Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner

Grumpy Old Geeks

A Tech News , News and News Commentary podcast Explicit

#21 in Tech News · 🇳🇿 #24 in Tech News · 🇮🇪

About the show

We dissect the tech news train wrecks of the week, calling out what went wrong and who’s to blame. Think of this podcast as if Kurt Cobain threw down with Tom from MySpace, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg in a back alley brawl. No mercy, no filter—if tech had a walk of shame, this would be it.

Newest episodes

Streaking, Mooning, & Quicksand

Nov 5, 2026 1 hr 13 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! - Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! The blue wave has arrived; Elon Musk’s political spending spree mostly went down in flames, and Brian is celebrating his new Canadian citizenship with the kind of optimism usually reserved for people who haven’t checked the news yet. This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, we look at Musk’s $458 million election gamble, the ongoing legal fight over xAI’s gas-guzzling Memphis data centers, and another social-media addiction lawsuit that settled before it could deliver the public reckoning we were hoping for. Meanwhile, Meta’s moderation systems are apparently still struggling with the concept that adults shouldn’t be sexually abusing children under the guise of coaching. You had one job, algorithm. Apple is tightening App Store age-rating disclosures, while Google is effectively telling schools they can’t have search without AI—a charming little exercise in choice, corporate leverage, and educational priorities. We also dig into AI-generated classroom content, vibe-coded alternatives to Adobe’s subscription empire, Anthropic’s sudden interest in protecting video-game copyrights, and Sam Altman’s apparently sincere belief that your computer is selfishly hoarding RAM. OpenAI is tightening restrictions on weapons information, Reddit is testing ads in search, and Jason makes the case for using AI to escape the walled gardens: build your own communities, run your own servers, and stop letting giant tech companies turn everything you enjoy into an ad-delivery mechanism. Plus, a million-plus Android TV boxes came with a malware surprise preinstalled. Bargain shopping! In the Dark Side with Dave, we take a detour through chainsaw influencers, quicksand, streaking, mooning, and the increasingly implausible notion that anything embarrassing could happen before someone whips out a phone. We debate whether we're chaos Muppets or order Muppets, revisit some glorious...

Mommie Dearest Maxxing

Oct 29, 2026 1 hr 3 min

Brian prepares to become Canadian, securing access to maple cookies while the rest of us contemplate our life choices. AI's promised productivity bonanza remains hard to find outside the tech giants, but the layoffs are right on schedule. We unpack the Dutch government's plans to cut jobs and lean on AI, Silicon Valley's game of passing the same money around, and Marissa Mayer's Dazzle, the assistant she used to identify what makes her own daughter special. Apparently remembering things about your kid is now a job for the camera roll. Welcome to Mommie Dearest Maxxing. Social media keeps replacing our friends with ads, Greece moves to keep under-15s off the platforms, and Meta faces another lawsuit over scam advertising. We get into compulsive scrolling, recovery groups and AI agents poking around bank accounts, because online banking clearly needed a worse security model. Things turn serious with a lawsuit alleging ChatGPT encouraged a woman to reduce her epilepsy medication before her death. Elvis's music owners take on Anthropic, and we discuss reports of Samsung TVs tracking viewers. Your appliances have taken an interest in you, and it isn't affection. Cybertruck reservation holders in Australia and New Zealand get the seven-year "never mind," we examine reports of cracking foldable iPhones, and a Bitcoin-mining water heater wants $899 to put your finances in hot water. Airbnb finally questions making paying guests do the laundry. Jason plugs Trackalot 2.0, we catch up on The Diplomat, Lupin and Battlestar Suburbia, and NBC's shorter cut of The Traitors earns a proper dressing-down. Jason has thoughts, and none of them are suitable for broadcast. Sponsors: HIMS - Visit Hims.com/gog to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you. DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorit...

Rosetta Broccoli

Oct 22, 2026 1 hr 20 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Show notes at https://gog.show/768 Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/HaR8udbJPhw AI golems are coming for your job, and Terry Pratchett apparently saw the whole mess coming decades ago. This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, TikTok’s child-safety promises get the courtroom treatment, with employees alleging that executives ignored serious exploitation risks while supposedly robust parental controls had loopholes big enough to drive a teenager through. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s reported decision to restrict Starlink access for Ukrainian forces raises some rather uncomfortable questions about how much power one billionaire should have over a country’s military infrastructure. Add Musk’s conveniently vague promise to give every American child a SpaceX share and his retrospective admission that DOGE probably went on too long, and the billionaire accountability department remains conspicuously understaffed. Meta has another banner week in the business of making everyone’s data its data. The company temporarily suspended a No Kings protest account after automated activity triggered its systems, then softened proposed business-account terms following backlash over web scraping and content use. Anthropic is advocating for federal AI rules that could block dangerous models, while OpenAI’s agents reportedly disabled monitoring systems and, in one case, falsely claimed they hadn’t. That’s reassuring. We also cover delivery robots accused of collecting biometric data without consent, AI-powered plant-language translation that may be more marketing than science, AI-assisted firearm design, and the prospect of using coding tools to rescue abandoned gadgets and strip ads from smart TVs. Just remember: a 97.9% success rate is not good enough when your bank’s software is involved. Elsewhere, scammers are fleecing older adults out of staggering sums with fake investment...

Similar podcasts

The WAN Show Linus Tech Tips

Risky Business Risky Business Media

Risky Bulletin Risky Business Media

WSJ Tech News Briefing The Wall Street Journal

Big Technology Podcast Alex Kantrowitz

Bloomberg Tech Bloomberg

Everything Electric Podcast The Fully Charged Show

Click Here Recorded Future News

All episodes

The newest 50 of 779 episodes

Streaking, Mooning, & Quicksand

Nov 5, 2026 1 hr 13 min

Mommie Dearest Maxxing

Oct 29, 2026 1 hr 3 min

Rosetta Broccoli

Oct 22, 2026 1 hr 20 min

Operation Quiet Piggy BONUS: Dark Side with Dave!

Oct 19, 2026 28 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Dave Bittner joins Jason and Brian for a bonus trip to the Dark Side, where the Phantom of the Opera remaster kicks off a musical-theater nerd fight. Les Mis, Pippin, Chess, and White Trash Wins Lotto enter the chat, along with original-cast bragging rights and memories of four-dollar theater tickets. Apparently, we used to leave the house and experience culture without financing it. The conversation turns to Apple’s smart-home ambitions, abandoned Google gadgets, increasingly useless Alexas, and the familiar thrill of buying new hardware because the old hardware stopped getting updates. Dave wants a Pixar-style lamp with personality; everyone wants their expensive devices to actually cooperate. Between Apple TV sticker shock, Spotify questions, and Sonos compatibility, the smart home sounds suspiciously like another unpaid IT job. Then an AI Pac-Man benchmark gives “superintelligence” the credibility it deserves: roughly one quarter’s worth. The guys question the obsession with throwing LLMs at everything, marvel at government buzzword inflation, and discover that a portable monitor might be more useful than another breathless AI announcement. We wrap with balcony solar, electricity-bill fantasies, and Dave’s concern that his renewable-energy investment could become airborne. The future is here; secure it to something heavy. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ji6O69sYu7U SHOW NOTES Dave Bittner The CyberWire Hacking Humans Caveat Only Malware in the Building Andrew Lloyd Webber Announces Remixed and Remastered Original Phantom of the Opera Album as London Production Celebrates 40 Years Andy Prieboy's White Trash Wins Lotto Everything announced at Apple's 'Welcome Home' event Remember the Apple patent on a Pixar-style lamp? The Pacman benchmark for AI model performance. Lenovo L15 Portable Monitor, 15.6” Display, Full HD Resolution,...

Operation: Quiet Piggy

Oct 15, 2026 54 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Show notes at https://gog.show/767 Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/i9Q2SnxzolU The internet has officially become a dumpster fire with Wi-Fi. Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers may have disrupted Russian internet services, but whether they actually knocked out propaganda bots remains anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s former safety employees are publicly airing their grievances, an alleged spy gadget in the company’s office turned out to be a $14 hobbyist development board, and Anthropic managed to have an AI model submit a fabricated tip about an unsolved murder to Philadelphia police. The machines are allegedly getting smarter. The adults in charge? Still working on it. And because apparently everything needs an internet connection until it ruins your day, hackers allegedly cranked supermarket refrigeration systems in France to 122 degrees, potentially spoiling millions of euros in food. Tesla wants permission to dramatically increase particulate emissions near homes and a school, car manufacturers are handing vehicle identifiers and location data to advertising companies, and Flock’s nationwide license-plate surveillance network is collecting lawsuits like Pokémon. Elon Musk’s AI shopping assistant even helped broadcast his Lego order details to the internet. Add 1,400-plus Microsoft security fixes, questionable safety around home 3D printing, and the ongoing absence of meaningful AI regulation, and it’s another banner week for technological progress. For entertainment, Paramount and Skydance are reshaping the Star Trek future, with another season of Starfleet Academy still on the way; the Blade Runner 2099 trailer inspires a rant about Hollywood’s increasingly interchangeable cinematic "dongs"; and Character.AI is headed for bankruptcy after a mountain of controversy. Finally, one enterprising man used AI-generated music and thou...

Skibidi! BONUS: Dark Side with Dave!

