemic. What else we got? Well, let's talk about what happened at Coachella. I actually did watch a bit of it, particularly the Nine Inch Noise, which is Nine Inch Nails with Boys Noise collaboration that they did at Coachella, which was fucking phenomenal. And the album's absolutely fantastic that they put out. But, you know, I'm on the wrong coast, so I'm a bit late. So I didn't see any of the later shows that were on. I did not catch Madonna, a surprise appearance, joining Sabrina Carpenter, who I've decided I liked since The Muppet Show. Yeah, really? I'm quite a fan. But you want to talk about dystopia, I've included a link in the show notes and there is an image. Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter, dance music, particularly Madonna, known for dance music. She came out. Nobody danced. Everybody is just standing completely still with their phones. it's really weirdest thing i've ever seen in my life it is so did you watch the tiktok video where they zoomed out to the whole audience yep it's creepy it's like it's like how hard does it have to be to be a performer performing to that with no feedback from your audience whatsoever nobody seems to be enjoying it they're just trying to capture it for what there is a 4k stream on YouTube that is capturing it. Put your fucking phone down. You want to watch it. Watch the 4K stream shot with professional cameras later. Yeah. I mean, you can probably see the zits on Madonna's ass with the cameras that they've got. Why are you sitting there at a show? The show is supposed to be fun. You're supposed to sweat, bump into people, get grind and do fun shit. Apparently, I'm glad I've aged out of Coachella because if this is what it is now, no thank you. There's a different performance that I saw. I saw FKA twigs perform. Oh, I like her a lot too. Oh, she's an amazing performer. A guy I work with Deshaun Wesley and a bunch of our Vogers went out to Coachella and they had a surprise performance at the end of her first night the first weekend in Coachella and it was awesome. The crowd is going nuts. Absolutely nuts. And then you can see Sabrina Carpenter. It's completely different. And it's funny the last time I, the reason I first had to watch Sabrina Carpenter is because Deshaun was dancing on her Grammy thing. So My, this is my only, he's my only like link to new music anymore. But FKA Twigs is insanely good. Yeah. Well, this was, this was dystopian again. And yeah, as the article points out, there's no wrong way to listen to music. And I would say, except for maybe this, Deezer, who has been reporting quite well on how AI generated music is seeping into streamers, has come out with another report. they reported receiving nearly 75,000 uploads of AI-made tracks per day on its platform. Per day. Those are going to start going down now that they have to start paying for them. They probably have, probably. They published a report revealing that 44% of its daily uploads are AI-generated songs accumulating to around 2 million flagged songs per month. Deezer said more than 13.4 million songs were detected and flagged as AI-generated across 2025. the statistics are made possible with their patent pending ai music detection tool which was launched in january 2025 a few months following the release deezer announced that it saw around 20 000 ai generated tracks uploaded a day which we reported on when that first came out so it is just increased despite all that deezer says that only about one to three percent of total streams on the platform involve ai generated music and that a majority of these streams are marked as fraudulent and demonetized. So they're working on it. They're trying to do it. But man, that is a flood of shit. Yeah, yeah. A tsunami, as it were. Yes, a tsunami of shit. Apps and doodads. Well, Brian, Apple has released a software update for iPhones and iPads to fix a privacy bug that allowed deleted messages to be recovered through forensic tools. Now, I told you they were going to fix this one fast, and they did. They even released a point patch. It was a point patch to the point patch to get this one out. So, yeah, the issue stemmed from how the operating system handled notifications. When a message was received and displayed in a notification, its content could be cached and stored locally for up to a month, even if the message itself was later deleted or set to disappear in apps like Signal. So this was how they backtraced those old Signal users, and they got convicted for that. So Apple is big on the privacy side. So they're like, we're sorry. We got you, fam. Our bad. Yeah. Yeah. Well, amidst ongoing legal trouble with several states and more than 100 pending lawsuits, this week Roblox announced a $12 million settlement with Nevada, allowing the company to avoid going to trial in this case. As part of the deal, Roblox has agreed to give $10 million over three years to local children's support programs