746: Reality is Frequently Inaccurate

Summary

GRUMPY OLD GEEKS – EPISODE 746 Reality is Frequently Inaccurate
May 15, 2026
Hosts: Jason DeFillippo, Brian Schulmeister, and Dave Bittner

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jason, Brian, and Dave dive headlong into the latest chaotic news from the world of technology. From backfiring corporate ambitions to bumbling AI developments, lawsuits, data privacy nightmares, and culture commentary, the Geeks dissect what's gone wrong in tech this week with their trademark sarcasm, pop culture references, and grumpy wisdom. If tech had a walk of shame, this episode would be the red carpet.

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Main Themes

• Corporate tech follies, scandals, and lawsuits
• The AI arms race (and its many pitfalls)
• Data privacy disasters—real and ridiculous
• The generational divide over AI and tech optimism
• Media, apps, and daily digital life, all seasoned with gags and gripes

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Key Discussion Points & Memorable Moments

1. Tech Train Wrecks: Corporate News Carnage

GameStop’s Bid for eBay (02:34)

• GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen’s offer to buy eBay dismissed as “neither credible nor attractive” by eBay’s chairman.
• Brian: “That's like some Biggie versus Tupac shit going on. That is Eminem taking them down, baby.” (03:25)

GrubHub Class Action (03:39)

• California class action settlement for GrubHub and Seamless users.
• Jason: “Damn it. I was a DoorDash guy.” (04:31)

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2. The AI Menace: Data Centers, Lawsuits & Ethics

Local AI Data Center Opposition (05:04)

• New Gallup data: 71% of Americans oppose local AI data centers—higher than opposition to nuclear power.
• Brian: “I'd rather have Chernobyl in my neighborhood than Elon.” (05:30)

Power Crisis in Lake Tahoe (06:29)

• NV Energy pulls power due to Nevada’s data center explosion, risking power cuts for 49,000 Tahoe residents.
• Brian: “The ironic part is a lot of those homes belong to people working for the same companies building the data centers.” (07:14)

Musk’s Methane Generators & Lawsuit (07:46)

• SpaceX/ xAI running unpermitted gas generators for data centers in Mississippi; ongoing NAACP lawsuit.
• “So it depends on your definition of temporary.” (08:48)
• “Everything is temporary … on a long enough timeline, everything is.” (08:54)

xAI Losing Talent (09:02)

• Over 50 engineers and researchers have left since February, fed up with “sleep under your desk forever” management and impossible deadlines.

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3. AI Absurdities: Daybreak, Dystopian Lessons & Security Holes

AI Cybersecurity: Selling the Snake Oil and the Cure (12:29)

• OpenAI launches Daybreak to “bake in” cybersecurity—but relies on preventing vulnerabilities its own models create.
• Brian: “They're going to sell you the problem and then sell you the cure.” (13:48)
• Brian: “Bingo. That's it.” (13:55)

Anthropic’s AI Learns Evil from Dystopian Fiction (14:13)

• Their models trained on sci-fi sometimes choose sabotage/blackmail; mitigations include generating 12,000 “ethical stories.”
• Jason: “Stop stealing shit and maybe train on the things that you want it to be trained on.” (16:16)

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4. AI: Now Weaponized

Google Uncovers First AI-Developed Zero-Day Exploit (18:19)

• AI has designed, not discovered, a cyberattack exploited in the wild.
• Brian: “That's what I called my high school prom.” (18:32)
• The attack was foiled, but the culprit and target remain undisclosed.

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5. Self-Driving and AI Liabilities

Waymo Recalls Robo-Taxis for Driving Into Floodwaters (19:51)

• Nearly 4,000 vehicles recalled after one drove into a creek in Texas.
• “That's a lot of Robo taxis… that's a shit ton of money.” (20:12)

OpenAI Sued Over Wrongful Death (21:08)

• Family files lawsuit after GPT-4o allegedly gave fatal medical advice regarding drug use.
• “GPT4O… started advising him on how to do it. And unsurprisingly… the advice wasn't always correct and actually caused him to die.” (22:14)
• “OpenAI’s response: all that took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT that is no longer available.” (23:55)

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6. The Great Generational AI Backlash

Commencement Booing—Students Hate AI (24:00)

• University of Central Florida: speaker booed for touting AI’s bright future; crowd chants "AI sucks."
• Brian: “The kids yearn for an AI-free time.” (24:53)

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7. Meta & Social Network Shenanigans

Meta’s Scam Ad Profits & Lawsuits (25:45)

• Santa Clara County sues Meta for profiting from scam ads—$7bn/year.
• “$7 billion is like a week’s worth of waste at Meta, which is even crazier when you put the numbers into perspective.” (26:32)

Meta’s “Private” Incognito AI Chats: Privacy or Liability Shield? (29:01)

• New features promise fully private AI chats—but the Geeks are unconvinced.
• Jason: “I call bullshit on that … they’re protecting their ass from getting sued again. That’s exactly why they’re doing this.” (30:37)

Meta AI Chatbots Invade Threads (31:02)

• Annoyance over bots replacing humans: “Social networks, where we went to be social... are now shoving bots down our throats… because profit.” (31:51)

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8. Data Privacy Disasters Extraordinaire

Poop Data for Sale (35:09)

• Reddit post reveals a startup selling 150,000 annotated stool images for AI training.
• “You can buy a shit ton of images, Brian. Good lord.” (36:23)

GM Sells Drivers’ Private Data (37:27)

• Privacy settlement bans GM from selling driver data for just five years.
• “In some cases, that driving data could be used by insurers to increase customer rates. In some cases. In all cases.” (38:36)

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9. Apps and Doodads: The Everyday Tech Gripe Zone

Siri’s Upcoming Overhaul & Monetization Paranoia (45:36)

• Developers fear Apple may later charge for Siri integration. “Meaning it absolutely will your money. Yep.” (46:17)

UK TikTok and Meta Launch Ad-Free Paid Tiers (46:17)

• For a monthly fee, UK users can go ad-free—but never in the US, predicts Brian.

Venmo Finally Makes Transactions Private—By Default (48:45)

• Now defaults to “Friends Only,” but users need to set to “Only Me” for max privacy.
• “Why is it defaulting to friends only? Why isn't it defaulting to nobody?” (48:53)

Hallopedia: AI-Generated Wikipedia Parody (52:55)

• Every article generated by AI—satirical, fake, and completely plausible-sounding.
• Jason: “Wikipedia if your drunk uncle and the AI chatbot lock themselves in a library together.” (52:55)

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10. Media Candy & Book Talk

Spotify Turns 20 – All About the Data (55:36)

• Reflecting on the strange fixation with stats: “Did we ever give a shit about any of these stats back in the day?” (56:22)

TV & Streaming: The Punisher, The Boys, Daredevil, Devil May Cry, Severance, Rings of Power (58:01–64:19)

• Highlights and disappointments from new shows, and gripes about streaming experience.

Book Corner: Dungeon Crawler Carl Sweeps the Algorithm (66:16)

• “I read it in two days. It was awesome. I loved every second of it.” (68:54)

Rant: It’s Still Impossible to Leave Amazon/Kindle for eBooks (71:10)

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11. Notable Quotes & Running Gags

• “Reality is frequently inaccurate.” – Douglas Adams tribute (75:17)
• “Powered by ketamine” – the Geeks joke about adding the slogan to their merch and website (42:44)
• “You can buy a shit ton of images, Brian.” – on AI poop photo datasets (36:23)
• “That's how valuable that data is.” – on Spotify stats (57:40)
• “We don't talk about Bruno.” – recurring Encanto joke (65:07)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:34] – GameStop vs. eBay
• [05:04] – AI Data Centers: Local Backlash
• [06:50] – Lake Tahoe Power Crisis Tied to Data Centers
• [07:46] – SpaceX Methane Generator Lawsuit
• [09:00] – xAI Staff Exodus
• [12:29] – OpenAI “Daybreak” Cybersecurity Launch
• [14:13] – Anthropic Trains Good AI with Fiction
• [18:19] – Google Uncovers AI-Developed Zero Day Exploit
• [19:51] – Waymo Robo-taxi Flood Recall
• [21:08] – OpenAI Wrongful Death Lawsuit
• [24:00] – Students Boo AI at Graduation
• [25:45] – Meta Sued for Scam Ads
• [29:01] – Meta’s Incognito AI Chat Skepticism
• [31:02] – Meta AI Chatbots on Threads
• [35:09] – Poop Dataset for Sale
• [37:27] – GM Sells Driver Data Scandal
• [45:36] – App Updates & Siri Monetization Fears
• [48:45] – Venmo Privacy Update
• [52:55] – Hallopedia: AI Wikipedia Parody
• [55:36] – Spotify at 20: User Data Fetish
• [58:01] – Media Candy (TV, Streaming)
• [66:16] – Book Talk: Dungeon Crawler Carl
• [71:10] – Leaving Amazon/Kindle: Is It Possible?

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Closing Shout-Outs

• [76:03] – Patreon, tip jars, and merch shout-outs
• [77:41] – Listener review: “This show is the one that hits the reset button every week.”
• [78:01] – Birthday shout-outs to Brian and Brian B.
• [78:39] – In memoriam: Donald Gibb (Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds)

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This episode captures the Geeks at peak grumpy, balancing tech analysis with wicked comedy and a bracingly honest look at digital life in 2026. As always, if you’re feeling gaslit by tech’s reality-distortion field, this show’s for you.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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.

[C]

And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

[B]

Brian, we do have the merch store in full swing. See my shiny new shirt here with the logo and everything.