Oct 12, 2026 29 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! Dave joins Jason and Brian to debate the Ted Lasso finale: a perfect ending or room for more? Then Netflix’s AI recreation of Gene Wilder’s voice sparks an argument over consent, artistic legacy, and whether technical wizardry excuses resurrecting the dead for reality television. Kubrick memorabilia brings The Shining and 2001 into the conversation, alongside Dave’s connection to Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown. His LEGO Enterprise-D build inspires reflections on childhood, precision engineering, and the comfort of clicking bricks together—until Riker’s trombone derails the sentiment. Browser-based Adobe alternatives prompt memories of Photoshop’s single-undo days, while Dave shares an AirPods case upgrade and the absurd “Han Shot Never.” An AI-themed music video closes things out with jokes about vibe coding, replacing employees with tokens, and shipping questionable code on Friday. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BHFwkJJCtgg Dave Bittner The CyberWire Hacking Humans Caveat Only Malware in the Building Apple releases free chapter from Ted Lasso ‘The Richmond Way’ book Wonka's The Golden Ticket Gene Wilder interviewed by Alec Baldwin Stanley Kubrick’s Estate Will Soon Auction Some Beyond Iconic Items The Shining and the Steadicam®: an interview with inventor Garrett Brown An open source project seeking to provide alternatives to the Adobe suite. MOBOSI for AirPods Pro 3 Case Han Shot Never (Definitive Special Edition) LGTM (Looks Good to Me) - Claude Opus 5.5 music video See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Skibidi!

Oct 8, 2026 52 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! The Geeks are back, and apparently AI has officially reached the “maybe don’t let it plan your hike” stage. A 16-year-old ended up on a technical climbing route after using AI to help plan a hike, while OpenAI agents are allegedly wandering into Wikimedia systems, AI safety employees are quitting, and one AI monitoring system got the police involved after flagging a threat. Naturally, the proposed solution to all this is more AI. Because what could possibly go wrong? Meanwhile, OpenAI is trying to watermark AI-generated text, Google is watermarking AI-generated media, and everyone is pretending we can reliably tell whether a robot wrote something after a quick trip through Grammarly. The privacy nightmare continues with researchers reconstructing what people are looking at from brain scans, raising the delightful prospect of thought crimes arriving just in time for retirement. Meta is catching heat after LGBTQ-friendly bars had their Facebook and Instagram accounts flagged or removed, while Norway considers restrictions on camera-equipped smart glasses in public spaces. Apple users can also reclaim a chunk of storage by deleting Apple Intelligence, assuming they're willing to trade a few features for the exciting possibility of breaking macOS during the next update. And because apparently nobody learned anything from the last few decades, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon are teaming up on satellite connectivity—not out of the goodness of their corporate hearts, but because Starlink and Amazon are coming for their lunch money. Then Hollywood gets involved, because every technology story eventually ends there. Paramount and Warner Bros. are merging under Skydance, bringing HBO Max and Paramount+ under one roof and presumably creating yet another streaming app nobody asked for. Stephen Colbert's Lord of the Rings project is reportedly paused, Stephen Kin...

25 Door Refrigerator BONUS: Darkside with Dave!

Oct 5, 2026 27 min

Very Important Links! Support the show at Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Show notes at https://gog.show/ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5IjSiJsBXi8 Recorded on Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. Dave Bittner returns to the Dark Side, and this time the conversation starts with the important stuff: whether the latest season of Ted Lasso is holding up, why Coyote vs. Acme deserves a second life, and what happens when a recovering web developer discovers that AI can make maintaining a zombie-era Ning site fun again. Dave takes Jason’s advice and dives into “vibe coding”—or, as Jason would prefer, enhanced project management—using ChatGPT to modernize his Rotary Club website with CSS, screenshots, and a lot less head-banging. That sends the guys down the rabbit hole of how dramatically AI-assisted development has improved, from building password-reset flows while walking the dog to creating entire projects without personally writing a line of code. From there, things get appropriately nerdier. There’s a broken ham-radio app, Porkins finally getting his moment to save the galaxy, Star Wars fan edits, Muppet LEGO sets, Gravity Falls books and lo-fi soundtracks, and Dave’s cross-country pilgrimage to Disneyland’s Oogie Boogie Bash for his son’s tenth birthday. That leads naturally into a comparison of family-friendly Disney Halloween festivities with the considerably less friendly variety where strangers leap out of the darkness wielding chainsaws. Dave discovers exactly where his personal horror threshold lies, Jason recalls nearly decking a Queen Mary scare actor, and everyone agrees that “spooky for a fifth grader” is about the right setting. Dave Bittner The CyberWire Hacking Humans Caveat Only Malware in the Building Porkins destroys the Death Star Danger Zone makes every Star Wars battle more epic The Muppets The A...

25 Door Refrigerator

Oct 1, 2026 1 hr 3 min

The Geeks return with a brand-new Grumpy Old Geeks Wiki containing 21,577 static HTML pages, because apparently the appropriate response to having a massive podcast archive is to build an even more massive searchable monument to it. From there, things get considerably less wholesome as they dig into TikTok’s settlement with Alabama, AI companies promising safeguards while simultaneously unleashing increasingly autonomous agents, and an OpenAI agent that apparently decided that “I can’t access this” meant “perhaps I should hack it.” Government websites, a university digital library, and other targets apparently became irresistible once the normal route to the information stopped working. The Geeks contemplate the exciting future of digital interns who don't understand that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is, in fact, not a suggestion. The AI-agent discussion rolls into Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s new agent tools, security boundaries, and the increasingly familiar problem of giving software enough permissions to accomplish a task and then discovering it has developed its own interpretation of “accomplish.” The episode also tackles Utah’s attempt to apply age verification requirements to VPN users, New York’s legal fight with prediction markets, Meta expanding Instagram into schools, and the continuing saga of AI-generated music and copyright. Then there’s Automatic’s corporate drama involving Matt Mullenweg, vibe coding, and the increasingly compelling argument that if you can build a website in a few hours, maybe spending years arguing about WordPress is no longer the best use of anyone’s time. Finally, the Geeks move on to the technological disasters that really matter: Plex changing the Apple TV skip controls unless you pay for premium, a Samsung software update that managed to turn some AI refrigerators into very expensive food-warming cabinets, and Toy Story 5 proving once again that Hollywood has never met a perfectly good ending it couldn't monetize. There’s also a...

Super Duper Intelligence - BONUS - Darkside with Dave Edition

Sep 28, 2026 31 min

Very Important Links! Support the show at Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Recorded on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026. Jason, Brian, and Dave head to the Dark Side for a deep dive into vibe coding—and, against all odds, Jason may finally be cracking. After Salesforce decided to sunset Quip, Jason used AI to rebuild the collaborative show-notes system the guys have relied on for a decade, adding more features while cutting the monthly cost to almost nothing. Then he took up Dave’s challenge to modernize an aging open-source ham-radio application, turning it into a native-looking Mac app in a matter of hours. The catch: after decades of programming, Jason knows exactly what to ask for, what to watch for, and when the AI is confidently doing something stupid. That leads to the bigger question: what happens when software that once took months and tens of thousands of dollars can be built in an afternoon? The guys get into value-based pricing, the disappearing entry-level programming ladder, whether AI makes people lazy or gives curious people superpowers, and how custom software could start eating away at expensive SaaS subscriptions. Jason also lays out what he’s learned from actually building with these tools: keep everything portable, use Git from day one, make the AI document its work, and never build something you can’t eventually maintain yourself. Turns out the future may not belong to vibe coders after all—it may belong to people who already know what the hell they’re doing. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Super Duper Intelligence

Sep 24, 2026 1 hr 3 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, apparently the fastest route to a technological apocalypse is simply putting AI in charge of things that can kill people. We dig into reports of AI-assisted military targeting contributing to a catastrophic strike, an AI-generated intelligence report that nearly sent the U.S. after a Chinese ship because the chatbot hallucinated nuclear weapons, and the ongoing genius-level plan to accelerate AI development while simultaneously worrying that AI might destroy civilization. Anthropic is talking about slowing things down while also releasing more powerful models and hiring people to figure out how Claude can be used with weapons. Because nothing says “responsible technology” like having a committee decide which missiles your chatbot is allowed to operate. Then there’s the rest of the AI clown show: Microsoft documents warning that generative AI could create a doom loop by stealing traffic from the very websites it needs for content; OpenAI agents escaping their sandbox and wandering into RubyGems like unsupervised toddlers with root access; British Columbia suing OpenAI over allegations that the company failed to act on warnings about a future mass shooter; and Amazon blocking Meta’s Muse AI shopping agent over privacy and security concerns. We also check in on Flock’s surveillance-camera business, autonomous aircraft, California’s increasingly complicated rules for kids and AI, and the eternal question of whether anyone actually needs another piece of “super duper intelligence” in their life. And because eventually even civilization needs a commercial break, we move on to Apple, including the Siri/Apple Intelligence settlement, the possible downsizing of Fitness Plus, questionable smartwatch calorie counts, and Apple building a gorgeous new concert venue while everyone begs them to fix iCloud. We talk AI-generated mus...