like the Boys and Girls Club and other non-digital groups, while spending another $2.5 million to fund a law enforcement liaison position and awareness campaign regarding online safety. That awareness campaign should be Don't Let Your Kids Roblox. That's about it. Additionally, Roblox will also implement more rigorous safety protocols, including an age verification system that combines a facial age estimation system with government-issued IDs that will only allow children to talk with other players of similar ages. Furthermore, users under 16 will not be allowed to message adults unless they have been designated as a trusted friend, which can be assigned via QR code. Aren't most kids abducted by trusted friends? Yeah, yeah, basically. And can't you go to any restaurant and just take a sticker of a QR code and say, it's the menu, please scan it. And then there's your trusted friend network right there. So some old guy's going to go to Chuck E. Cheese and put his sticker on all of the menus and all the kids that go to Chuck E. Cheese will then be his new trusted friend. I'm sure that's going to work out great, guys. I'm sure it will. While Roblox may have settled with Nevada, the company is still facing a number of lawsuits, in fact, 99 or so earlier in the article, from other parties in the states, including Kentucky, Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, and more regarding claims the platform has knowingly facilitated child sexual exploitation. I got 99 lawsuits, but Nevada ain't one. Speaking of kids, Cash App is expanding its financial services to target younger users, launching a new program for children ages 6 to 12, as it looks to build early relationships with Gen Alpha. What the fuck? Brian, parents can create and manage accounts on behalf of their children who won't have a direct app access, but will receive debit cards for spending. Yeah, I want to give a six-year-old a debit card. What the fuck? That's insane. Yep, the accounts can accept limited peer-to-peer payments from approved contacts and offer up to 3.25% interest with features like scheduled allowances to encourage saving habits, Brian. What parent is, what six-year-old is running around without their parents anyways and needs a debit card? Have you been to Calabasas lately, Brian? Okay, fair. At age 13, users can transition to broader cash app services under parental supervision, including stock and Bitcoin trading. No. You have a 13-year-old chance to buy stock and Bitcoin. What the fuck is wrong with you? Oh, wow. The company says it already has around 5 million monthly active teen users entering a competitive and controversial market focused on youth financial exploitation, or I mean, education. Right. You know, it was bad enough that they gave us all those credit cards in college where all you had to, you were walking around the quad and basically you just had to sign a piece of paper and they gave you a credit card at insane interest rates. And I bought very expensive keyboards with it. And we're still paying those off well after graduation. Some of us had to file bankruptcy because of those very same credit cards that started us down the wrong fucking path. Thanks, Chase. That was an awesome plan of yours. So, no, don't do this for your kids. Absolutely not. And, yeah. Yeah. Judges granted the makers of the Ice Sightings Chicagoland Facebook group and the Eyes Up app a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from coercing platforms to take these projects down. Similar apps, including IceBlock and Red Dot, were also taken down from the App Store and Google Play. Judge Jorge Alonso of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois found that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their case, which alleges that the government suppressed protected speech under the First Amendment by strong-arming Facebook and Apple into removing ICE monitoring efforts. The lawsuit cites social media posts by former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Secretary of Homeland Security. They're all formers. It's amazing how fast this is going. Christy Noem that demanded and took credit for the removal of these apps. In a document filed on Friday, Alonzo called these posts thinly veiled threats. Good. We should be able to have these apps. There's nothing wrong with them. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner. Dave covers the daily cybersecurity beat on the Cyber Wire, busts scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, untangles privacy headaches with Ben Yellen on Caveat, digs into industrial cybersecurity on Control Loop and still shows up to stir up some trouble on only malware in the buildings. Welcome back, Dave. Thank you. Nice to be back. So we got a little start here. Mike M sent us in a note, said, the only useful use of AI that I've seen so far. Wondering what you fellow geeks thought of it. And it's two links to two Star Wars fan film videos. I want to emphasize the fan film videos. Did you guys get a chance to watch these? I did. And your thoughts? Well, I mean... Is Mike correct? They're very impressive. Yes. Is Mike correct? Is this the only useful AI that you've seen so far? No. No, but I think it is a fun use of AI. I would love to know what tool they're using for this. I don't know. Admittedly, I've never dug into this, but I'm curious what tool allows you to have the consistency that they seem to have here and be able to create what they've created. some of these if you took some of these individual shots you could plop into a star wars movie and nobody would know that you'd done it they're that good i disagree well you're wrong i'll tell you why i disagree that the sound is off and i'm so attuned to that that the the voice does not match does not match oh yeah just shots okay yes i'm saying just the visual the pure visual and i'd say that many of the uh the ai versions of the main characters are better than the ones ilm has done yeah well but it's a time there's also 10 years difference yeah yeah yeah of course yeah but it's it's inconsistent i i think you're brian you're absolutely right on that the sound is wrong uh to me the main thing that's lacking are the performances Yeah, Lando's pretty flat. It's really bad acting. Yeah, and I think they just, it seems to me like they didn't have enough to sample from with Lando to get a full range of emotions for whatever they're using to generate his audio because he always sounds like he's kind of yelling no matter what. But at the same time, it was fun. Look, I watched all of them. I didn't just watch these. I watched the rest by this guy and then it led me to other ones. And honestly, I can't even go onto YouTube now because my entire recommended thing is just CGI fucking Star Wars stuff. You know, could be worse. It could be worse. I thought it was a lot of fun. I'm surprised that's any different than normal, though. I'm never on YouTube. Oh, there you go. So, you know, yeah, I thought it was a lot of fun. the thing that I really took away from this is that Star Wars is such a fun universe and we love it all so much that the beats that Lucas left off because he had to only make a two-hour movie not fucking Hobbit 17 hours from one book they're all interesting like I love the behind the scenes things between Darth Vader and Boba Fett and like all these little beats I would watch all of them Right. And, you know, the guy points for the creativity, not so much with the AI stuff, but just like the things that he decided to do with it. The little stories he chose to tell were all good. Like, I liked them all. They were fun. Is the technology there yet? Absolutely not. So, it's still very uncanny valley to me, particularly with the sound. I agree. Yes. Yes. Yes, and so the facial movements are very uncanny, Vali. It's helpful when you have characters like Darth Vader and Boba Fett. With no faces? Yeah, that helps a lot. Whose lips don't need to move. You could do an entire movie about Mandalore and everybody would love it. Right. Well, maybe he could rotoscope them and turn them into animated shorts and they'd be probably better. Speaking of which, Maul is still very good. Oh, yeah, I need to check that out. My son came to me earlier this week and said, hey, one of my friends said mall's really good. And I said, yeah, one of my friends said it is too. Let's watch it. So we haven't watched yet. Yeah, I'm watching it with my son and we fell a little bit behind. I guess one comes out every Monday and I basically argued with him every single day this week. No, we're only watching one. We'll watch the next one tomorrow. No, we're only going to watch one today. Well, that's a good sign. Yeah, it's a good sign. He's enjoying it. I have to check it out. I finished Fallout last night, season two of Fallout, which is really good, surprisingly. Surprisingly good. And yeah, I think I'll dive into that because the boys, I have to wait every week for the boys now. My son and I caught up on that yesterday and felt like the most recent episode was a filler episode. Kind of, yeah. Yeah, didn't. Kind of. And boy, there was some bad dialogue writing in that episode. Like, I don't know. They should hire this AI Star Wars guy. Right. Yeah. There you go. I think it's coming to a good climax, though. I hope so. You didn't go back and watch the miniseries, though, did you? No. See, yeah, you don't know what's coming yet. Okay. Yeah. So there's stuff that you know, having seen the university stuff, that I don't know, having not seen it, that makes you more excited for what's yet to come. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that sucks for me. Well, maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised when it shows up and you go, oh, that's cool. I didn't realize that was coming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. All right. Well, let's move from Star Wars to the other big sci-fi franchise, Star Trek, because we do love our prop sales in this segment. The current era of Star Trek is ending with a fire sale. Now that Paramount's committed to making more Star Trek movies, maybe. We'll see. Right. It's time to say goodbye to its current run of TV shows by selling everything off. Prop Store and 403 Auction recently launched individual sales of props from recent Trek shows. From Prop Store, collectors can put down money for costumes and props from Star Trek Discovery and the Star Trek Shorts miniseries. And over on 403, Star Trek Starfleet Academy stuff is up for grabs. Unfortunately, nothing from Strange New Worlds, which is the only show I'd be interested in, really. But, I mean, there are fun little things in there. nothing I want to spend a ton of money on. You can buy entire transporter rooms, but they do say you have to come and pick it up. They will not be delivering it to you. That's a very cool transporter room, though. You've got to admit, that thing is really cool. It's cool looking. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, if I had money, I would definitely get some of the Klingon outfits that they have in there are pretty spectacular. They would make amazing Halloween costumes, for sure. That's true. So if you have the coin, I definitely... I don't think any of us are the six feet tall and 140 pounds that most of the actors that played these Klingons are and would be able to fit into them. But yes. Do you guys remember the Star Trek adventure at Universal in California? No. No. Why would that be at Universal? Star Trek is paramount. So why would there be a Star Trek at Universal? I'm just telling you where it was. I don't know. Are you drinking a lot back then? I just fondly remember the Star Trek experience in Las Vegas where I did drink quite a lot. Yeah. So that was great. Yeah. This was, I guess it was sort of like a special effects demo kind of thing where they would mix footage from one of the Star Trek movies with footage. They get audience members to come up and get dressed up and they put them in scenes that would then get cut into the movies. So it was a whole behind the scenes sort of thing. Sounds fun. It was fun. And my reason for bringing it up is that I once got picked to be in it. And so I got to dress up like a Klingon. Somewhere I have a VHS tape of it. I'll have to try to dig up somewhere. Who knows where it is. But the funniest thing about it is that I dressed up as a Klingon, but I still had to wear my glasses. So I got the whole Klingon head and the battle armor and everything and my little round glasses. didn uh didn uh chang in the undiscovered country have a monocle is that right yeah see that would have been cool They get astigmatism too man Klingons they just like us Right. Right. Yeah. So I'll see if I can dig that up. I have so many. Gosh, there's so many VHS tapes. So many VHS tapes. Get on it, man. They're melting as we speak. Yeah, they're not going to last much longer. I know. Anyway. Anyway, I had an interesting question came by on one of my feeds this week, and it got me thinking because I feel like we're sort of in the middle of the generation that this would have happened to. So I'm curious for both of you, because you're both a little bit younger than me. In your life, did you ever know anyone who was born in the 1800s? No. Yeah, my great grandmother. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, she was, she was, she, yeah, she was, she came over from, like, in the 19, like, 1917, and she came over when she was at least 20, so. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, same for me. There's some great-grandparents who were born, like, 1898, right, right at the tail end of that. And I have very vague recollections. In fact, the memory I have of my one great-grandmother on my father's side was seeing her in the hospital right before she passed away. but I just thought it was funny like there is no one alive who was born in the 1800s and I have a link to the Wikipedia page on the last person who was alive who was born in the 1800s who was an Italian woman named Emma Morano but I don't know it's funny how these things pass you know we're very close to coming up on a time when there will be no more World War II veterans That's scary. Yeah. And that was so, especially when we were kids. What's that? One can tell the way society is going, yes. Yeah. Memory is short when they're not around to remind you that Nazis are bad, I guess. When we were kids, it was such a regular part of life, particularly for me growing up in the 70s. and on TV shows, like you watch the Mary Tyler Moore show and half the characters, if they were men, their background was, what'd you do in the war? And we all knew what the war was. It was World War II. And so they're pretty much almost gone. And same thing with Holocaust survivors. It's not going