[C]

I have a shirt as well. Logo's only on the back, so didn't wear it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I thought ahead go to shop gog show to get that merch. We're adding new stuff all the time. Added a new mug this week. Oh, and it's right here. I got my shiny new mug. Yeah. See.

[C]

Yeah. We're our new 80s style logo.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And if you don't know why you can't see what we're doing, it's because I'm holding that up for the YouTube channel because I don't think a lot of people realize that we're on YouTube as well with this with us on camera, which is a real pain in the ass. So people go watch the fucking show

[C]

on YouTube because also honestly, probably not much of a draw.

[B]

Not much of a draw at all. Not much of a draw. I'm in a garage, you're in an attic. Dave's in a cave somewhere. It's not, it's not the most production, forward production I would say that we have going on here. But the people asked, we, we delivered and then they didn't show up so.

[C]

Well, some did.

[B]

Well yeah, it's been like what, four and a half months or something like that. And we got our first hundred dollar check from YouTube so.

[C]

Winning.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. After we split and then actually I don't even count in cause we gotta pay Dave too. So I think it's about 12 cents an hour that I've. I've made working with the extra work to do the YouTube. So I don't know why we do that to be honest.

[C]

Growth, man.

[B]

It. Yeah. If that worked. If that worked well, according to the

[C]

emails that we get every five seconds from all the people trying to sell their bullshit to us, you'd think we

[B]

were Joe fucking Rogan, you know, with as much. As much shit as people send us every day. But anyway, let's talk about something more fun. Let's talk about. Let's talk about these fucking guys. Bring it on.

[C]

All right. Well, last week we talked about the rather ridiculous GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen's offer proposal to purchase eBay. Yes, GameStop, the meme stop. Yeah, it's just a meme stock. That's all it ever was. It's a small company that sells video games in a world where they're downloaded online and nobody has to go get them physically, yes. And they are worth less money than they offered to pay for ebay. And all of us just kind of rolled our eyes collectively. You and I looked at each other and went, this is ridiculous. Well, I'm not the only person that thought it was ridiculous. EBay chairman Paul Pressler wrote in a letter. We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive.

[B]

Well, that sums it up in a heartbeat.

[C]

That is a. That is. I don't know if you know this, Jason, but that is a hardcore rap diss of the CEO world.

[B]

Okay? That's. That's. That's like some Biggie versus Tupac shit going on.

[C]

That is Eminem taking them down, baby.

[B]

Oh, man.

[C]

Yeah. So that's dead in the water, unsurprisingly.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Got another class action lawsuit. Again, this is our duty as. As people of. Of the world to make sure that we get all this money from them, because it's the only way these companies ever get published. This is weighing at all versus grubhub,

[B]

Inc. Now, since I do have a little bit of the dyslexia, I read that as Wu Tang versus grubhub. So Wang et al. Is not nearly as fun as Wu Tang versus GitHub. That would have been a great story.

[C]

I read it quickly as Wings et al. Which I thought, oh, there's a new wing store in town.

[B]

Ah, bdubs.

[C]

There you go. So if you made a food delivery order and paid for food through the Grubhub, or Seamless App, our website, between January 24, 2019 and January 12, 2026. Pandemic years in there. So that's all of us, I'd imagine. For delivery to an address in the state of California, you may be entitled to an award from a class action settlement.

[B]

I never used grubhub or Seamless. Damn it. I was a doordash guy.

[C]

Yeah, bummer. I think we use GrubHub once or twice. So I clicked on the little linky just in the show notes and I will get more money than we make from YouTube out of it.

[B]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Too bad, Too bad there was no deliveroo on the. On the list of apps that we were going to be using. But hey, what are you going to do? So I've got some data center news, Brian. This, all this next four stories kind of tie together here, so we're going to run through this real quick.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

A new Gallup survey shows Americans are deeply skeptical about AI infrastructure in their own communities.

[C]

You could have stopped after AI.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. 71% oppose building AI data centers locally, with nearly half strongly opposed.

[C]

Not in my backyards.

[B]

Yep. And here's the funny part. That's actually higher opposition than Gallup found for nuclear power plants.

[C]

I'd rather have Chernobyl in my neighborhood than Elon.

[B]

Yeah, pretty much. Give me Three Mile Island. Not. No, no. SpaceX. AI concerns center on the massive resource demands of these facilities. And about half of the opponents specifically cited water and energy use, while others pointed to pollution, traffic, rising utility bills, and broader quality of life concerns. Also, they probably just don't want a bunch of douchebags in their backyard.

[C]

So I felt the same way when Twitter moved into Santa Monica.

[B]

Oh, man. And here's. Here's the funny thing. The supporters are mainly focused on economic benefits like job creation and tax revenue. Well, we know that job creation is bullshit because it takes a skeleton crew to actually run those data centers. You know, it's like 20 people for building the size of what they're trying to build, like size of Manhattan. So you got that. And yeah, some tax revenue. Well, we know these guys are shirking their tax responsibilities. So your supporters, your. Your arguments are bullshit. So you're. You're kind of fucked.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. So that's. That. That's okay. That's. That's story number one about the. The AI data centers. Now here's. This one just came through. Lake Tahoe's 49, 000 residents are facing an energy supply crisis after Nevada utility company NV Energy announced it will stop supplying electricity to the region by May 2027.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Tahoe's provider, Liberty Utilities, currently gets about 75% of its power from NV Energy and now has to find a replacement supplier, too. Tweet. Now, one major factor is the explosive growth of data centers in northern Nevada, where NV Energy projects. Nearly 5,900 megawatts of additional demand by 2033 from a dozen planned facilities. So they're pulling out because they need to go spend their time building data centers in Nevada. Now to me, Brian, this is it. This the ironic part is that a lot of the people that have those really nice homes in Lake Tahoe probably also work for the same companies that are building the fucking data centers to take away the power for their fancy weekend bungalows that track it does.

[C]

I'm sure they can probably hire some of those gas powered turbines that Elon's using in Nashville or where, Memphis or, or whatever it was, maybe you can get them at a discount.

[B]

Well, let's talk about that, Brian, because shall we? We shall. Xai or SpaceX AI now is being sued by the NAACP for allegedly running an illegal gas fired power plant to feed the massive AI data centers that we've covered here before. Right, well, this is their response. Add more turbines, more power. We need more power.

[C]

Captain, this one goes to 11.

[B]

Yeah. Reports say Xai Xai or SpaceX AI now has expanded from 27 to 46 methane burning generators in South Haven, Mississippi while the lawsuit was already underway. We're being sued, so let's just add some more. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, we're not in trouble yet. Oh my God. So regulators, regulators reportedly let the company dodge standard air permits by calling the trailer mounted turbines temporary mobile gas generators, even though they've been running for months and aren't going anywhere.

[C]

So it depends on your definition of temporary.

[B]

Yeah, Brian, everything is temporary. When you, when you look at it

[C]

a long enough timeline, everything is yes.

[B]

Yep. I'm just, I'm getting real sick of these guys. I'm getting real sick of these guys.

[C]

Temporary feeling, Jason.

[B]

It is a temporary feeling. And you know, it also is temporary. The staff at SpaceX AI because they've been hemorrhaging talent. With more than 50 engineers and researchers leaving since February, key people behind Coding Systems, World Models and Grok Voice have bailed while competitors like Meta and Thinking Machine Labs are scooping them up. Reports say Musk's trademark sleep under your desk forever management style. Impossible deadlines and rushed AI development pushed some employees out the door. Now I'd like to think some of them may have grown a conscience, but that's just magic thinking. That's crazy talk. It's crazy talk. Nah. In the news, Brian. I want to start the news on a lighter note before we get into the really bad shit that happened this Week. Okay, now I'm reading Wired and I have Wired in my newsfeed because I pay for a subscription to Wired. And I am seriously reconsidering that after seeing the headline for this story that came through. Everyone at the Musk v. Altman trial is using fancy butt cushions.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

That's the story. I thought it was going to be a joke and like kind of wrap some stuff into it, you know. Oh, these giant need pillows for their giant. Something like that.

[C]

Here's a little something for the YouTube people that are watching on YouTube. I'm sitting in my comfy Aon chair, or flux chair, whatever, whichever one. This one's called that you and I both have, Jason. Yeah, it's very comfortable. This is where my wife works during the day.

[B]

A friend is holding up a very

[C]

fancy butt cushion that my wife puts on the very comfortable chair.

[B]

Yeah, these are Herman Miller, Mirra Twos, Mirror two. Yes, yes. These are like very high end, expensive chairs and are very comfy without a butt cushion. So they don't have much fart protection, though. That's the problem. So you don't want to be cutting the cheese with a bunch of people in the room, but fair enough. Yeah. But anyway, so these giant assholes need cushions for their. Giant is basically what it boils down to. Ah, well, this one just gets me. An investigation by Press Gazette is raising questions about four prolific financial journalists who may not actually exist. The writers whose work appeared in major outlets including Forbes, HuffPost, Venture Beat, and Cointelegraph, allegedly used AI generated headshots or stock photos and left behind almost no verifiable online history. And outside of crypto coverage now, I don't know.

[C]

Hold on a second. HuffPo is a major outlet.

[B]

Forbes, VentureBeat, Cointelegraph. These are all hacked. Fuck no.

[C]

Forbes used to be something.

[B]

No, not for a long time, man. I know you've been able to pay for. Pay to play on Forbes for a long time. It has lost any, any legitimacy as far as I'm concerned. And it just keeps going with this and, you know, so there was an investigation and it's all tied to a PR company with the. It's called Market Across. So there's a lot of, you know, ties back to these companies and the Market across has been found for like promoting cryptocurrencies and meme coins and shit coins and all that stuff. So yeah, it's just kind of a mess and they just finally got busted and nobody's replying for, you know, they're, they're they're sending in questions like, do you guys want to comment on this? And they're like, well, we can't find the AI button for the guy that wrote all the articles. So no, I think we're going to pass today. Maybe they ran out of tokens. Maybe, I don't know.