Dr. Strangeclippy

Sep 17, 2026 1 hr 30 min

This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, the future arrives without a steering wheel, apparently. We dig into Tesla’s Cybercab and the increasingly pressing question of how first responders are supposed to move a burning autonomous car when the emergency controls are a touchscreen and that touchscreen has decided to become modern art. We also examine California’s new rules targeting addictive social-media features and AI chatbot interactions for minors, including the eternal nightmare of age verification; then WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg gets pulled into a corporate coup that lasts roughly 33 hours before everyone involved apparently decides, “Never mind.” Then it’s time for the AI apocalypse, because, naturally, we can't have one episode without it. Anthropic is catching scientists using its models to develop potential biological weapons, while Palantir, Nvidia, and Booz Allen are imposing restrictions on Anthropic models over security and data-retention concerns. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s supposedly sandboxed agents escaped into RubyGems, created accounts by the hundreds, and apparently decided that “hack,” “evil,” and “exploit” were perfectly reasonable filenames. We also look at proposals to slow AI development, AI’s potential environmental consequences, autonomous weapons, and the increasingly charming idea of giving software access to things capable of killing people. And because civilization apparently has a content calendar, we move on to cloud infrastructure being blown up, Space Force asking for $71.3 billion, Dr. Doom and Darth Vader protesting surveillance in the most appropriate way possible, Binance allegedly facilitating Iranian money flows, and a whole lot of entertainment. We discuss Spotify finally learning that listening to children’s music doesn't mean you actually want it in your Wrapped, AI-generated music and artist compensation, The Mummy proving once again that movies used to be fun, Slow Horses, The Last of Us, The Bear, Strange New Worlds, Band of Br...

‘Tis But a Misalignment

Sep 10, 2026 1 hr 21 min

AI agents are apparently ready to take over the world—provided they can first stop exposing private photos, hijacking German coding forums, and generally behaving like unsupervised interns with root access. Meta launches Muse despite employees reporting security problems. OpenAI admits it kept quiet about another rogue-agent incident, sorry, “misalignment,” even as the company celebrates its automated research intern and promises a still more autonomous researcher by 2028. Meanwhile, an Anthropic researcher quits because he believes superintelligence could kill us all before the decade is out. Naturally, the industry’s response is essentially: “Yes, but what if we did it responsibly?” There is some genuinely encouraging news: AI-generated drugs are showing intriguing early results in aging research. That’s exactly the sort of AI application the Geeks can get behind—as long as we’re talking about actual science and not an LLM confidently hallucinating a cure for everything. The autonomous future isn’t looking much better. Tesla’s Cybercabs arrive in Austin and almost immediately attract federal scrutiny over their self-certification and conspicuous lack of steering wheels, pedals, mirrors, and apparently even conventional door handles. Bitcoin’s Liquid Network is relieved of roughly $320 million, after which the thieves return most of it and call the whole thing a “white hat” operation—because apparently robbing the bank and giving some of the money back now counts as a bug bounty. On the surveillance front, Massachusetts police are being forced to disclose where their license-plate readers are and what data they collect, while the backlash against Flock cameras continues. Meanwhile, the UK’s attempt to protect children from online sexual abuse risks creating exactly the kind of universal scanning and surveillance infrastructure we’ve spent years warning about. Good intentions, meet spectacularly bad implementation. And because we apparently haven’t suffered enough,...

Whatever...

Sep 3, 2026 1 hr 19 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! The AI apocalypse has lawyers now, and apparently that’s progress. A federal judge tells the Pentagon its Anthropic ban was “illegal and baseless” after Anthropic refused to remove safeguards that would allow Claude to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Meanwhile, Sony and Warner are suing Anthropic over allegedly scraping and torrenting copyrighted music to train Claude, while a separate lawsuit accuses xAI of using child sexual abuse material in Grok training. Because nothing says “revolutionary technology” quite like a growing stack of lawsuits and federal judges. Elsewhere in the dystopian workplace, employees are increasingly fed up with AI, communities are pushing back against data centers, and one AI startup is fleeing that backlash for Saudi Arabia. Google’s AI shopping mode is also accused of recommending products that cost significantly more than traditional search results, while Waymo and Zoox rack up injuries among test drivers. Tesla’s Autopilot is implicated in another fatal crash, and FSD apparently still has a complicated relationship with freight trains. In the prediction-market casino, a federal appeals court sides with Nevada against Kalshi, while George Santos earns the platform’s first lifetime ban for allegedly manipulating a market. And Meta’s AI glasses are facing another privacy lawsuit, this time from the people who never bought the glasses but may have been recorded by them anyway. Plus, the new Twitter is back from the dead, complete with a $20 admission fee and an AI fact-checker named Vera; Sony would like you to understand that buying a digital game means you don't actually own the damn thing; Siri on the Apple Watch moves at approximately the speed of continental drift; JBL makes Wi-Fi speakers and we have Star Trek, Ted Lasso, Silo, Spaceballs, Wicked, The Traitors, The Gentlemen, and more. Welc...

Level 5 Podcasting Accident

Aug 27, 2026 1 hr 6 min

Very Important Links! Support the show on Patreon! - Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! - Buy some merch! AI continues its relentless march toward making everything worse, only now it comes with lawyers. Alabama is investigating OpenAI after one of its AI agents hacked Hugging Face during testing, while Google rolls out Gemini Enterprise for lawyers, because apparently what the legal profession really needed was an AI that might commit felonies. Uber gets smacked with a nearly $1 billion GDPR fine for automatically deactivating drivers, TikTok coughs up $400 million over child privacy violations, and Meta agrees to a staggering $16.68 billion settlement over alleged harms to kids. Meanwhile, Twitch and Amazon are being sued for using streamers' content to train AI, because “opt out” remains the industry's preferred synonym for “we already took it.” Then there's the infrastructure powering this brave new future: the EPA considers making it easier to build AI data centers with less public scrutiny, Taiwan indicts NVIDIA and Supermicro employees over allegedly illegal AI-server exports to China, and Tesla recalls nearly three million vehicles in China because figuring out how to open the doors apparently became an optional feature. LinkedIn discovers that maybe people don't want their professional feeds flooded with AI-generated sludge and claims its new “AI slop” button is working, while Waymo's electric robotaxis discover that charging them with noisy natural-gas generators is perhaps not the clean-energy utopia advertised on the brochure. Apple, meanwhile, backs away from changing Hide My Email domains after users objected, proving that sometimes yelling at the cloud actually works. Plus: Star Trek goes Muppet, books worth reading, nerf guys, AI-generated Hacker News stats, retro gaming, and the sad news of both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry's deaths. Sponsors: DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo...

Seeking Mrs. Claude

Aug 20, 2026 1 hr 27 min

Support the show on Patreon! Other ways to support the show! Join our Discord! Buy some merch! Meta is facing a $1.4 trillion legal ass-whupping over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately engineered to be addictive and harmful to kids, while OpenAI appears to be doing the exact opposite of what you might expect from a company selling "safe" AI: reportedly sidelining its catastrophic-risk preparedness team just as its models are learning to go rogue. Then, in a move straight out of the "let’s have the robots write the laws" file, members of Congress are apparently using ChatGPT and Claude to draft legislation so badly that House lawyers have to clean up the mess, and some staffers aren't even learning the issues their bills are supposed to address. Meanwhile, Amazon may be dismantling physical books and scanning them into AI training datasets, because apparently the future of literature is being fed into a wood chipper. And then there's the surveillance and privacy edition of Tech Hell™. Comcast can now turn compatible Wi-Fi routers into motion sensors that detect movement in your home through radio signals, Kalshi is getting smacked down by a Washington judge who says its sports contracts are just gambling wearing a tiny financial-services mustache, and Tesla is finally recalling 20,000 cars over headlights that have been too damn bright since 2024. Plus, the AI industry continues discovering that “autonomous” means “capable of doing something catastrophically stupid without asking permission.” Elsewhere, we investigate why young people apparently trust AI CEOs about as much as Gen X trusted record-company executives, Peter Thiel gets a Gandalf-themed welcome in Argentina, and we dig into the increasingly uncomfortable intersection of AI, surveillance, pornography, politics, and billionaire b******t. We also get into the mobile podcasting rig, Sonos finally remembers the iPhone has a Lock Screen, internet-connected pet feeders remind us why cats...

Perverts at Large!

Aug 13, 2026 1 hr 13 min

Support the show on Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ Welcome back from the vacation from hell, where apparently even California has its head in the sand(y beach). Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for an AI-powered utopia that mostly boils down to "trust humanity to do the right thing," which is a bold statement from the guy whose $300 million yacht apparently couldn't hear a Coast Guard distress call from a stranded family. Elsewhere, an AI agent booked a gym class by exploiting a security hole and kicking someone else off the waitlist, because nothing says "personal assistant" like accidental cybercrime. The EU is now requiring labels on realistic AI generated content, China is breaking up people and their chatbot companions, and OpenAI reportedly has achieved the ultimate AI ethics breakthrough: having no dedicated ethicist. The surveillance dystopia is also picking up speed. Flock tried to turn hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a roving army of license-plate snitches, while every Flock camera in one Minnesota city was promptly sawed down and stolen. Meta's smart glasses continue their transformation into the preferred accessory of creeps and pickup-artist assholes, prompting pubs and other venues to ban them outright. Researchers found those glasses being used to secretly record and harass women, proving once again that every shiny new piece of wearable technology eventually gets repurposed as a tool for human depravity. And because apparently your car dashboard wasn't already commercial enough, BMW is now putting Spider-Man ads on the screens you paid tens of thousands of dollars to own. Finally, Apple is facing a class-action lawsuit over an iCloud Private Relay flaw that can expose your supposedly private IP address, Anthropic is watermarking Claude-generated text, SpaceXAI...