to be much longer until there isn't going to be anyone who was there. And I just wonder what happens when we lose those connections. Look outside. That's what happens when we lose those connections. Yeah, yeah. I think I shared the story with you guys about how one time, probably 20 years ago, I interviewed a woman who was in her 90s whose father had been a slave. Not her grandfather, her father. I do recall this, yes. Yeah, her father, when he was a child, was born into slavery, got freed when he was four or five years old, and the woman that I was interviewing was born when he was in his 50s. So the math worked out for this all to be. But for me, it was a real reset of my own calibrating history because to think that just not someone's grandfather, great-grandfather, you think about that time as being so far away. But here it was one generation before us that someone I was talking to, their father was someone else's property when he came into this world it's hard to contemplate so time is weird it really is i was just saying this week how i still feel like post-covid just how messed up time is and the weeks sometimes the weeks are flying by and sometimes there are moments that last forever and yeah i feel like it's not the same way it was before i just can't grasp the difference between decades anymore like when i was younger decades seemed very long and now it's i'm always shocked when something was like 20 30 years ago i'm like how that was that was five years ago yeah yeah yeah i'm watching this show on netflix and uh one of the trivia questions was um the the the person that you're looking for was born the same year that fight Club, The Matrix, and one other movie came out. And they're like, 1999. And I'm like, fuck. Which, no, the phrase 1999 doesn't bother me. It's when I do the math and I realized 1999 wasn't a decade ago. Exactly. It was almost three of them. Yeah. That's the problem. Therein lies the rub. Yeah, I think part of what's contributing to that, I saw a different video this week and it was asking why is it that the most recent decades have been so similar to each other? In other words, like the people from the 50s looked like people from the 50s. Same with the 60s. Same with the 70s. Same with the 80s. But somehow from the 90s and certainly starting around the 2000s, if you were to hold up a picture of somebody and say, what decade is this from? it it there's there isn't the distinction that there used to be decade after decade with clothing styles and hairstyles yeah it's all kind of blended together and i'm i'm not sure why uh mass production of everything uh just could be homogenization of culture so many internet the internet amazon everybody's getting the same clothes everybody's getting the yeah yeah yeah so i don't know i don't know if it's good or bad but it is it's bad i'm with you It's bad. And so it is. Well, speaking of bad, there's another article that caught my eye here that I thought I'd share. I spent some time with this week. It's written by Derek Thompson, and it's titled, If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad? and it looks at how so many of our economic indicators over the past few years have been quite good. Like unemployment is good. The stock market is doing well. Obviously, the stock market is not the economy, but people aren't happy. And what's the disconnect here about why things are good, but people aren't happy? And this article digs into that. I didn't read the article yet. I definitely want to, although I have enough sadness porn in my life that I don't need more. Right. Which is what this would be. But my gut instinct is all these economic indicators that look strong, look strong, and they are strong for the very rich. But there's no trickle down here. Yes, there's low unemployment, but the people that, well, there used to be low unemployment. We're seeing unemployment is starting to skyrocket again. But even when there was low unemployment, people weren't getting paid well. Wages were rising, yes, but prices are rising faster. Stock market, vast majority of people, that doesn't impact them in any way, shape or form. They're not invested. And even if they are in it, it's only retirement accounts. And even those are getting slammed left, right and center at certain points. So all these economic indicators only affect people that are already rich and they're not affecting the middle class and the lower class. So we're seeing people upset about that. Jason and I, particularly Jason, has been banging on the drum of class war is coming for quite some time. Yeah, one of the things this pointed out to the point of low income groups that wages have been rising significantly among the lowest level of earners in a healthy way. But one of the impacts of that is that the prices of everyday goods like burgers has gone up as a result of that. And that hits the middle class. Yeah. So now the middle class feels like