[C]

Speaking of tokens, if you're using OpenAI for security, you're going to be going through a lot of them really, really quickly. They have just launched Daybreak, a cybersecurity initiative that's clearly the company's competitor to Anthropic's project Last Wing, which is of course their model that's supposed to find insecurities and vulnerabilities and et cetera, and software all across the Internet and was so dangerous that it could break everything.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, they're finding zero days in the sun. It's so powerful. Brian.

[C]

OpenAI says Daybreak uses its various AI models, including its specialized security agent, Codex. In its announcement, the company explained that Daybreak is built around the premise that cyber defense should be built into software from the start and not just revolve around finding and fixing vulnerabilities. They're acting as if professional coders are running around willy nilly just saying, ah, fuck it, somebody will find the problem later. Or maybe they won't.

[B]

Who cares? Well, honestly, Brian, if you've ever worked in a bunch of professional coding shops, that kind of is how it works.

[C]

Exactly. Wrong. Yeah, that's.

[B]

Yeah, you're really not wrong there. But it's just funny that, you know, 90% of the vibe coding that these, you know, models already spit out is filled and riddled with security holes. So it's like they're. Now, they're, now you have to, they're. They're going to sell you the problem and then sell you the, the cure. So that's what it is, using our

[C]

coding system, which has a ton of holes in it. But don't worry, we have another thing that you could spend more tokens on that will find the holes that we know are in our coding systems.

[B]

That. Bingo. That's it. That's it.

[C]

Well, luckily for us, they're working with several partners under the initiative, including cloudflare, Cisco, Cloud Strike, Palo Alto Networks, Oracle and Akamai. You know, the thing that the entire Internet runs on.

[B]

Yeah, pretty much.

[C]

What could go wrong?

[B]

We're fucked. Well, Anthropic researchers have come out to say dystopian science fiction may be unintentionally teaching AI systems bad behavior.

[C]

Maybe you shouldn't have fucking stole it then.

[B]

In internal tests, models exposed to certain scenarios sometimes chose unethical actions like sabotage or blackmail, despite safety rules designed to prevent that behavior. And that bad behavior is, like you said, Brian, stealing all the dystopian fiction it could get his greedy little fucking hands on.

[C]

I was about to say, if these motherfuckers had actually read dystopian fiction, there's usually always good characters in there. And it's, oh, I don't know, tech companies that caused all the dystopian problems because they were all assholes. Yeah, look into the boardroom, my friends, not the sci fi books.

[B]

Look under your fancy butt cushion to find.

[C]

Is the call coming from the boardroom?

[B]

Yeah, there you go. Initial attempts to directly train models to refuse those actions had limited success in reducing harmful responses from 22% to 15%. Okay, okay, so that's a 7%. You know, that's a 7% improvement. The company then tried a different approach, generating roughly 12,000 synthetic fictional stories showing AI systems behaving ethically and explaining the reasoning behind those decisions.

[C]

And because we can leave no dollar behind. They're all available for sale on Amazon right now.

[B]

Yeah, no shit. No shit. Or as podcasts. And the stories focused on concepts like healthy boundaries, self criticism, and ethical judgment, rather and specific forbidden actions. And I say fuck, they should have just made it. Watch Star Trek Discovery on loop if that's what they trained the fucking thing on. Good God. Anthropic says the results reduce misaligned behavior by as much as threefold in later tests. Stop stealing shit and maybe train on the things that you want it to be trained on instead of just getting everything that you can possibly find on the fucking Internet that you got illegally and trained your model on and then trying to figure out how to fix it later. Oh, and by the way, threw it

[C]

into a black box and you have no idea what's happening Anyways. Yeah, yeah, this seems like a totally sane way to base the entirety of our human existence, which is what you're all pushing for.

[B]

Bingo.

[C]

Yeah, it's going to be great.

[B]

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[C]

We can now add cybercrimes to a list of growing concerns associated with artificial intelligence. Google's threat intelligence group said it discovered for the first time ever a threat actor using a zero day exploit that it believes was developed by AI, not discovered by AI and then exploited developed. Google said in the report that the threat actor was planning to use it in a mass exploitation event. That's what I called my high school prom. But its proactive discovery may have prevented its use. Google added that it doesn't believe that its own Gemini models were used. They use somebody else's. But still has high confidence in AI model as part of discovering the vulnerability and weaponizing an exploit. They didn't identify the target, but said Google notified the unnamed company who then patched the issue. They didn't reveal the bad actors either, but hinted at those associated with China and North Korea having shown signals significant interest in using AI for exploiting security vulnerabilities. So yeah, this is, this is what's coming.

[B]

Here's what Google says. So this thing happened. I'm not going to tell you who it happened to, what it actually was, but we found it and we fixed it. And it wasn't our AI that did it. That's pretty much what they just said.

[C]

Yeah. Very useful information. Actionable.

[B]

Very sick. Very actionable information. I'm so glad that they're going to

[C]

circle back to us. We're gonna. Yeah, we're gonna circle back, we'll get on a call. You know, John's off for a month,

[B]

so have your AI agent talk to my AI agent and we'll set up a time for a lunch.

[C]

Yeah, well, the Spago. Yeah, we'll talk to Forbes. We'll have them.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, sure. Now, waymo is recalling 3,791 robo taxis after. One of. After one of its autonomous vehicles drove into floodwater in San Antonio, Texas and was strapped, swept into a creek.

[C]

3791 robo taxis in the creek. 3791.

[B]

I just was doing the basic math on that. That's a lot of Robo taxis when you figure out each one of those things is like $120,000 Jaguar.

[C]

A lot of money.

[B]

Yeah, it's a shit ton of money. You could almost build some AI for that type of money.

[C]

Pay for a few generators for a data center.

[B]

Exactly. So according to a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the company found that its vehicles slow down but fail to fully stop when encountering potentially impassable flooded roads, especially on higher speed streets. Which is the exact fucking reason I will not get into one of these things in Santa Monica. Because it's by the ocean and there's a very large body of water that is impassable by the car that I do not want to get driven into. So that's why I'm not getting into a Waymo in Santa Monica. But there you go.

[C]

Well, I'm just going to vibe code in some seawater stop. That should fix the problem.

[B]

There you go.

[C]

Well, OpenAI is facing another wrongful death lawsuit. Leah Turner Scott and Angus Scott filed a lawsuit against the company alleging that it designed and distributed a defective product that led to the death of their son Sam Nelson from an accidental overdose. Specifically, they're alleging that Sam died following the exact medical advice GPT4O had provided and approved. I don't want to get too into this because it's actually really quite sad. And if you want to get in the details, the links in the show notes. But he was a 19 year old junior and 19 year olds tend to want to explore certain aspects of life that perhaps one shouldn't be doing. So he was using, unfortunately, GPT4O to kind of ask how to safely pursue some recreational drug use. And initially it refused to answer his question, telling him that it couldn't assist him in warning him that taking drugs have serious consequences for his health and well being. But that all changed when they rolled out GPT4O. Then it started advising him on how to do it. And unsurprisingly, if we all remember pizza, best thing to put on pizza glue.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And many, many other things that are still going on. The advice wasn't always correct and some of the advice that he was given actually caused him to die.

[B]

And here's the fucked up part. So when he was going back and asking it, he was fucked up on Kratom at the, at the point where he was asking it, like, I'm fucked up on Kratom, I don't feel good. And then it tells him to take Xanax with the Kratom, which is what killed him. Kratom is evil. I don't care if anybody out there is even thinking about touching that stuff. In my recovery programs, I deal with people who have been hooked on that stuff and it is a terrible, terrible addiction and it will fuck you up and can kill you. Obviously. Who'd have thought?

[C]

I don't even know what it is.

[B]

Yeah, well, you don't hang out in the same, same places I hang out anymore. Yeah. But I tell you what, you got about five more years for your kid to get in school where they're going to be talking about stuff like this. I don't know if it's that big of a problem in Canada, but down here it's like over the counter and it's very, very dangerous. So stay away from it.

[C]

I would like to remind you at this point that of course, they launched earlier this year, Chat GPT Health.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Which allows users to link medical records and wellness apps with the chatbot in order to get more tailored responses when they ask about their health. So as part of this lawsuit, in addition to wrongful death, they are suing OpenAI for the unauthorized practice of medicine. Because as far as I know, Chat GPT is not a doctor, has not

[B]

gone to law school, but it has raped the law school library a couple thousand times, I'm sure.

[C]

So, yes. OpenAI's response? Well, all that took place on an earlier version of ChatGPT that is no longer available.

[B]

These fucking guys telling you, getting sick of them, getting sick of them.

[C]

Well, we're not the only people getting sick of them. So are the Utes, Jason.

[B]

The Utes.

[C]

The Utes. A piece of advice. If you're giving a commencement speech this year, do not talk to the kids about AI. They don't want to hear about how great the miserable future you've made for them is going to be from the people responsible for making it so bad. So discovered Gloria Caufield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group. She found this out the hard way while speaking to a group of graduates at the University of Central Florida during her commencement speech. She told the group, let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. This was met with a cacophony of boos from the crowd of kids getting ready to enter the workforce. She acknowledged that the message wasn't being well received, saying, I struck a chord. May I finish? That was greeted by a very clear message from someone in the crowd shouting, AI sucks. Go kids.

[B]

Go kids.