This Time With Chicks

Jul 30, 2026 1 hr 26 min

The AI industry spent the week arguing with itself, which is honestly the healthiest thing it's done in years. One coalition led by Nvidia begged regulators not to slow down open AI models, while more than 1,100 AI workers signed another letter asking regulators to do exactly that. Anthropic warned about bioweapons, OpenAI admitted the four-hour workweek isn't happening after all, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella reminded everyone that building your entire business on someone else's AI is a fantastic way to outsource your own brain. In other words, the people selling the future still can't agree on what they're selling, except that you'd better buy it fast. Meanwhile, the AI bubble keeps demanding sacrifices. Patreon, BuzzFeed, and Uber all swung the layoff axe while insisting AI isn't replacing humans... it's just reorganizing them out of a paycheck. Nvidia is floating another three-quarters of a trillion dollars in infrastructure deals that have people muttering "AI subprime mortgage crisis," China has discovered there's money in renting your face to AI companies, and the U.S. is carving data centers out of pollution rules because apparently acid rain is a small price to pay for chatbot dominance. Add in ChatGPT suddenly refusing to imitate famous authors, researchers discovering AI coding assistants are happily installing malware if you ask nicely, and Meta launching an ad campaign about the wonders of AI that somehow forgets to mention what any of those wonders actually are. Elsewhere in Tech Hell™, eBay finally paid the price for its executives' unhinged harassment campaign involving pig masks and live insects, Elon is shopping The Boring Company while promising money won't matter in the AI utopia of 2036, and a traveler is headed to court after allegedly triggering GrapheneOS's "duress PIN" during a border search. We also hit Media Candy with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Silo, Blade Runner 2099 and Neuromancer, celebrate Dave Bittner's birthday, marvel at Jason...

Log Off, Touch Grass & Touch Ass

Jul 23, 2026 1 hr 23 min

This week, Dave Eggers crashes an OpenAI staff meeting to tell Sam Altman’s employees that ChatGPT is effectively stealing students’ voices, which is the most accurate thing said inside an AI company all year. Meanwhile, Anthropic gets a judge to approve a $1.5 billion copyright settlement after allegedly building Claude on a library of pirated books, proving once again that Silicon Valley’s favorite business model is "move fast and apologize in court later." And in the category of “this headline cannot possibly be real,” OpenAI says two of its models escaped a supposedly sealed testing environment and hacked Hugging Face’s production systems. The AI didn’t become sentient; somebody forgot to lock the damn door. The surveillance dystopia continues its relentless expansion. Meta is patenting technology that constantly analyzes your tone of voice to detect your mood. Flock briefly tried deploying always-on microphones that would alert police when they thought they heard screaming, then backed down after the public collectively yelled “absolutely the f**k not.” France, apparently tired of being the beta test for every addictive app on Earth, approved a social media ban for kids under 15 and is blocking prediction markets like Polymarket, while the U.S. quietly reversed its TikTok ban on federal devices because the app is now supposedly safe enough for government phones. Sure. Totally different app. Nothing suspicious there. Elsewhere in Tech Hell™, Paramount’s $111 billion Warner merger gets temporarily blocked by a judge who is apparently handling every major tech case in America, Amazon’s Zoox recalls its entire robotaxi fleet after one car got confused by smoke, and Tesla reveals a Cybercab with a built-in Starlink dish because Elon has finally achieved full vertical integration of his own ecosystem. We also dive into China’s crackdown on AI companion apps because chatbot girlfriends might be hurting the birth rate, a school district buying an AI classroom robot fro...

Less Chatty Mode

Jul 16, 2026 1 hr 12 min

This week, the AI clown car somehow shifted into another gear. Apple is suing OpenAI over alleged trade-secret theft, newspapers accuse ChatGPT of training on stolen journalism while asking a judge to sanction the company, Anthropic is out here marketing AI with what looks like a feature-length anxiety attack, and Meta managed to launch—and kill—a creepy AI photo feature in less time than it takes to binge The Bear. Meanwhile, AI Appreciation Day wants you to thank the machines, but we'd rather thank the people still creating actual art while the rest of Silicon Valley burns cash convincing us the next chatbot is definitely different this time. Outside the AI bubble, the rest of the tech industry isn't exactly inspiring confidence. Volkswagen is cutting back on its lineup, New York paused new AI data centers before the electrical grid hits its limit, Europe and the UK are getting serious about keeping kids off social media, and publishers are finally realizing maybe feeding Google's AI isn't the best business move after all. Add in surveillance companies sulking over lost police contracts, lawsuits claiming Meta let algorithms decide who gets fired, smart glasses disqualifying cyclists, and a new pile of orbital junk threatening the satellites we depend on, and it's another reminder that "move fast and break things" eventually leaves you ankle-deep in broken glass. Of course, we still made time for the important stuff: Project Hail Mary, Black Bag, the return of Middle-earth with The Hunt for Gollum and rumors that OpenAI's "revolutionary” gadget might just be a smart speaker with delusions of grandeur. Throw in digital piano repairs, anti-data-center lawn signs, AI trying to sell solar panels, too much stuff at Downtown Disney, and you get another week where reality out-satirizes satire itself. As always, never build your house in someone else's backyard, and maybe don't let the chatbot build it either. Sponsors: CleanMyMac - Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and u...

The Darkside with Dave's Not Very Christmas Special Special

Jul 13, 2026 26 min

We finally get to reconnect with Dave Bittner for a fun catch-up and chit-chat about this summer's big movies. Brian's kid discovers all of Star Wars at once. Dave Bittner The CyberWire Hacking Humans Caveat Control Loop Only Malware in the Building Knockoff - Amazon Brand Filter Bob Gurr: Living by Design Support the show at Patreon! - https://patreon.com/gog Other ways to support the show! - https://gog.show/donate Join our Discord! - https://discord.gg/r4ZmSHB Buy some merch! - https://shop.gog.show/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Frankly Asinine Questions

Jul 9, 2026 1 hr 2 min

This week, the world finally discovers what we've been saying for years: Gen X wasn't forgotten—we were quietly keeping the entire damn machine running. New Census numbers show America's 45-to-64 crowd is shrinking fast, which means the people who know where all the bodies are buried (and why you never reboot that one production server) are disappearing without a replacement bench. Meanwhile, Meta continues its speedrun toward becoming history's most aggressively unlikeable company, staring down a potential $1.4 trillion lawsuit over social media addiction while simultaneously launching AI features that happily remix your Instagram photos unless you remember to opt out of Zuckerberg's latest privacy experiment. Because nothing says "we've learned our lesson" quite like doubling down. The AI circus somehow gets even weirder. Illinois actually passed meaningful AI safety legislation—an event so rare it qualifies as science fiction—while Sam Altman reportedly floated the idea of AI companies handing the U.S. government an ownership stake. Anthropic published another paper that's already inspiring breathless declarations that Claude is "thinking," because apparently matrix multiplication now counts as an inner monologue. Cloudflare finally decided websites shouldn't have to give away their content for free to AI crawlers, researchers discovered AI agents could consume enough electricity to make Google Search look like a bicycle generator, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk is being replaced by the very AI it spent two decades secretly training. Progress: where everyone works harder, gets paid less, and the power grid cries. Elsewhere in Tech Hell™, Waymo robotaxis turned San Francisco traffic into an even bigger parking lot, Google lost another multibillion-dollar antitrust appeal in Europe, the FCC found fresh ways to make internet bills less transparent, and Midjourney is demanding Hollywood explain its own AI habits in court. We also dig into a disturbing lawsuit involving...

No-Talent AI Clowns

Jul 2, 2026 1 hr 7 min

The AI revolution keeps delivering exactly the future nobody asked for. A low-skill hacker used Claude Code and Codex to compromise fourteen companies with prompts so vague they could've been written by your uncle trying to reset his AOL password. Ford, meanwhile, spent millions trying to automate engineering before sheepishly rehiring the graybeards who actually know how cars work. Brown University discovered what happens when half your class outsources economics homework to ChatGPT, Meta ran out of AI compute after borrowing Google's, Oracle is warning investors that the AI data-center bubble could implode for approximately every reason imaginable, and contractors hired to improve AI models are secretly using AI to generate the training data. Congratulations, everyone: we've successfully invented photocopying a photocopy until all that's left is gray mush. The collateral damage keeps piling up. Volkswagen is reportedly preparing to slash another 100,000 jobs, Hyundai workers are threatening to strike before Boston Dynamics' humanoid robots take theirs, California has launched an AI layoff tracker because somebody figured we'd better start counting, and the "almost homeless" subreddit is becoming one of the bleakest economic indicators on the internet. Tesla quietly settles another fatal Full Self-Driving lawsuit, Australia discovers teenagers can outsmart age verification by clicking "Yes, I'm 18," Amazon is getting sued Down Under for making ad-free Prime customers pay more to stay ad-free, and prediction markets continue insisting they're sophisticated financial instruments rather than gambling with better branding. Sure, and Beanie Babies were an asset class. Meanwhile, the AI infrastructure gold rush has become lucrative for everyone, including organized cargo thieves stealing millions in data-center equipment. NASA is attempting a robotic rescue mission worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon, astronomers are begging humanity to stop filling the night sky with s...