they get anxious because the prices of everyday things are going up. And it's also harder for the middle class to hire people to do the things that they used to rely on the lower class to do, like mow their lawns and do the handyman work. Childcare, right? All that stuff has gotten more expensive because in a good way, the wages have gone up. But anyway, this thing, the bottom line here is this person posits that we've got this combination of post-pandemic inflation, institutional distrust, social isolation, and this crisis-driven media environment makes us all feel worse despite positive economic indicators. And I think there's a lot to this. No arguments for me on any of those. No, I've had multiple conversations with multiple people all across the spectrum just in the past month that there is this general malaise and depression that a lot of people have right now that they can't quite really put their finger on. And it is just it's kind of blanketed. You can put your finger on it right here. Maybe that is a big part of it. He's holding up his phone. For those listening on audio, Brian's holding up his phone. I'm holding up my phone and I'm putting my finger on it. This is a huge part of it because this is the reason that we have that crisis driven media environment because it's being fed into our eyeballs every five seconds. This is the reason we have social isolation, isolation, because we think that this is keeping us in contact with our friends and our family when it's really not. It's not the same. It's just not. It's not the same as seeing people in person. Yeah, that that is I was getting to that. That's the biggest problem that most of the people I talk to is it's so hard to make new friends. And, you know, what's the old phrase? You can lose friends, but enemies accumulate. The people I know are like, you know, there's a lot of loneliness. There's just a huge amount of loneliness and people can't figure out how to just branch out and meet new people. Well, it's funny because my wife had mentioned to me just the other day. I can't remember why it got brought up. It was some one of her colleagues and dating. And, you know, my wife was just like, we never would have met each other. Not in a million years would we have met each other in today's environment. There's people, people don't go to bars. People aren't going to concerts. And, you know, we met through friends of friends at a bar at a concert. And it's all these sorts of. Now at a concert, you just stare at your phone. You don't even know that the cute girl standing next to you. Yeah. Right. You guys were talking earlier about nobody dancing to Madonna. You know, like, you're right. Everybody wants to get that footage. You're right, Brian. It's just the phone. Throw them all away. A lot of it is. A lot of it is. This is this constant contact thing that tricks us into thinking we're having meaningful interactions. Plus, it's just a depression machine. It's just sending us nonstop, comparing ourselves to others. We're being told we're not good enough. We're seeing people present the best possible version of themselves that's probably a lie and becoming more so every single day because of generative AI. Like they're fixing everything. Everything is perfect in everybody else's life except yours. You suck. That's what our phones are telling us. I also wonder how much people, completely related to that, how much do people feel unsafe? I've heard people say that we are in a state where our prey instinct is constantly being triggered, you know, where we feel like we're being hunted, that feeling of always having to look over our shoulder because of the barrage of bad news and the way that these platforms and the news organizations have capitalized off of that, of pressing those buttons to keep us engaged because we're fearful. We want to go back to see what's happened next. That's from the algorithm. The algorithm does that, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, so. I mean, I see that even as a difference between suburbs and like the city. I think about like my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law and with their kids. They live out in the suburb and they're terrified. They're really unsure. They're scared to come into downtown Toronto. I would walk around my neighborhood at midnight naked and I would feel completely safe outside of the fact that I would just be sexy. But I would be, you know. it's yes bad things happen bad things happen in greater proportion in cities than they do in suburbs true toronto is incredibly safe there is no reason for my in-laws to feel that the way they do about toronto but that's what's being fed to them they they think that suburbs are safe cities are dangerous you listen to the news you hear about the bad things that are happening and the bad things that are happening are happening concentrated in the cities as opposed to the suburbs. Yeah, I think