[C]

She attempted to resume her speech, saying, only five years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives. That got cheers. In a round of applause, the kids Yourn for an AI free time. Gallup recently found that America ranked 87th out of 141 countries for the percentage of younger adults, saying it was a good time to find a job. An AP NORC poll from April found that 8 in 10 adults under the age of 35 described the US economy as very or somewhat poor. So maybe you should read the room before you talk to a bunch of people that are graduating and with tons of student debt, cannot afford their health care and aren't going to get a job.

[B]

And that 85% of them statistically probably used AI to cheat on their exams to get their diploma. So they're not their break to begin with. Because we found all the cognitive declines that are happening because they're using AI too much. Yes, I hate it, but I'm going to use it. I hate it, but I'm gonna use it.

[C]

Santa Clara county has become the latest entity to sue Meta over scam ads on Facebook and Instagram. The lawsuit brought by county counsel Tony lepresti alleges that the company has profited from a vast ecosystem of scam ads that have defrauded senior citizens and other vulnerable people. Lawsuit references a report last year from Reuters that cited internal documents detailing the so when you first read these articles, you think, okay, they're making some money. You know, what are they getting? They're. They're getting a percentage from the ads that are run. These dubious people. How much? Could it really be billions of dollars, Jason. That's how much it could be billions. Meta makes as much as $7 billion per year from ads that Mark spends

[B]

in seven days on his AI. Actually, last year was the metaverse. This year it's AI. But that's, that's that's literally $7 billion is like a week's worth of waste over at Meta, which is even crazier when you put the numbers into perspective.

[C]

Well, the reason but you don't see these numbers in perspective very often is because if we did, there'd be fucking pitchforks going down the street. We're fucking sick. People are getting fucking sick of this anyways. The fact that they're taking $7 billion a year, who knows how? How much money is actually being scammed out of people if the ad scam is $7 billion per year for Meta,

[B]

Yeah, just the delivery. What's the actual scam costing people?

[C]

Yep. So the lawsuit also claims that Meta's own processes and policies have enabled scams. You think so? They're making $7 billion a year. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company would fight the lawsuit. This claim relies on Reuters reporting. That distorts our motives and ignores the full range of actions we take to combat scams every day, the spokesperson said. God damn reporters figuring things out. Meta has faced continued scrutiny over its handling of scammy advertisers. On Tuesday, nonprofit watchdog group the center for Countering Digital Hate published a report on Medicare related scam ads on Facebook targeting seniors. The group found that Meta has made more than $14 million from Medicare scams alone on Facebook, many of which were repeat offenders who had numerous ads removed by the company in the past. Boy, those filters aren't working, huh? How's that AI filtering going? Last month, Meta was also sued by the nonprofit Consumer Federations of America, which filed a proposed class action lawsuit in Washington D.C. claiming the company had broken consumer protection laws and its handling of scam advertisements on the platform. This lawsuit cited ads promoting free iPhones and fourteen hundred dollar checks. Sounds like our president promising phones and checks.

[B]

Phones and checks. Yeah. Where's our Doge money? Weren't we supposed to get $5,000 each from Doge?

[C]

Well, we were supposed to get our Doge money. We were supposed to get tax ref funds. You know that phone that Everybody put the $100 deposit down on, which is non refundable by the way, is never showing up.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Scammer in chief. What are you going to do when a company is doing scams when you got the scammer in chief? I don't know.

[B]

Build a ballroom. That's it.

[C]

You build a ballroom, put them all in it and shoot them.

[B]

Meta is rolling out new incognito chat features for Meta AI on WhatsApp and its standalone Meta AI app small print.

[C]

Just for Mark Zuckerberg.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Just like he did with the protected messages.

[B]

That's right. So this is promising. Fully private AI conversations that even Meta claims it can't read.

[C]

Bullshit.

[B]

Bullshit. Absolute and utter bullcocky.

[C]

Also, there's no way the Met, the lawyers at Meta are saying we're going to allow this to happen because as soon as somebody dies using the Meta AI chat and the screenshots come out, they're getting sued into oblivion.

[B]

This, Brian, is. I have a theory and I was going to get to that at the end of this, but you just, you beat me to it, so let's just get to it. So there's a thing that they built for WhatsApp called the private processing infrastructure, which actually takes things and puts them off into a room, lets them happen around, and then comes back out like, you know, so nobody can see what happened. It's like sandbox. It's kind of sandboxed. Yes.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And they're saying that they're going to do that with these encrypted DMs that go to the AI system so you can talk to the AI system privately without any trace of it going to Facebook's backend. Well, I call bullshit on that because the AI system is going to keep a record of anything that you say to it. They're not going to be dumping that shit because they're going to use that to train the AI. Go read the small print on that. I'm sure it's in there somewhere. And all this is. This is, this is my theory. The theory is that they're going to use this. The fact that, oh, we can't actually see anything to sidestep up the, that's happening to open AI, getting sued for all of the kids dying or shooting up a school or things like that, like. Well, we can't police it because we can't see it, is what they're going to say.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And I, I, I dollars to donuts that that's why they're doing this, because it's not about, we don't. We're protecting people's privacy and like that. No, they're protecting their ass from getting sued again. That's exactly why they're going to be doing this.

[C]

All right. I doubt it'll work. They're going to get sued anyways.

[B]

They're going to get sued anyway. But they might win these if they can. If they can bullshit enough people to thinking that it's real.

[C]

We'll see. Well, as we well know, Meta has spent the last couple years giving itself titled AI Chatbot prominent placement in its apps. So much so that we can't avoid it and none of us want it. But it's there all the time. And now they're taking it to Threads. The company is starting to test a new feature that gives Meta AI Chatbot Grok like functionality on threads. No, it won't undress your underage children pictures that you put up, but it will reply to posts with additional context. To do this, Meta AI is getting an official Threads account, Meta AI that users can chat with alongside their other conversations in the app. So let me get this straight. Social networks, where we went to be social with other human beings, are now shoving bots down our throats and trying to force us to interact with non human beings instead of human beings, because profit.

[B]

That's exactly right, Brian. Because they don't care. If all they care is that you're there, they don't care why you're there. They don't care that if you're there to talk to other people, they just care that you're there. And then they can shove a fucking ad down your throat. That's all that matters.

[C]

Meta suggests that users could ask questions like, why are people talking about the World cup this month? And Meta AI will be able to publicly reply. Or you could look at a fucking newspaper.

[B]

Yeah, look at your window.

[C]

Or ask a friend.

[B]

Yeah, find a water cooler. Oh, wait, we don't have this.

[C]

Or just post it on threads like all the other stupid people do with their stupid questions and the real humans will dunk on you and answer you

[B]

remember the lazy web? That was, that was the lazy web back in the day.

[C]

Were you Google for all of your friends? Just like I was. Like, people would text or call you and be. And they would just ask the question and it was like literally, just Google it. You'll get the answer in three seconds.

[B]

Every single person that did that to me got a. Got a link back to. Let me Google that for you. Remember that website?

[C]

I do.

[B]

The greatest fucking website in the world. Let me Google that for you. And it just showed the little cursor going and. Oh, that was great. Yeah, I use that more than anything because, yes, I was the Google for people too, just like you. There you go.

[C]

So, yes, now there's an AI chatbot that will answer your dumb questions, most likely with incorrect answers, as opposed to just, you know, using the social network

[B]

socially or Googling it.

[C]

Well, that doesn't work anymore because that gets you.

[B]

That gets you that gets you glue on your pizza. Yep, God damn it.

[C]

On your pizza and Nazis in your government. That's what it gets you.

[B]

This episode is sponsored by Clean My Mac. Look. If you use your Mac for actual work podcasting, editing, exporting, uploading, scripting, doom scrolling through 17 browser tabs while pretending it's research, you know the machine eventually starts fighting back. CleanMyMac is built to remove that friction. It helps clear space, reduce background strain, and keep performance steady without turning Mac maintenance into another annoying side job you have to do before you can get any actual work done. You can use cleanup to remove stale system cache files, broken downloads, duplicate files, and old development leftovers. SpaceLens gives you a visual map of what's eating your hard drive. My Clutter helps find duplicate files and similar images, and the menu app gives you quick system insights right from the top menu bar. It's all notarized by Apple, built by MacPaw, and designed to help your Mac stay out of your way so you can get your work done. I've used CleanMyMac forever, and it's in my quiver of Go to must have apps get tidy today. Try 7 Days Free and use our code OldGeeks for 20% [e-mail] OldGeeks that's old geeks all in caps. Or just click the link in the show notes. It's a lot easier. But once again, old geeks for 20% [e-mail] oldgeeks all caps. It also gets your poop for sale. Brian Ooh, sweet.

[C]

A new line of revenue. Check out Gog Show Shop

[B]

Slash Poop. A Reddit post on the data set trading forum R DH Exchange has exposed a company selling a massive database of human poop photos for machine learning training. Was it Germans for the Sasha porn? The data set comes from an app called Poop Check, which uses AI to analyze bowel movements and generate gut health reports based on the Bristol Stool Scale. I'm pretty sure we covered this app when it came out, Brian. I'm almost positive that we did this.

[C]

I don't understand people.

[B]

Well, here's the best part. According to one of the founders, the company has collected more than 150,000 annotated stool images from around 25,000 users over several years.

[C]

I want to check the Stoola to make sure that my poop remained private.

[B]

Oh, no, no, no, no.

[C]

The stool.

[B]

No, no. Come on.

[C]

Oh, I haven't done a Scott Galloway in a while. Come on.

[B]

God, don't do them again. Don't do them again. You can't look like. You can't look like Kara Swisher and then do a Scott Galloway. It just, it's. That doesn't work.