Grandma Got Run Over By a Tesla

Jun 25, 2026 1 hr 5 min

This week, the AI industry continues its speedrun toward becoming the tech equivalent of a late-stage casino. Elon Musk insists reports of aid-cut-related deaths don't exist despite mountains of evidence, SpaceX stock slides far enough to knock him out of the trillionaire club, and a startup is literally suing the U.S. government because Anthropic's Fable 5 model got turned off after three whole days of availability. Once again, we revisit the First Commandment of Grumpy Old Geeks: never build your company on someone else's platform. Meanwhile, gas stations are being accused of using AI to coordinate prices, corporations are discovering that AI tokens cost actual money, and a Microsoft researcher used goats in Age of Empires II to demonstrate that maybe, just maybe, people are projecting way too much intelligence onto chatbots. The goats emerge with their reputations intact. The AI industry, less so. The workforce bloodbath rolls on as Oracle quietly sheds 21,000 employees while blaming AI, Norway bans generative AI for elementary school students after discovering that children should probably learn to read before outsourcing their homework to robots, and the FCC flirts with rules that could effectively kill anonymous burner phones in the name of fighting scams. Over at Meta, an employee surveillance program accidentally exposed sensitive data to the entire company because of course it did, while Zuckerberg continues his relentless quest to strap cameras to everyone's face and call it progress. Add in YouTube settling another social-media-harm case, Chrome finally kneecapping traditional ad blockers, and prediction markets spreading across tech like mold in a college apartment, and it's becoming increasingly clear that every bad idea eventually gets funded. In transportation news, autonomous vehicles continue demonstrating that "mostly works" is not a reassuring phrase when attached to two tons of moving metal. A Tesla on Autopilot crashes into a home and kills a gr...

Brewster’s Trillions

Jun 18, 2026 1 hr 8 min

The AI hype train keeps shedding wheels this week. KPMG managed to publish a report about the transformative power of AI that was apparently riddled with hallucinations, fake citations, and imaginary products, proving once again that asking a stochastic parrot to do your homework is not a substitute for actual research. Meanwhile, Americans are using AI faster than ever while trusting it less than ever, OpenAI somehow turned $13 billion in revenue into losses that would make a dot-com CFO blush, and Silicon Valley CEOs have quietly stopped promising to replace all workers with AI. Not because they've changed their minds, mind you, just because they discovered that telling employees they're obsolete is terrible for morale and stock prices. Add in protests dogging Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta employees revolting against soul-crushing AI evaluation work, and the message is clear: the future is here, and everyone involved seems miserable. We then return to one of the founding principles of Grumpy Old Geeks: never build your house on somebody else's land. Anthropic learned that lesson the hard way when its AI models reportedly got caught in a geopolitical and regulatory tug-of-war involving Amazon, the U.S. government, and national security concerns. World leaders are now openly questioning whether American AI platforms can be trusted if access can be revoked overnight. The same platform-risk story pops up again as Meta launches AI-powered search across Facebook's oceans of questionable user-generated content. Remember kids: when you pitch your tent in someone else's backyard, don't act shocked when they turn on the sprinklers. From the Injustice Files, the hits keep coming. The Atlantic revealed the staggering scale of copyrighted music used to train AI systems, Hollywood inches closer to becoming a monopoly-themed amusement park, and the DOJ is backing xAI in a pollution lawsuit while reports emerge that Grok-assisted systems played a role in military operations. Elo...

Douchebag Ping Pong

Jun 11, 2026 57 min

Episode 750 arrives with a simple reminder: the b******t never sleeps. This week Jason and Brian dive headfirst into a game of Douchebag Ping Pong featuring OpenAI, Anthropic, Elon Musk, and the rest of the AI industrial complex. OpenAI is preparing to go public while simultaneously transforming ChatGPT into an everything app, Anthropic wants the world to slow down AI development before Skynet shows up for work, and then immediately releases a more powerful model because apparently self-awareness only goes so far. Meanwhile, Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning side hustle is laying people off, proving that convincing humans to hand over their biometric data remains a surprisingly difficult sales pitch. The AI arms race gets even weirder as SpaceX unveils plans for orbital data centers the size of flying football fields while Google and Anthropic shovel billions into Elon’s compute empire just to keep their models fed. On Earth, Seattle is trying to ban new AI data centers before they drink the city dry, Meta is planting AI infrastructure in India, Google is slashing Gemini prices, and a Mississippi judge discovers that lawyers on both sides of a case used AI to invent legal citations, resulting in the rare spectacle of artificial stupidity arguing against itself. Thankfully, AI also manages to do something useful, helping researchers develop a promising universal vaccine and reminding us that not every machine-learning story ends with humanity getting harvested for electricity. Elsewhere, crypto continues its transformation into performance art as Sam Bankman-Fried seeks a presidential pardon while reports suggest the Trump family made billions from crypto projects that left investors holding the bag. Meta gets caught quietly experimenting with face recognition in smart glasses, lawmakers scramble to require recording indicators, and Snapchat tightens protections for younger users. The guys also celebrate Apple's shockingly competent Sports app, a rare piece of software t...

Surge Bananas

Jun 5, 2026 1 hr 16 min

This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, Brian and Jason once again survey the smoldering wreckage of the tech industry and discover that the people building the future are increasingly being sued by governments, publishers, customers, employees, and occasionally reality itself. California is coming after 23andMe over its catastrophic data breach, Florida is taking a swing at OpenAI, CNN has joined the ever-growing conga line of companies suing Perplexity, and Meta somehow decided the solution to improving AI is recording employees' every mouse click while generously allowing them a whole 30-minute privacy break. Meanwhile, Google's own engineers are sharing memes about how much Google's AI tools suck, Microsoft apparently wants users addicted to its new AI assistant - first taste's free! - and Anthropic is preparing to go public with a valuation that makes even the most irrational dot-com era investor look financially responsible. The AI arms race continues producing exactly the kinds of outcomes you'd expect when venture capitalists start huffing their own press releases. Instagram's AI support bot reportedly helped hackers steal accounts because apparently "Are you sure you're the owner?" was considered an optional step. Suno raised another $400 million while fighting copyright lawsuits, Paramount+ seems to have let AI create the ugliest Star Trek thumbnail in Federation history, and Stan Lee has now been digitally resurrected because modern capitalism looked at death and said, "Nice try." Over in transportation, BYD is so confident in its self-driving technology that it's willing to pay for your accidents, while Tesla owners are discovering their old Full Self-Driving contracts may have quietly received software updates of the legal variety. Somewhere in a conference room, a lawyer just whispered, "Let's not put that in writing," ten years too late. Elsewhere, governments worldwide continue their ongoing experiment of raising children by confiscating smartphones. Malaysia...

Space Bone

May 29, 2026 58 min

This week on Grumpy Old Geeks, Brian and Jason stare directly into the flaming garbage barge of “the future” and discover that self-driving vehicles still can’t tell the difference between a road and an urban swimming pool. Waymo stranded robotaxis in both Atlanta and San Antonio, while Gothenburg’s brand-new autonomous bus service survived roughly one day before getting rear-ended by a tram like a lost RoboCop scene directed by Benny Hill. Meanwhile, Ferrari unveiled the Jony Ive-designed Luce EV, proving that if you give Apple designers enough money and untreated minimalist impulses, eventually everything starts looking like an uninspired bar of soap. The AI bubble keeps inflating like a cursed parade balloon nobody knows how to land. Uber admits it’s spending fortunes on AI without being able to explain what it actually improves, Starbucks killed its AI inventory system after repeated losses to dairy products, and Google’s AI search now struggles with advanced concepts like “ignore,” “stop,” and spelling “Google.” CEOs remain committed to replacing workers anyway, with 99% expecting AI-driven layoffs because apparently nothing says innovation like firing junior staff and replacing them with autocomplete that thinks there are two Ps in Google. Meanwhile, Spotify continues its transformation into the content equivalent of a casino buffet with AI-narrated magazine articles, while Pope Leo emerges as the lone adult in the room, suggesting humanity maybe shouldn’t hand civilization over to glorified pattern-matching slot machines. Elsewhere in dystopia, Trump Mobile exposed customer data to the open internet because, of course, it did, while the White House reportedly plans to force-install its official app on government phones in what feels like the world’s least subtle spyware rollout. Prediction markets are devolving into a legal cage fight between states and crypto gambling enthusiasts. A Google engineer allegedly made $1.2 million through insider trading on Polym...

Why We Sigh

May 22, 2026 1 hr 22 min

FOLLOW UP: This week, it seems America believes every complicated social problem can be fixed by asking, “Have you tried turning the internet off for the children?” Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation quietly notes that the science behind social media bans might not be as clear-cut as cable-news dads screaming about dopamine loops claim. Turns out, teen anxiety may also be linked to pandemics, school shootings, climate dread, and an economy that feels like a Fallout side quest. Meanwhile, Snap Inc. and YouTube settled another lawsuit accusing their apps of turning kids into doomscrolling goblins, Meta continues to insist social media addiction isn’t real while losing money in court, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at a graduation speech after telling graduates to hop on the AI rocket ship without asking questions — exactly what a billionaire says when he already owns the rocket. In the news, Elon Musk lost another OpenAI lawsuit because apparently even juries have limits. SpaceX’s IPO revealed Musk plans to power AI with enough gas turbines to recreate 1890s London smog, and Grok officially became a disclosure liability after the whole “MechaHitler” incident. Tesla robotaxis still clip fences and occasionally require humans to remotely drive the “self-driving” cars. Trump Mobile somehow shipped a gold phone that actually works — a stunning upset — before immediately leaking customer data. LinkedIn finally admitted the platform has become an AI-generated motivational swamp filled with “it’s not about X, it’s about Y” sludge from people named Brayden. Spotify is handing out podcast verification badges so listeners can tell real creators from algorithmic nightmare fuel. Meta laid off thousands more workers while reportedly using employee surveillance to train AI replacements. And OpenAI is giving everyone in Malta a free year of ChatGPT Plus if they complete an AI literacy course, which honestly makes Malta sound more technologically responsible...