we're just getting overloaded all the time. Yeah, there's no more filter and there's no, I guess, you know, when we used to get our news at specific times of the day, it was more compartmentalized. And it was a half an hour. Right. It wasn't a nonstop, never-ending feed of it it was yeah and by the fact of it only being a half an hour it was more curated as to what you know and they always ended with a fucking puppy being saved right that's why we're trying to end our news segment with something nice and light too yeah well it's a good read i i recommend it uh i found it to be pretty insightful um you know Not completely unrelated to this. I saw another lecture that commentator David Brooks gave this week. And he's, you know, right of center guy. Someone I don't always agree with him, but I respect his writing and his capabilities and all that stuff. and he made a lot of really interesting points in this talk. He was giving a talk at Yale and the talk was about what can we do? How is America going to save itself when we're on the other side of all this stuff that's happening right now? Basically, everything that's going on in Washington, how do we get past this? And it was a historical look back and I had a lot of interesting insights and I sent it to a friend of mine who is way more hard left leaning than me and I'm pretty left-leaning. And I sent it to a friend and said, I think you might find this interesting. And she wrote back and said, I don't like David Brooks, no. And I was like, okay, but I understand that. And I put that in the calculation of sharing it with you, knowing you the way I do, but also having watched this myself and feeling like as your friend, you would find value in this but instead you're dismissing it because of the messenger and i was very frustrated by that and there was no convincing her otherwise she's like i'm not spending an hour of my life watching that guy it's hard to break through somebody's bubble chamber the hard left and the hard right are both problems like we can't just say it's the hard right the completely far right that's the problem it's also the completely far left so yeah no it was it was frustrating we have to be able to to find some middle ground it's never going to be both ends wanted are my way or the highway and that's just not how the world works i mean it can work that way we're we're seeing the world work that way right now and i think we all agree we don't like it right yeah no shit right well i'm gonna go lock myself in a room and watch some ai star wars so i'm gonna go walk around my neighborhood naked all right do you have a ring camera brian no but everybody else does and i'm sure that you can hack into them pretty easily oh my goodness i'm gonna go i'm gonna go rub a puppy and look at a tree so i hope that's not a euphemism not a euphemism i have a puppy all right guys see you next time all right bye I'm going to lie along. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, well, we peaked last week, Brian, because we got no new patron subscribers this week. But we would like to thank Timothy, Stephen, Jason, Steve, Matt, Jeremy, Dan, Spizes, Patrick, and James. Sorry, Spizes, if I screwed that one up. Thank you. Well, the lingering guilt donations over your pending bankruptcy have continued over at PayPal. We've got Gregory with 50 bucks and Connor who gave us 180 bucks. Thank you. Thank you guys so much. Trust me. Trust me. Jason's not out of the woods yet, people. No, I got 60 more days to wait. Kathleen and Thomas with the 25 over at the tip jar. So thank you very much. And if you would like to keep the show on the air and keep the grump on a grumpin', go to either patreon.com slash GOG and sign up for as little as $3 a month. But you can sign up for more if you want to get the show early, ad free and in high definition. or go to gog.show slash donate to find other ways to keep us cooking. So we appreciate you very, very much. No new merch this week, but new merch is coming. I'd like to see my, oh, what a great mug this is. It keeps my coffee hot. Now that I'm past the thing, we're going to have new merch. I promise. New merch is coming. I'm going to finish it this week because now I can sleep at night. It's great. I got to get the logins from you, or I'll just guess based on URLs from previous. Exactly. That's all you have to do, Brian. we didn't get a new five-star review uh they didn't give their name but uh and they used some emojis so apparently let's start with uh fire fries fire fries okay i don't know what that but one of one of shows that make me the most happy to know it's been released love you guys look love you too we'll take any good review thank you so much and i want fries now so yeah thanks fire yeah oh what a fucking week until next time i'm brian schilmeister and i'm jason DeFellippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. 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