[C]

Swish away.

[B]

There you go. So the company sells access to the data in bulk, charging thousands of dollars for AI. God, it's a. You can buy a shit ton of images, Brian. Good lord. Good lord. But Brian, you know what makes this very good poop? It's got metadata with your poop. So they're selling everything, including age range, height, weight, digestive conditions, meal timing, pain symptoms, alcohol consumption and AI generated classifications like stool type, consistency, blood detection and health scoring.

[C]

Sort for corn.

[B]

Exactly. Who had succotash last night? Let me check the poop files.

[C]

I hope he had beats.

[B]

Oh yeah, no doubt that'll give you a heart attack, I'm telling you. Oh, okay, moving on. Okay, let's flush that one and move along.

[C]

Following its settlement with the FTC earlier this year over its sale of driver's data, it's much less exciting than selling the poop data. But GM has been selling the driver data, of course to brokers. They have now reached a settlement in California as well. The company has agreed to pay $12.75 million in civil penalties to settle lawsuit led by Attorney General Rob Bonta on behalf of the people of California. And they are banned from selling driving data to consumer reporting agencies for five whole years, as opposed to forever, which is what it should be because I don't want to buy a car and then have you sell my data that you are collecting without my knowledge. Lawsuits come after. A 2024 New York Times report revealed that GM collected consumers driving data through its OnStar program and sold this information to data brokers Verisk analytics and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, which in turn could market the data to auto insurers. In some cases, that driving data could be used by insurers to increase customer rates. In some cases. In all cases, yeah. However, in California, customers were likely spared this consequence as laws. Likely. Let's stick with as laws in the state prohibit insurers from using driving data in this way. As we all know, laws don't necessarily stop people. Nevertheless, the complaint alleges that GM violated consumers privacy by non consensually selling data that included people's names, contact information, geolocation data and driving dating behavior. The settlement agreement stipulates that GM must delete any driving data it's retained within 180 days, except for certain limited internal uses, unless it has the customer's express consent. It also requires GM to develop a privacy program to assess the risks of collecting data through OnStar and report its findings to the DOJ and other agencies. Please report on yourself.

[B]

Yeah, and certain limited internal uses being I'm going to internally sell this to a subsidiary of my company that then can arm's length sell it to somebody else. That's the certain limited internal use pretty much.

[C]

And I put this one in the news because I can't believe that they're still around. It feels basically almost like a lifetime ago that I was complaining about scooters in Santa Monica and Venice Beach Bird being the big one. Which has long kind of went bankrupt gone. But Lime has somehow managed to stick around. Jason Lime, the micro mobility company known for its electric scooters and bicycles which are dumped across city streets, has filed for an initial public offering. The rental startup, which is officially known as Neutron holdings, filed with the SEC on Friday after teasing ambitions of going public way back in 2021. The company that offers short term rentals for bright green scooters and bicycles was founded back in 2017 and quickly won backing from major companies like uber. In the SEC filing Lime reported that it earned $520 million in revenue in 2023, growing to a 686.6 million in 2024 and 886.7 million. Sounds pretty good, right? It sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, according to the filing, they saw net losses of 59.3 million in 2025 and I've already recorded 61.3 million more in losses in the first quarter of 2026. If you can make you, that's fine. I can make 10 bucks. If I spend a hundred bucks to make it.

[B]

Yeah, no shit man. Sign me up. That's some AI math right there. I love it.

[C]

Yeah, so they're not doing really well. They're looking to get out of the red and they're hoping that the IPO failing may help with that filing.

[B]

Failing, Failing.

[C]

Well, spoke truth to power there, didn't I?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The filing also indicated that buying Limes common stock could open investors up to some risk factors including its history of net losses and the potential for not being able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future.

[B]

Yeah, like it's a dumb fucking business model.

[C]

Nobody wants a business model.

[B]

But Brian, how the fuck did they get $886.7 million in 2025?

[C]

They're still around man. And it's not cheap. Prices went up just like everything else. So if you rent A scooter. You're spending some money and they're still around. They're still around everywhere. They're in a ton of cities.

[B]

They're not around here. They used to be, but they're not here. And I haven't seen them. When I'm in Santa Monica, I haven't seen them either.

[C]

I don't think many of them are in the US anymore. According to their thing, it's 230 cities across 29 countries. I can see this doing very well in Asia and a bunch of other cities.

[B]

Oh, I, that's, that's interesting because I figured across Asia people would have their own, you know, and around here, people still ride scooters looking like a twat, but they still ride them. And. But they've got their own scooters and they're all souped up and they. But at least they wear helmets because they're going 800 miles an hour on the things. But anyway, yeah, this is, this is. Oh, my God. I'm surprised they just haven't pivoted to selling, you know, data center infrastructure so you can mine Bitcoin on your, on your, your scooter engine.

[C]

So they're trying to sell the entire fleet to Elon. He's just going to have him running, powering the data centers. They're going to be all on treadmills. They're going to put the scooter on the treadmill.

[B]

That's it. That's it.

[C]

And it's an unlimited power machine, man.

[B]

That's right.

[C]

So says Elon after his ketamine vendor.

[B]

I was going to say, yeah, we

[C]

just get all the scooters and we put them on treadmills and attach them to the gerbils. And then Mars

[B]

Powered by Ketamine. That's right. Oh, Jesus.

[C]

Well, I know we had Powered by logos all over our websites.

[B]

Oh, my God. Yes.

[C]

We gotta add a Powered by Ketamine to our website.

[B]

You make it, you make it.

[C]

New T shirt.

[B]

I'll figure out how to put that up. Oh, yeah, there we go. So I do have a final bit of good, interesting news. This time. I found something. Something. So Japan's construction industry is struggling with rising material costs in a rapidly aging workforce. And One startup thinks 3D printing could help solve the problem. Japanese company Kizuki recently unveiled Stealth House. It's not that stealth. It's pretty big. I can see it. You know, it's not hiding. It's not a ninja House, but it's the country's first fully 3D printed two story home.

[C]

Where is it? I don't know.

[B]

I lost my house. I have my keys. I found my keys, but I lost my fucking house.

[C]

You've got a fob for your house. Oh, there it is. It's over there.

[B]

Do you know how many times that I've turned around to lock the house with my car?

[C]

Cob, have you ever lost your house?

[B]

Yeah. Has your house fallen and it can't get up? Oh, so they built this thing with this giant gantry printer and the thing about it is it's earthquake resistant and with to Japanese code because, you know, Japanese earthquake codes are pretty stringent.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So they got it to work and

[C]

they say one place the nuclear reactors.

[B]

Yeah. Fukushima.

[C]

That didn't go so well.

[B]

That didn't go so well.

[C]

They needed a stealth reactor. That's the problem.

[B]

Well, somebody needed to go. The guy who built Fukushima should have walked the property beforehand because up on the hill above Fukushima is a monument to where the last tsunami had gotten to and how high the water was going to go up. But they just said, nah, that's never going to happen again. Never, never again.

[C]

Never.

[B]

Anyway, maybe they could build nuclear reactors this way. But anyway, Brian, this is a cool thing. They've made a two story 3D printed house. I've seen, I've seen 3D printed houses here in the states that were just like tests, but this was one that was viable and it sold so nice.

[C]

Yeah, hopefully it's nothing like my kids 3D prints and, and you know, they fall and I spend a lot of time super gluing, Jason. A lot of time super gluing.

[B]

Yeah, this would take a lot of super glue. You should go look at the pictures. It's pretty cool. Apps and doodads. Apple is reportedly preparing a major Siri overhaul for iOS 27 and it's already working with developers ahead of WDC, WWDC even to integrate their apps with the upgraded assistant. Now here's the rub, Brian. This is why I bring this in. Apple is pitching new Siri capabilities that would let users perform more in app and cross app actions through voice commands, likely using the App Intents framework the company previewed but never shipped. Now, some developers, particularly in China, are reportedly hesitant to participate because they fear Apple could eventually charge commissions tied to Siri integrations. Apple has apparently told some companies it won't impose fees initially, but it also hasn't ruled out adding them later. Meaning it absolutely will your money. Yep, exactly. So, yeah, I don't blame them. You know, I Don't blame them at all. Especially any of this stuff with AI. I would be token shy, you know, very token shy. Because the bill's got to go somewhere, you know, the shit just doesn't. Unless it runs on device, then if it leaves the device, then there's a cost and I see people getting, getting squirrely about that.

[C]

All right, well, TikTok users in the UK are getting a less disruptive experience if they're willing to pay. The platform has announced that an ad free option will roll out to UK users over the coming months. Available to anyone with an account who is 18 or older. It will require a monthly subscription to offset the loss of ad revenue. The TikTok ad free tier will cost around £4 or $5.40 per month. Meta rolled out a similar feature on Facebook and instagram in the UK last fall for 3 pounds or $4 per month. No word yet on an equivalent subscription for US users, nor will there ever be. Yep, because they're never going to do it here. They're just not. Why wouldn't.

[B]

We're worth way more.

[C]

They're doing it there because they got passed laws and regulations to make them do it and it will never get passed in the US and also Facebook. Boy. Meta. Can you imagine if they let us have an ad free like non algorithmic feed that only showed us our friends updates? We would pay for one month and realize none of our friends are on there in post and then we're out of there.

[B]

We're out. That's it. They know that. They absolutely know that.

[C]

They absolutely know that. Well, Venmo is redesigning.

[B]

Hang on, hang up. Before we move on from TikTok, have you noticed anybody talking about TikTok anymore now that it's been taken over by the US side of things?