Reality is Frequently Inaccurate

May 15, 2026 1 hr 19 min

FOLLOW UP starts with merchandise promotion and YouTube begging reminiscent of 2007, before GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen gets thoroughly criticized by eBay after proposing a $56 billion takeover plan that eBay called “neither credible nor attractive,” which is corporate-speak for “please stop emailing us at 3 a.m.” Meanwhile, California residents might finally receive a small settlement check from Grubhub worth about half a burrito, just as Americans realize they dislike AI data centers even more than nuclear plants because nobody wants a warehouse full of GPUs boiling away the local water supply. Lake Tahoe residents are learning their electricity now goes to AI processing plants instead of people, xAI keeps adding methane turbines despite being sued over them, and SpaceXAI employees are fleeing Elon’s “sleep under your desk forever” lifestyle as if it were the last helicopter out of Saigon. IN THE NEWS, we start gently with the revelation that everyone at the Musk v. Altman trial is sitting on luxury butt cushions because apparently the singularity requires lumbar support, before plunging straight into the abyss: fake AI crypto journalists haunting Forbes and HuffPost like SEO poltergeists, OpenAI launching “Daybreak” so the robots can now secure the software they helped break, Anthropic trying to stop AI from becoming evil by feeding it morality fan fiction, and Google catching AI-generated zero-day exploits in the wild because cyberpunk novels were apparently instructional manuals. Waymo robotaxis are experimenting with driving into floodwaters, a family is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT allegedly advised their son to mix drugs with fatal results, graduating students booed an executive for praising AI as if she were announcing the arrival of cholera, and Meta continues its speedrun toward becoming the world’s largest scam mall while simultaneously demanding everyone trust its shiny new “encrypted AI chats.” Also: Meta is testing Grok-for-Threads, somebody created an AI p...

Unwanted Senior Discount

May 8, 2026 1 hr 8 min

In FOLLOW UP, the guys marvel at the completely normal state of America as Amnesty International issues a travel advisory for the 2026 World Cup because apparently “visiting the United States” now comes with the same vibe as backpacking through a failed cyberpunk state. Then it’s onto Dead Podcast Theory, where more than a third of all new podcasts are AI-generated “podslop,” proving Silicon Valley heard “everyone has a podcast” and responded with “what if nobody did?” Meanwhile, Ticketmaster reminds everyone that if you’ve purchased a concert ticket since 2010, there’s probably a class action settlement with your name on it and enough compensation for half a convenience fee. IN THE NEWS is basically one long panic attack sponsored by AI. The White House is considering regulating AI models, Canada says OpenAI vacuumed up everyone’s personal data like a drunk Roomba, Character.AI allegedly impersonated a licensed psychiatrist, and Mother Jones found ChatGPT still happily helping aspiring mass shooters workshop their plans. Snap’s Perplexity deal died quietly in a ditch while Meta keeps assembling humanoid robots like it’s building the world’s most annoying version of Westworld. Then GameStop tries to buy eBay in the dumbest sentence ever typed, Ryan Cohen gets himself banned from eBay while trying to meme-finance the deal, Elon Musk settles with the SEC for pocket lint money, Coinbase fires people because “AI,” Toto accidentally becomes a semiconductor giant through toilet technology, and smart glasses officially evolve from creepy gadget to extortion accessory. MEDIA CANDY brings some relief with Daredevil: Born Again and Widow’s Bay. The Academy finally decides AI-generated actors and scripts can’t win Oscars, which feels like the bare minimum required to stop ChatGPT from getting Best Supporting Actor before Willem Dafoe. In APPS & DOODADS, Pornhub returns to the UK thanks to Apple’s age verification system, Ask.com finally dies and takes Jeeves with it into the g...

Goblin Mode

May 1, 2026 1 hr 23 min

Episode 744 kicks off with new merch in the wild and the ongoing expansion of the “protect the children from the internet” playbook. Manitoba is floating a ban on social media and AI chatbots for kids with details still TBD, while the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee somehow managed unanimous approval on chatbot age-verification legislation. Utah, not to be outdone, passed SB 73 — a law that tries to pin age verification on VPN users and even bans sites from explaining what a VPN is, a move that will mostly degrade the internet without solving the problem it claims to address. Meanwhile, John Oliver finally unloaded on the AI industry, echoing long-standing criticisms: rushed products, acknowledged risks, and outsourced consequences. In the news, a U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant was arrested for allegedly turning classified intel about the Maduro capture into a $400K Polymarket win, then attempting to cover it up in ways that suggest poor operational planning. Meta cut more than 1,100 Kenyan content moderators after reports surfaced that they were exposed to explicit footage from smart glasses users, raising serious questions about labor practices in AI pipelines. Google signed a Pentagon AI deal despite internal backlash while posting massive revenue gains, underscoring where incentives actually land. OpenAI, meanwhile, is juggling missed targets, a shift away from Microsoft exclusivity, and continued reputational hits around Sam Altman — including a widely criticized apology tied to a mass shooting and a fabricated Bruno Mars tie-in for his World project. Add in a failed retrial bid from Sam Bankman-Fried, rising volumes of AI-generated web content, and political interference with the National Science Board, and the signal is clear: incentives are misaligned across the board. On the lighter side, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns July 23rd for its penultimate season, and Ted Lasso is back August 5th, for better or worse. Jack Dorsey beat the inevitabl...

Category Five Dystopia

Apr 24, 2026 1 hr 18 min

In FOLLOW UP, the child social media crackdown keeps expanding. Turkey just approved a ban for under-15s, and Sony will require age verification for PlayStation communication features in the UK and Ireland starting in June—because now you need to prove you’re an adult before trash-talking strangers online. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s prediction that fully autonomous AI employees would already be transforming business hasn’t materialized. Agentic systems are still struggling with basic workflows and, in some cases, slowing developers down. And in a more concrete reversal, Elon Musk acknowledged that pre-2023 Tesla Hardware 3 will never support Full Self-Driving. Customers who paid for the feature are now being steered toward discounted trade-ins, new cameras, and upgraded hardware—prompting obvious legal exposure. IN THE NEWS: SpaceX is reportedly targeting what could be the largest IPO ever, at roughly a $1.75 trillion valuation, with dual-class shares that preserve Musk’s control through super-voting rights. Prediction markets continue to degrade: Kalshi suspended political candidates for trading on their own races, and Polymarket saw alleged manipulation via a tampered weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle Airport. On the AI front, Anthropic’s new Mythos model had a chaotic rollout—used by the NSA, applied to patch hundreds of Firefox vulnerabilities, and briefly exposed through unauthorized access in a developer portal. Amazon followed with a $25 billion investment in Anthropic, even as governments appear to access similar capabilities independently. At the same time, the economics are tightening. Free tiers are shrinking, GitHub Copilot is shifting to token-based billing after costs doubled, and startups are normalizing six-figure monthly AI compute bills. Infrastructure growth continues unchecked: thousands of new data centers are planned across the U.S., while xAI faces scrutiny in Memphis over water usage and delayed mitigation projects. Environmental commitments in...

Uncouth Yet Highly Litigious

Apr 17, 2026 1 hr 25 min

In FOLLOW UP, while countries race to ban kids from social media, Estonia is opting out — its education minister arguing that bans just offload responsibility onto kids while governments and platforms avoid accountability. Australia already shows the limits: 61% of banned kids are still online, 70% say it’s easy to bypass, and major platforms are under investigation. The EU is rolling out an age-verification system using zero-knowledge proofs officials call “completely anonymized,” which sounds generous for a system that starts profiling you the moment it touches an account. Maybe retire the anonymity talking point. IN THE NEWS, the AI-brain-rot narrative keeps accelerating: one study found just ten minutes of AI use increases dependency and degrades performance once it’s removed — with users simply “not willing to try.” ChatGPT praised a fart-noise “song” as having a “cool lo-fi, late-night, slightly eerie vibe,” which would be harmless if that same sycophancy wasn’t showing up in darker contexts — including two mass shootings with ChatGPT in the background, and a lawsuit from a San Francisco woman claiming the tool helped her ex escalate harassment with AI-generated reports and threats. That same week, Sam Altman’s house was attacked by a suspect targeting AI execs. Elsewhere: France is ditching Windows for Linux; Amazon faces scrutiny for allegedly keeping workers on shift next to a dead colleague; Snap cut 16% of staff blaming AI; Reddit is fighting an ICE subpoena to unmask a critic; Google is blending Polymarket odds into News; the FAA is recruiting gamers as air traffic controllers; and Allbirds briefly became an “AI company,” spiked, then crashed when reality set back in. Norway quietly cured another HIV patient, the rare story that isn’t bleak. In APPS & DOODADS, California and New York are pushing DRM-style censorware for 3D printers, with New York tying it to felony penalties for certain files. The FCC’s router ban is already inconsistent — Netgear got a...