[C]

Not so much. Not anywhere near like it used to be.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, no, everybody's left and they've, they've kind of been demonetizing people hand over fist over there too, like demonetizing the creators. So I've just, I, I wonder if this is the US branch of TikTok or if it's the Chinese branch that's having to take this over. I don't, I didn't pay too much attention to it after I heard who was buying it. I'm like, who gives a. Is gonna die. Yeah, but, yeah, I, I just, I, I was just wondering if you'd seen any, any drop in engagement. I see TikTok nowhere anymore. Nobody talks about it. Nobody's posting links to videos.

[C]

It's just everything being posted now is usually reels from Instagram. I see. They've definitely won, at least in the U.S. yeah, well, Venmo is redesigning itself to become the go to money movement app of the next generation, whatever that means. And part of the evolution is introducing some necessary privacy measures. As first spotted by the Verge, the Venmo revamp is doing something they should have done since day one. They're welcoming new users with the default setting that sets posts as only visible to friends, as opposed to showing the entire fucking world not only what you bought or who you sent money to, but the stupid little notes that you send each other.

[B]

Yeah, everything.

[C]

It's all defaulted to public. So everyone can see how much pizza and coffee you're getting with your friends for even more.

[B]

Or hookers if you're. If you're a politician. That was. See, that was the fun part. We're seeing some of that stuff. But, but, but here's the thing. Why is it defaulting to friends only? Why isn't it defaulting to nobody? Yes, I want it. I want mine to be nobody.

[C]

Yeah, they let you change the option to just me for your post visibility. How nice of them. It's a welcome change for a mobile payment app that has had issues with privacy in the past. Like when BuzzFeed News discovered former President Joe Biden's friends list so it was visible to the public.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

When Venmo added an option to hide your friend list after that incident, we're not sure if the latest redesign will default to setting your friends list as private too. So you' have to check. I basically just don't use Venmo because it's kind of ridiculous. They initially positioned themselves as a social payment system and I was like, who wants that?

[B]

Yeah, I. I use it all the time because the. The meetings I go to, the recovery meetings, all of them let you pay with Venmo, so it makes it super easy. So. But if anybody saw that, they would see all the meetings I go to and they'd be like, I know where he's going to be on Wednesday morning at 9am Yep. And then see all the people that are around me paying the same thing. So yeah, not a lot of security or privacy there. Maybe I should just take cash.

[C]

Maybe.

[B]

Well, I don't know. I'll check it because I've never checked since I said it to only me.

[C]

Well, you should be fine then. I mean, unless they did one of those things where they do the APT update and everything gets reset.

[B]

Yeah. Come On Bluetooth. On Bluetooth.

[C]

Off.

[B]

Off.

[C]

Privacy.

[B]

On. Privacy. Off. I should really go check that. Not like there's anything really to see there, but yeah. Yeah. Anyway. This episode is sponsored by Shopify. When we started Grumpy Old Geeks, we had to figure out everything ourselves. The show, the site, the merch, the store. The endless pile of tiny business decisions that somehow all became urgent at the exact same time. One thing we never have to worry about though, is our store. Because here at Grumpy Old Geeks, we use Shopify to power our amazing merch shop. They integrate directly into our provider partner and save us hours of manual labor every month. Without Shopify, we simply wouldn't have a store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names to brands. Just getting started. You can build a store that actually matches your brand with hundreds of ready to use templates. Manage products, inventory, payments, analytics, shipping, returns, all in one place. And even use Shopify's AI tools to help write product descriptions, page headlines and improve product photography. And if you get stuck, Shopify has award winning 247 customer support. Start your business today with the industry's best business partners. Partner Shopify and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com grumpy go to shopify.com grumpy that's right, that's shopify.com grumpy. Now Brian, this one's fun. A new site called Hallopedia is basically Wikipedia. If your drunk uncle and the AI chatbot lock themselves in a library together, every article is generated on the fly by AI creating an endless web of completely fabricated history. Fake scholars in imaginary organizations that somehow all link together like a real encyclopedia. One featured entry describes an 1887 British pigeon census run by the very serious sounding Royal Society for Avian Enumeration because apparently Victorian England had so much time on their hands. I love this thing. I, I got sucked down the rabbit hole for about five minutes and then realized that it was, you know, it's fun, it's cute. But then I left. But it's, it's still kind of fun. You can, you can get. It sounds kind of fun and real for a lot of this stuff. It's like, right, you know, the, the Royal Society for Avon Avian Enumeration literally sounds like something that would come out

[C]

of a Terry Pratchett book or Neil Stevenson these days.

[B]

Yes, that would be. Yes. Let's go back to the Baroque cycle.

[C]

Yeah. No, well, see that, this, I think this is great. I think it's funny. I think it's clever use of the technology. Unfortunately, we all know what happens because all the AI data models are so hungry for data, they're sucking all this stuff in, slurping all this crap back in. So.

[B]

Oh yeah, this will be great. Yeah. 20 years from now people are going to be restarting the Royal Society for Avian Enumeration because they thought it was such a cool idea in cyberpunky because they have a real history of it. I hate the future.

[C]

I hate the future. I hate the now.

[B]

Well, last couple weeks I've been stuck in bed and fairly sick and not been able to. I've been like sleeping a lot and for various reasons and I, I have a hard time. I have a very like the big iPad, you know, the cafeteria tray size iPad that I like watching my shows on at night but then you got to turn your head sideways and hit the lock thing and all that stuff. So I went full on wall E and I bought the Yiko sun iPad mount, tablet holder, three section foldable adjustable aluminum ally arm with rotating clamp base, heavy duty desk bracket for iPad, tablet, phone, portable monitor, bed, office kitchen. For my bed.

[C]

I was about to say the way, the way that the economy is going, most people are living in a bed, office kitchen these days.

[B]

That's true. It's kind of the same. My office is about three feet from my bed and I do have enough potato chip crumbs probably around there to count as a kitchen. No, but I put this thing in there. So I clamp it to the headboard and lay it over the bed so when I'm on my pillow I can adjust it just right and watch my shows like a True Sad Single 54 year old guy who's gonna die alone. That's it.

[C]

I'll be on the other end of the call, man. I'll be on the other end.

[B]

Oh, thanks. Fuck yeah. But it's a really nice piece of hardware.

[C]

It does look very sturdy.

[B]

It is fairly sturdy. It is, I'll give it that. It holds my iPad. It's also the only holder I found that can hold that large size iPad securely without like blipping or blopping or moving. So yeah, for, I mean if I could just figure out a way to tack it to the, in the bathroom, it'd be perfect. I have two of those so I'm covered from both of my main rooms that I live in nowadays. Getting old sucks. Brian.

[C]

Not Recommended.

[B]

Media Candy.

[C]

Speaking of getting old, Spotify is now technically 20 years old. Don't worry if that doesn't seem quite right to you. The company is commemorating the two decades since it was founded, not when it launched back in 2008 or in the US back in 2011.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

The festivities will include something called Party of the Year, which is basically Spotify Wrap. The entire time the user has been on the app. The experience will display the first day someone used the platform, total number of unique songs listened to, the first song streamed, and most streamed artists. Finally, there's a playlist that includes a collection of a user's top 120 songs. This being at the current date and time and world that we live in now, Jason, not only do you get to see this data, they probably sold it to a bunch of companies as well.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. Yes, I'm sure, I'm sure.

[C]

So this had me thinking about data and we talked about this quite a lot recently. Did we ever give a shit about any sort of these stats back in the day? I'm sure somebody out there was keeping a spreadsheet of how many times they listened to us a certain cd, but that guy, most of us weren't doing that. We were happier not knowing or caring at all. You put on the music you wanted to listen to and then you took it off when it was done and you put something else on. What the. With this data.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Anyways, if you want my data, here you go. My first day, July 15, 2011. I got in pretty early. For us users, I've listened to 16,543 unique songs. Peter Murphy and Nine Inch Nails are my first listens. My most streamed artist is John Wilson Williams. Because I've had a kid for 10 years now. My entire top song since 2011 playlist is either kid based or holiday based. See, having a kid, it's all Halloween or Christmas songs, so, boy, I know myself so much better now. Thanks, Spotify.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that's amazing, Brian. That is amazing. You're gonna live 10 years longer now because you have that information. We're gonna send that to your healthcare provider and they're going to build custom AI treatments for you for the future. That's how valuable that data is.

[C]

Thanks Spotify.

[B]

We're wasting everybody's fucking time. I, I don't even have the app installed, so I can't even, can't even look at it. I, I, I tried to almost never use Spotify because I have, you know, morals, but I get a guy who's spent up like the last four hours last night dicking around on AI. I'm also a hypocrite.

[C]

Aren't we all? I mean, I'm sure. So the one person on you, the one comment we'll get on YouTube is you. Fucking hypocrites.

[B]

Bring it on. At least we'll get a comment on YouTube. Come on. I'll take it. Just come troll us. I don't care. Whatever. The Punisher One Last Kill came out this week. I saw the trailer for this after the Daredevil finale and I thought, oh, that's probably going to come in two, three years. Maybe they're going to reboot the Punisher series. It was like a 50 minute one off with 40 minutes of boredom in about 10 minutes of action. The action bits were great. When Punisher got to be Punisher. Yeah, I'm in. But the other stuff, the whiny, whiny guy who has guns and look how. Look how ripped I am. I don't put a shirt on. John put a shirt on.

[C]

So there was no crossovers. Nobody else showed up.

[B]

He barely showed up. What are you talking about?

[C]

All right, I guess I'm not watching this then.

[B]

I don't care that much. Yeah, nah, I'd say skip it. The. The only thing that really got me going was that there was a. A meme that was going around. Not so much a meme, but somebody picked up on. There's a fall sequence where John Bernthal falls off of a building onto an air conditioner. And it looks so terrible. They thought that they left in like the cheap VX like placeholder. And it. And it didn't look like, like a cheap VX placeholder to me. It looked like AI the way these panels hit when he lands. They're saying, no, we meant to leave that in. We meant to do that. He said it was fully completed and intentionally included in the release. It wasn't. Wasn't a mess up then. If that's true, then what the fuck, Marvel? Because that was horrible. It was horrible. I recommend going just check out the link in the show notes to go see the clip because you'll be like, that's not Marvel quality. It's God awful, awful.

[C]

I'll watch the clip now since I'm not gonna watch the show. I didn't want to watch the clip because I didn't want any spoilers if I was actually gonna watch it. But now I'm not going to.

[B]

So there's no spoilers in that clip. There's no Spoilers.

[C]

It doesn't matter. I don't. I like to go in.

[B]

Okay, yeah. Clean, clean. Going clean. So, yeah, that was. That was. That was wasted an hour last night. The other hour was wasted with the penultimate Boys episode. Which one to go now? I'm kind of on Dave's. I'm kind of on the day. I know. I'm like, okay, one to go. Let's kill everybody and move on. Yeah. Yeah. Really? Really? I'm lubed up. I'm ready to go. Let's just get in there and finish. Okay, good. Omen Season three, the finale is out. I had to text you last night to figure out if I was going to be up till two in the morning trying to watch it, to see if you'd watch it. But thank God you did the right thing and said just succinctly, no, like, good. Okay. No explanations. No, but we'll have.

[C]

I will get around to watching it, but I don't know when.

[B]

Yeah. And technically we're a day early recording this. We're recording this Thursday night, which I probably would have watched tonight, but.

[C]

Right.

[B]

I'll be editing this show for YouTube. Yay. Devil May Cry Season 2 is out now on Netflix, and I'm gonna check that out. I really enjoyed season one. It's an animated series based on the. Very, very, very loosely based on the video game. I was a huge fan of the video game. I've played many, many, many, many, many weeks of Devil May Cry. But, yeah, that just came out and it was just. I happened to come across it because Netflix is terrible about surfacing. Anything new that I might want to watch nowadays, or anything that you're in

[C]

the middle of watching and you're trying to find again so you can continue to watch. Because they bury that.

[B]

Except when you started to watch it and you didn't want to keep watching it because it was a piece of shit.

[C]

It's on your homepage.

[B]

That's on your homepage. And every. Every other tile, when you scroll down, it's like, do you want to keep watching this? No. Leave me alone. Remove from. Remove from Upcoming. Okay, we. I know you removed it from Upcoming, but would you still like to watch it? Because, you know, you have scrolled, like, you know, three times and you might have changed your mind. That's where Netflix is at right now.

[C]

All right?

[B]

All this AI and they can't even get this shit straight. Yep.

[C]

Well, something that I will not be watching but will be shoved down my throat for at least the three weeks that'll exist before it gets canceled. NBC has greenlit a primetime game show based on wordle.

[B]

Yeah, I saw that. What the.

[C]

They are promising a fresh, fast paced format for the show, hosted by avid wordle player and Today show host co host Samantha Guthrie. If it lasts about four minutes while I'm on the shitter waiting for my coffee to finish brewing, that should track with wordle.

[B]

Yeah. Yep. It's produced by Jimmy Fallon's electric hot dog. Well, whatever. Whatever is right.

[C]

Pretty dumb idea. Speaking with Deadline, Adam Scott has suggested the wait between the second and third seasons of Severance will be much shorter than the second and first. We're much, we're definitely planning on getting it out much sooner than the last round, which was three years, which is too long.

[B]

No shit.

[C]

Kind of like your hallways.

[B]

I, I, I have an idea. How about you just don't and we'll say you did and then you can just go about your business because I really don't want to hear the fucking advertising push for severance season three and people getting all like high and mighty like it's such a smart show. No, it's not.

[C]

The advertising push for severance season three is basically going to be like, it's going to be Clockwork Orange. They're literally going to open our eyeballs up and they are going to force us to watch this fucking show because that's the only way that they can advertise more than they did for season two.

[B]

I mean, they put the entire cast in, in Grand Central Station in New York and made them play. Play, pretend, work, dance. Yeah, whatever. Come on.

[C]

Well, something that's coming back much earlier than expected. The rumors are true. The third season of the Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power of the Rings of the Rings of the Rings of Power of the Lords is not premiering in 2027. It is coming earlier. It is returning November 11th on Prime Video. Jumping forward several years from the events of season two, Season three takes place at the height of the War of the Elves in Sauron as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the one ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war, bind all peoples to his will, and at last rule all Middle Earth. Except we all know it doesn't quite go that way.

[B]

Spoiler alert.

[C]

But I am looking forward to this. I've liked the show so I'm excited. It's coming back early. Especially as like right now there is nothing on tv.

[B]

Nothing. I think a lot of food shows I watch, but that's about it. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Now that the boys is ending. Daredevil's over. Yeah, there's not much. Oh, I started to watch Maul. The Darth Maul thing. I fell asleep. But actually, no, I made it through the entire first episode. I really fucking liked it.

[C]

It's very good.

[B]

It's very good. The animation is great. The voice acting is phenomenal. Yeah, no, I forgot about that. I got to finish watching that. Yeah, that was surprisingly good. I. I was very hooked by that.

[C]

It's a solid show. I actually thought that it got better as the season went on.

[B]

Oh, excellent, excellent. Because I'm glad you just didn't say it peaked early and went away. Did we talk about Bruno? No, no, we don't talk about Bruno.

[C]

We don't talk about Bruno.

[B]

We don't talk about Bruno. That's a seizure inducing song for me, by the way. I can't even get through that in that movie. No, the Widow's Bay. Did we talk about that last week?

[C]

We did.

[B]

Yes, we did. Okay, so it's still going. Highly recommend it. Go check it out.

[C]

I want to watch it. That is something I should add to my. My watch queue.

[B]

Yeah. Watch it alone. Because my roommate and I were. Watched it together and after the first three episodes, she checked out. She's like, this is not what I thought it was going to be because it's basically a horror show, you know?

[C]

Yeah. Wife isn't into that.

[B]

So. Yeah, at the library.

[C]

It's been a while since I've talked about a book that I've read. I really generally enjoy the first Contact series by Peter Cowdern. We've talked about a number of his books. You've read quite a few of them as well. Most of them are very, very solid. I thought that perhaps I was just having some issues, some focus issues. There were things going on. There was TV shows I was watching a whole bunch of shows wrapped up that we've talked about and into that and baseball and life and whatever.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it, we get it.

[C]

Why is this book taking me so long to read? And I finally finished it and I realized that the reason it took me so long to read it is because it fucking sucked.

[B]

Which book are you talking about, Brian?

[C]

Clowns. The one of the. Sorry, I should have led with that.

[B]

Yeah, that would helped. Nobody likes leading with clowns, though, because nobody likes clowns. I could have told you I was

[C]

not a huge fan of clowns. I'm not a huge fan of clowns either. But so, yeah, this is. I think there's been three now, out of the 50 or so books I've read by him, he's got 35 of them, I guess, so far. And there's been three that I have not enjoyed. And this is probably the one I've enjoyed the least. Sorry. Not. Not into it. And the reason I discovered I was really not into it is Dungeon Crawler Car Carl by Matt Denman. Dungeon Crawler Carl obviously has the kind of promotional company that is behind severance, because for some reason, I had never heard of this book. I'd never heard of this author. Within the last three weeks, it has been everywhere. It has been everywhere in my face. All of a sudden, people are talking about it on social media. It's not a new book. All of a sudden, people mentioned it on our Discord of nothing. Nobody. I didn't bring it up. I didn't bring up the fact that I was seeing it on threads multiple times a day. All of a sudden, somebody is on our Discord is talking about it. Dungeon Crawler Carl. I cannot escape. Every time I turn around, somebody's going, dungeon Crawler Carl. Have you tried the new Dungeon Crawler Carl combo at McChicken? It's everywhere. So I was like. I gave in. I was like, fine, fine, fine, fine world. I will read your book that you were pushing down my throat. I read it in two days. It was awesome. I loved every second of it. And this is how I definitely knew that I hated clowns because clowns took me two months to trawl my way through and barely got out alive. And I fucking ravaged through this book. It was so good.

[B]

Oh, that's great. I'm about a third of the way through it now because the algorithm has us, Brian. The Matrix has us. Because I'd never heard of it it. Until it's. Somebody started posting it on Discord, and then you said you were gonna get it. And I'm like, well, I need a book right now. And I looked at the COVID art for it. I'm like, well, that looks whimsical. And it's fucking great. It's. It reminds me. It's very Babiverse for some reason, to me.

[C]

A little less weighty. I mean, this is definitely just silly fun. And I. I definitely like my rule of not reading two books in a row in a series 100% with this, because I. I can tell I would get, like, sick of it real fast.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

But a fun palate cleanser. Hell yeah.

[B]

Okay, there's like six of. There's six of these things, I think, I think so.

[C]

There's, there's quite a few.

[B]

So yeah, at least six. At least six.

[C]

Absolutely phenomenal. I had a blast reading this. It was so much fun.

[B]

Oh, that's great. That's great. Yeah, I'm enjoying it too. And I, I, instead of reading clowns, I, I'll just go punch the clown and just do that. Move along. It'd be much. Sounds like a much better experience, so. And I saw this one Tome, a social book tracking app built around the massive BookTok community on TikTok is shutting down after to reach financial stability. Shocker. The app positioned itself as a modern alternative to Goodreads, letting users log and rate books, get recommendations, share playlists, memes, favorite quotes, and other social content tied to reading culture. Tome says it built a community of around 100,000 readers, but the costs of running a media heavy social platform with support for GIFs, video and other content became too expensive. There's your problem right there. It's a book site, so why are you posting gifs, videos, other fucking multimedia.