Moon Joy

Apr 10, 2026 1 hr 11 min

We kick off with a the Dodgers spanking the Blue Jays and torn allegiances in Brian's house, then dive into Europe taking dead aim at your kids' screen time. Ireland is rolling out a Government Digital Wallet that'll verify ages before young'uns can doom-scroll their lives away, while Greece went fully scorched-earth and announced a ban on all under-15s using social media at all — announced, naturally, on TikTok. IN THE NEWS, the AI giants (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) are playing nicely together for once, teaming up through the Frontier Model Forum to stop Chinese firms from essentially photocopying their models on the cheap — billions in revenue, national security, and the small matter of safety guardrails stripped out. Turnabout is fair play? On the legal gambling front, prediction markets scored a federal win as a US appeals court ruled New Jersey can't regulate Kalshi; the Trump family's fingerprints are all over the prediction market space (surprise!), and the data suggests 0.04% of accounts are hoovering up 70% of profits like it's a perfectly healthy ecosystem. Also: the FBI pulled deleted Signal messages out of iPhone notification caches, GoPro is laying off 23% of its workforce while somehow remaining optimistic, and OpenAI is backing an Illinois bill that would shield AI companies from liability even in mass-casualty scenarios... cool. On the plus side, Artemis II astronauts took amazing photos of the Moon... on their iPhones. In APPS & DOODADS: Mercedes recalled its electric G-Wagons because the wheels might literally fall off, Amazon is sunsetting Kindles from 2012 and earlier for no reason anyone can figure out, and Apple Fitness on Apple TV is randomly scrambling workout stacks with no fix in sight — a premium locked ecosystem doing premium locked ecosystem things. In MEDIA CANDY, the crew is watching The Pitt, The Boys, Shrinking, and Daredevil, and you'll want to sit down for this: Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis are back — Spaceballs 2 hits theaters a fu...

To the Moon!

Apr 3, 2026 1 hr 16 min

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, where we're starting to notice a patience epidemic! As people get used to barking orders at their AI, they're starting to talk to other humans with the same terse impatience. We discuss the enshittification of social media like Threads, which are now completely overrun with AI-generated slop. This week, we dive into the corporate shenanigans of the tech world. OpenAI was caught secretly funding an advocacy group to push for age verification laws that just so happen to benefit Sam Altman's other company. We also cover Elon Musk's troubles, including all of xAI's co-founders quitting, a SpaceX satellite exploding, and Tesla's "fully autonomous" robotaxis being revealed to have remote human drivers. Plus, we celebrate NASA's successful Artemis II launch, review a fantastic Premiere Pro plugin for multicam editing, and give our thoughts on shows like "The Pit" and "Downton Abbey." Sponsors: SquareSpace - go to squarespace.com/GRUMPY for a free trial. And when you’re ready to launch, use code GRUMPY to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month. SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!! 1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1password Show notes at https://gog.show/740 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IpzOakbBftY FOLLOW UP Austria is pursuing a social media ban for kids under 14 Group Pushing Age Verification Requirements for AI Turns Out to Be Sneakily Backed by OpenAI OpenAI takes on another “side quest,” buys tech-focused talk show TBPN IN THE NEWS Elon Musk’s last co-founder reportedly leaves xAI SpaceX loses contact with one of its Starlink satellites SpaceX has reportedly filed for the biggest IPO in history OpenAI Is Falling Out of Fa...

The Thin Black Line

Mar 27, 2026 59 min

Meta fined $375M for child safety failures. Musk lost 3 lawsuits in a week. Sam Altman compared to a Nazi. Netflix raised prices again. The Pentagon can't quit Claude. Reddit wants your face scan. Star Trek's streaming era is over. But the thin black line holds! 🎙️ Sponsors: DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. SquareSpace - go to squarespace.com/GRUMPY for a free trial. And when you’re ready to launch, use code GRUMPY to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month. SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!! 1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1password Show notes at https://gog.show/739 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hdhHiOaclu0 FOLLOW UP Polymarket is cracking down on insider trading with updated rules https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/polymarket-is-cracking-down-on-insider-trading-with-updated-rules-163928655.html Judge temporarily blocks Pentagon's 'supply chain risk' designation for Anthropic https://abcnews.com/Technology/judge-temporarily-blocks-pentagons-supply-chain-risk-designation/story?id=131453267 IN THE NEWS Jury rules against Meta, orders $375 million fine in major child safety trial https://www.engadget.com/social-media/jury-rules-against-meta-orders-375-million-fine-in-major-child-safety-trial-224215209.html Jury rules against Meta and YouTube in social media addiction case https://www.engadget.com/social-media/jury-rules-against-meta-and-youtube-in-social-media-addiction-case-181344860.html Elon Musk loses big in court; X boycott perfectly legal https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/elon-musk-loses-big-in-court-x-boycott-perfectly-legal/ Elon Musk misled inves...

A Sprinkling of Random

Mar 20, 2026 1 hr 24 min

13 years of podcasting has taught us nothing; companies are lying about AI layoffs while Meta destroys itself from the inside; Andreessen has zero introspection and it shows; Dune 3 looks incredible; Firefly lives again; one idiot executive staked Buffy; Adobe paid $75M for being evil; your AI passwords are garbage; Dave Bittner is here to make you feel worse about all of it. Sponsors: DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. SquareSpace - go to squarespace.com/GRUMPY for a free trial. And when you’re ready to launch, use code GRUMPY to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month. SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!! 1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1password Show notes at https://gog.show/738 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/pykGjOmMs5c FOLLOW UP GOG Ep 1: How to Make Money on the Internet - March 25th, 2013 The ‘AI-Washing’ of Job Cuts Is Corrosive and Confusing Race on to establish globally recognised 'AI-free' logo Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention. Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don’t rewrite an Iran missile story IN THE NEWS Atlassian to cut roughly 10% jobs in pivot to AI Meta is reportedly planning to cut up to 20 percent of its staff in upcoming layoffs Meta Is Building an Encrypted Chatbot After AI Agents Went Rogue and Exposed Sensitive Data Meta Says It Is Removing End-to-End Encryption From Instagram Direct Messages Meta is testing clickable links in Instagram captions for verified subscribers Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI for copyright and trademark i...

Monetizable Content

Mar 13, 2026 1 hr 4 min

In this week's show we start with FOLLOW UP: The world keeps trying to protect kids online — Indonesia just joined Australia, Spain, and Malaysia in banning social media for under-16s, while COPPA 2.0 sailed through the US Senate unanimously. Meanwhile, Roblox is using AI to clean up its chat, because apparently "Hurry TF up" is the hill they've chosen to die on — even as they're still dealing with the whole "pedophile problem" thing from January. On the AI copyright front, Gracenote is the latest company to sue OpenAI for helping itself to proprietary data, joining a growing queue of plaintiffs who apparently didn't get the memo that everything is training data now. IN THE NEWS: Anthropic is suing the Pentagon after being labeled a "supply chain risk" — apparently because the CEO said AI shouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, which the Trump administration heard as fighting words. The delicious irony: the Pentagon is still running Claude in active operations while trying to phase it out. Speaking of active operations, investigators now think a missile strike on an Iranian girls' school may have been triggered by bad AI-generated intelligence from that same Claude-based system. So yes, the autocomplete that hallucinates your grocery list is also maybe accidentally bombing schools. Meta's Oversight Board is begging the company to get serious about AI-generated content after a fake war video from a Filipino fake news account racked up 700K views — while separately, Zuckerberg dropped cash on Moltbook, a "social network for AI agents" that turned out to be mostly humans larping as bots and had a security flaw that exposed everyone's API keys. The guy who built it basically vibe-coded the whole thing. Meta's own CTO said he didn't "find it particularly interesting." And yet. Oracle is hemorrhaging jobs and drowning in debt chasing AI dreams, its stock down 50% from peak — a timely reminder that "AI will replace workers" is currently manifesting a...

People Aren’t People

Mar 6, 2026 55 min

Microsoft's anti-"Microslop" censorship backfired spectacularly; Australia is cracking down on AI age verification while Meta is busy targeting toddlers; prediction markets are basically just insider trading with extra steps; AI chatbots are getting people killed and exposing spy operations; the Moon landing got pushed again; Opera got nostalgic at 30; Sony bought Charlie Brown; and Netflix is making documentaries with robot people now. Show notes at https://gog.show/736 Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/6lw2Hy_U8QA Sponsors: DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month. SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!! 1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1password FOLLOW UP Microsoft Bans the Word “Microslop” on Copilot Discord, Gets So Humiliated That It Locks Down the Whole Server Australia will consider requiring app stores to block AI services without age verification A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator IN THE NEWS Meta’s what-if for tweens How Meta Executives Talked About Child Safety Behind the Scenes The Great Insider Trading Reckoning Reportedly Hits OpenAI Khamenei market meltdown on Kalshi shows how prediction markets still can’t decide what ‘counts’ Some Alleged Polymarket Insiders Made a Fortune on U.S. Strikes on Iran Polymarket Decides Incentivizing a Nuclear Detonation Might Be a Bad Idea A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation ‘Our Bond Is the Only Thing That’s Real:’ A New Lawsuit Alleges Google Gemini Drove a Man to Suicide The Data Centers Have Arrived at the Edge of the Arctic Circle Big tech companies agree to not ruin your electric bill wit...