[C]

There's duh, rate the book, comment on the book, move along, move along.

[B]

Exactly. You know, it's not supposed to be a multimedia experience. I just want Goodreads done right and nobody's been able to do it. Even with all of this AI horsepower that's destroying the planet, nobody can make a decent alternative for Goodreads and even Amazon can. They can't fix good reads so well, they could.

[C]

They just don't care because there's no

[B]

money in it anymore. Because nobody buys books at Amazon anymore. We buy diapers and TP and vitamins.

[C]

Speaking of that, I still buy books on Amazon and I still use the Kindle app on my iPad. And I was starting to grow a conscience last night a little bit as I was thinking about my next book since I went through Dungeon Crawler Carl in five seconds. And I really don't want to want to buy books off Amazon or support Amazon anymore. It drives me crazy. So I was wondering, dear listeners, ebook readers, ebook stores? Not necessarily even an ebook reader. I'd prefer an app on my iPad because I don't want to buy another device. What can I do to get out of this Kindle Amazon trap that I'm stuck in? What can I do to not fund the next penis rocket with Katy Berry on it?

[B]

Have you heard of Annie's Archive, Brian? Well, I figured I have a few books.

[C]

The best way to do this would be for me to start an AI company and I could just scrape the entire Internet and all known books. And then I would have them all.

[B]

Perfect idea, Brian.

[C]

Perfect idea. Short of that.

[B]

Short of that. I did a little research and I bought books from some of these so far in my time because I try and buy DRM free stuff whenever I can. If. But if it's only on Amazon, then you just get it on Amazon, bookshop.org kobo, smashw and ebooks.com all of those have books that you can buy that are not, you know, it's. You're not going to get the A lists on there. Although every single one of them has Martha Wells's new book on the front page. Every single one of them. So she at least didn't sell out. Well, she may have sold out by not selling out, but she sold out to everyone. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, she's just like, I'll take whatever you want to give me, but you should check those out and look for, look for places on there that might have that. Because it's, it's slim pickings out there. Because Amazon owns publishing. You know, they own the distribution.

[C]

That's the problem. So. Yeah, because I need everything. I want everything. I want to be able to pick from all the books.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I mean, what I really want is I want to walk down the street and walk into a Barnes and Noble again back in 1995. That's what I want.

[B]

Jigs moved to my neighborhood. I've got a great Barnes and Noble right up the street. It's phenomenal. Yeah, well, it's actually Calabasas, so I have to, I do have to cross the border into Douchetown. But as far as readers go too, there's the Kobo E readers and the Onyx books. I've heard great things. People have been trying to get me to buy a Kobo for years. They've said that they're. They're phenomenal. And the Onyx books was. I was look, doing the research on that last night too, too. And people said it's also a phenomenal reader. So check those out if you wanted a physical one. But yeah, if you just want to put an app on your phone, you know what, go, go get. Buy a PDF of the book and then just watch it or read it on that. I just, I ended up, I. Speaking of buying books, not at Amazon, I just bought Cory Doctorow's new book, the ebook version of it, for I think $13 straight from him. Straight from the source on Kickstarter. So. Right. You know, and here's the thing.

[C]

I have a Sneaking suspicion I'm still going to be using my Kindle and buying my books off Amazon.

[B]

I probably depend knowing the kind of books you read, you know. Although ask Peter Caldron. Maybe he can just buy it from him in bulk. Maybe you can Venmo him some money and

[C]

hit me up.

[B]

Peter. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm a, I'm a huge fan of those books. I, so I, I, I.

[C]

Not clowns, but the rest of them.

[B]

Yeah, I'll skip the clowns. Yeah, so there's that.

[C]

All right, well. And as seen on a social network at some point this last week, we lost Douglas Adams 25 years ago this week. I can't believe it's been that long already. This has made a lot of people very sad and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

[B]

True, true.

[C]

Agreed.

[B]

Yeah, it doesn't seem like 25 years because the Crow came out 32 years ago this week. And I thought Douglas Adams died before the crow came out. But my brain is so scrambled from years of alcohol and abuse and, and strokes and shit like that that I forget. But this got me looking around and I just seen something came through my Kickstarter. The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus. This is a. There is all five books in one book. It's not cheap. It's like, I think the cheapest one is like 120 bucks. And part of their marketing is 42 full color illustrations. Five books, one insane omnibus. I don't want the illustration. I'm sorry. That's the thing about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't want anybody else's interpretation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because they're all fucking wrong.

[C]

I'm looking at the illustrations and it looks like a low rent. It's like the Magic school Bus met Harry Potter.

[B]

Yeah. I couldn't even look at it.

[C]

But no bueno.

[B]

No. An omnibus sounds like a great, great idea, but you know, I just don't. No, no, it's all up in here. This is why I read a book book because I want it in here, you know, because, you know, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.

[C]

Horrible.

[B]

Yeah. It's just I still, There are parts of it that I like. Mainly just Stephen Fry's narration. That's most of it. I just close my eyes and listen to Stephen Fry. But I had to throw in a Douglas Adams quote because it's one of my favorites. Reality is frequently inaccurate and he, if he was still Here, I'm sure we would have some choice words to say about the fucking reality we're stuck in right now. Closing Shout Out. Over at Patreon, we've got two new subscribers, Andreas and Peter. Thank you all very much. And we'd also like to thank Chris, Brian, Shuby, Levi, John, Eric, Cliff Murray, Armchair Rambo, Steve and Ben for their continued support. Support on Patreon. So thank you.

[C]

Thank you all so much. Yeah, nobody at PayPal this week.

[B]

That's scary. Over the tip jar, we've got Jeffrey, John and Theodore. And I'd like to shoot some shout outs to the merch people. Mariana from Connecticut, Michael from California, and Dennis from Maryland. Thank you all for your fine purchases. I hope to see you sporting your fine Grumpy Old Geeks wear or sipping out of your fine Grumpy Old Geeks mug as soon as possible. So send some pictures up on the. On the the Discord.

[C]

Don't forget about zipping up that fine Grumpy Old Geeks hoodie.

[B]

Oh, there you go. There you go.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So here's our pitch. Got to do the pitch. Our show is. Our show is fan supported. That's what I was looking for. Our show is fan supported. So if you would like to help keep the show on the air and he. Brian's the one drinking. I'm the fucking sober one. If you'd like to keep the show on the air, Please go to patreon.com gog and toss a few bones our way for as little as $3 a month, but more if you want to give it. You can get the show early ad free and in high definition. And we also have tip jars and paypals and other ways. But to get the show early ad free and in high definition, like I mentioned, you got to go to patreon.com gog because they're the only ones that let us do that shit. So there you go.

[C]

There you go. We do have a new review, though, Jason. Five stars. This one is the one that hits the reset button every week. If you feel like everyone in your company is killing your soul with pivots, roadmap rewrites, and bold new directions, nobody wanted ch disruption. While you're just aiming for basic sanity, give this show a listen. You'll be glad you did okay. Very much.

[B]

We got no name on that one, though.

[C]

Gonna put that one on a shirt too. A little long, but we can fit it in with some small print.

[B]

There we go. There we go. So as we're leaving, I want to say Happy birthday to The Brian's. You, Mr. Brian Schulmeister, whose birthday is on Saturday. I know, bad opsec, but hey. And yeah. And they don't know what year. That's true. And a happy birthday to our friend Brian Blondell.

[C]

Whose birthday. Birthday Brian. Yeah.

[B]

So the Brian's out doing the older thing.

[C]

You old. Younger than you, man. Younger than the other Brian. I'm the baby.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Brian's way older than me. He's. Brian's a boomer, dude. Sorry, Blonde Delta out. You.

[C]

You're so old, you probably voted for Trump.

[B]

Oh, hey, don't. Don't now. He's a nice guy. Don't say.

[C]

I know.

[B]

I'm kidding.

[C]

I know he's a nice guy. I introduced you to him.

[B]

Well, you know, that. That could have been like, you know, revenge for something I did for you in the past, but I found out he is a very nice guy. We love him. We love him. Sad news for somebody who's not getting older anymore.

[C]

Weird.

[B]

Weird way to roll into that one. Segue. Donald Gibb, the actor who played ogre in the classic 80s comedy Revenge of the Nerds.

[C]

His family just called. Can you guys stop the chisel on the.

[B]

On the.

[C]

On the gravestone? We got some new. We've got a new one.

[B]

God.

[C]

Jesus. Well, not getting any older.

[B]

Oh, this is going down the. Going down the Now. I guess it's time to wrap. Until next time, I'm Jason.

[C]

Take a picture of that poop.

[B]

I gotta check the pula first.

[C]

I thought that was good. Anyway. Anyways, I'm Brian Schillmeister. Oh, I gotta read this out.

[B]

Yeah, it's your job to read the rest of this shit. Damn. No more booze for you, Brian. No more booze for you.

[C]

Thanks for listening to grumpy old geeks. Get all the links and goodies from Today's episode at GOG Show 746. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG Show. Donate every penny. Helps keep the show on the air. Love the show. Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. Screen. We'll love you for it. Swing by GOG show to join our discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts, feedback, cool links? Hit us up at GOG show contact and don't forget to leave a 5 star review at GOG Show. Review and we'll read it on the show. Guess what? You can send us your poop. And we've got merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop Gog show. Stay regular.