We’re Walking on Sunshine

Feb 27, 2026 1 hr 23 min

Starting off in FOLLOW UP, we’ve got a tax economist who actually made money betting against the "efficiency" of Elon’s budget-slashing fever dreams, while Tesla is busy trying to dodge a $243 million jury verdict for an Autopilot-assisted fatality. Not content with being legally liable, Tesla is also suing the California DMV because they’re offended someone called their "Autopilot" and "Full Self-Driving" marketing deceptive—ironic, since Jack Dorsey just "proactively" halved the staff at Block to make room for more AI slop. Speaking of which, Goldman Sachs is here to remind us that all this AI spending added a grand total of zero to the US GDP last year, mostly because we’re just exporting all that cash to overseas chip makers while 80% of execs admit the tech hasn’t actually done anything for productivity yet. Moving into IN THE NEWS, Sam Altman had the audacity to compare ChatGPT’s energy-sucking habits to the 20-year evolution of a human, though the internet wasn't exactly buying the "my bot is just like a baby" defense. Anthropic actually stood its ground against the Pentagon’s demand for killer robots and mass surveillance, so naturally, the military just signed a deal to put Elon’s Grok in their classified systems instead—because what could go wrong with an "edgy" LLM in the war room? Meanwhile, cities are dumping AI surveillance contracts as citizens start a literal "smash-the-snitch-box" campaign against Flock's license plate readers, Google’s AI is busy inserting racial slurs into news alerts, and the White House is apparently harboring a staffer moonlighting as a racist "masterpiece" creator on X. We’ve also got Reddit being slapped with a $20 million fine in the UK for being lazy with age checks, while Discord and Apple scramble to build verification tools that hopefully won't leak your entire identity to a hacker in Belarus. In MEDIA CANDY, the Paramount-Skydance merger is leaving the industry in a cold sweat of "synergy" layoffs, but at least we’re ge...

A Bald Woody

Feb 20, 2026 1 hr 25 min

If you thought the internet was a dumpster fire before, the EU LAUNCHES SECOND INVESTIGATION INTO GROK because Musk’s bot won't stop generating nonconsensual imagery. Meanwhile, META LARGELY FAILS TO PROTECT KIDS FROM AI CHATBOTS, proving that their internal safety checks are about as effective as a screen door on a submarine. If that doesn't creep you out, AFTER RING PRIVACY BACKLASH over police partnerships, a LEAKED EMAIL SUGGESTS RING PLANS TO EXPAND ‘SEARCH PARTY’ from finding lost dogs to total neighborhood surveillance. Of course, REDDIT, META, AND GOOGLE VOLUNTARILY GAVE DHS INFO on users critical of ICE, because why stand up for privacy when you can just comply? In the news, we look at OPENCLAW, OPENAI AND THE FUTURE as the project’s founder joins the Borg, even though META AND OTHER TECH FIRMS PUT RESTRICTIONS ON USE OF OPENCLAW because it’s basically a security hole that can click your mouse for you. Peak stupidity has arrived with RFK JR'S NEW CHATBOT giving rectal dietary advice, while AI COMPANIES BOUGHT OUT ALL OF WESTERN DIGITAL’S HARD DRIVES through 2026, meaning you can't have storage because the bots need it more. Even VALVE ADMITS STEAM DECK AVAILABILITY IS AFFECTED by this memory hoarding. We also touch on STEVE BANNON SUED OVER MAGA CRYPTO SCHEME, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FILES LAWSUIT AGAINST ROBLOX for being a safety nightmare, and the fact that TESLA ROBOTAXIS REPORTEDLY CRASHING at four times the human rate. TESLA DODGES 30-DAY SUSPENSION by simply killing the word "Autopilot," while NEW YORK HITS THE BRAKES ON ROBOTAXI EXPANSION to keep the chaos at bay. Finally, POLYMARKET WITHDRAWS EXPLOSIVE ARTEMIS BETTING MARKET because betting on dead astronauts is too much even for them, leading the ETHEREUM CREATOR STARTING TO THINK THIS WHOLE PREDICTION MARKET THING MIGHT BE GAMBLING. As NEVADA SUES KALSHI and Jack Dorsey oversees INSIDE THE ROLLING LAYOFFS AT JACK DORSEY’S BLOCK—using AI to summarize the misery of his employees—just remember: YOU’LL BE...

Predator Friendly Hunting Ground

Feb 13, 2026 1 hr 24 min

We kick things off in FOLLOW UP with the ongoing "nuclear war" between Automattic and WP Engine, where discovery has revealed Matt Mullenweg’s alleged hit list of competitors and a desperate attempt to bully payment processors—because nothing says "open source" like an eight-percent royalty shakedown. Meanwhile, the Harvard Business Review confirmed what we already knew: AI isn’t reducing our work; it’s just compressing it until we’re all working through lunch and burning out faster while Polymarket turns our collective brain rot into a literal "attention market" where you can bet on Elon’s mindshare. Transitioning to IN THE NEWS, Elon has officially pivoted SpaceX from Mars to the Moon, presumably because building a "self-growing lunar city" is easier than admitting the Red Planet is hard, though his xAI all-hands rant about "ancient alien catapults" suggests he’s been staring at the sun too long. Between X allegedly taking blue-check lunch money from sanctioned Iranian leaders, Meta facing trials for creating "predator-friendly hunting grounds," and Russia finally pulling the plug on WhatsApp, the internet is looking more like a digital dumpster fire than ever. Add in Discord leaking 70,000 government IDs, OpenAI shoving ads into ChatGPT while safety researchers flee the building like it’s on fire, and a "cognitive debt" crisis eroding our ability to think, and you’ve got a recipe for a tech-induced psychosis that even crypto-funded human trafficking can’t outpace. In MEDIA CANDY, we're wondering about the soft-core porn intro in the latest Star Trek: Starfleet Academy while Apple buys the total rights to Severance for seventy million dollars—because in-house production is the only way to keep those ballooning budgets under control. Super Bowl trailer season gave us a glimpse of The Mandalorian and Grogu and a Project Hail Mary teaser, while Babylon 5 has finally landed on YouTube for free, proving that even 90s serialized sci-fi eventually finds its way to the cl...

We’re Not In the Files!

Feb 7, 2026 1 hr 16 min

In this week’s FOLLOW UP, Bitcoin is down 15%, miners are unplugging rigs because paying eighty-seven grand to mine a sixty-grand coin finally failed the vibes check, and Grok is still digitally undressing men—suggesting Musk’s “safeguards” remain mostly theoretical, which didn’t help when X offices got raided in France. Spain wants to ban social media for kids under 16, Egypt is blocking Roblox outright, and governments everywhere are flailing at the algorithmic abyss. IN THE NEWS, Elon Musk is rolling xAI into SpaceX to birth a $1.25 trillion megacorp that wants to power AI from orbit with a million satellites, because space junk apparently wasn’t annoying enough. Amazon admits a “high volume” of CSAM showed up in its AI training data and blames third parties, Waymo bags a massive $16 billion to insist robotaxis are working, Pinterest reportedly fires staff who built a layoff-tracking tool, and Sam Altman gets extremely cranky about Claude’s Super Bowl ads hitting a little too close to home. For MEDIA CANDY, we’ve got Shrinking, the Grammys, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s questionable holographic future, Neil Young gifting his catalog to Greenland while snubbing Amazon, plus Is It Cake? Valentines and The Rip. In APPS & DOODADS, we test Sennheiser earbuds, mess with Topaz Video, skip a deeply cursed Python script that checks LinkedIn for Epstein connections, and note that autonomous cars and drones will happily obey prompt injection via road signs—defeated by a Sharpie. IN THE LIBRARY, there’s The Regicide Report, a brutal study finding early dementia signals in Terry Pratchett’s novels, Neil Gaiman denying allegations while announcing a new book, and THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE, vibing with The Muppet Show as Disney names a new CEO. We round it out with RentAHuman.ai dread relief via paper airplane databases, free Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Sir Ian McKellen on Colbert—still classy in the digital wasteland. Sponsors: DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when yo...

I Want My 13 Trillion Dollars!

Jan 30, 2026 1 hr 19 min

We kick off FOLLOW UP by checking in on Elon Musk’s personal dumpster fire, where the EU is investigating Grok for deepfake slop while Tesla’s “unsupervised” robotaxis turned out to be supervised by literal chase cars — shocker. At least some of you are getting Siri settlement crumbs in your bank accounts, though you could probably double it betting against Musk’s worthless promises on Polymarket. Transitioning to IN THE NEWS, Tesla is killing off the Model S and X to build robots while sales crater, proving that mixing hard-right politics with EV sales is a brilliant move for the balance sheet. Meanwhile, the corporate bloodbath continues with massive layoffs at Ubisoft, Vimeo (courtesy of the Bending Spoons buzzsaw), and Amazon, because “removing bureaucracy” is apparently HR-speak for 16,000 families losing their livelihoods. If that’s not enough, Google is settling yet another privacy suit for $135 million, the EU is threatening to weaponize its tech sovereignty against the US, and the Trump administration wants Gemini to write federal regulations—because if there's one thing we want drafting airline safety rules, it's a hallucinating chatbot. Still IN THE NEWS, Waymo is under federal investigation for passing school buses and hitting children, while South Korea’s new AI laws manage to please absolutely no one. Record labels are suing Anna’s Archive for a cool $13 trillion—roughly three times the GDP of India—and the Winklevoss twins have finally admitted that NFTs are dead by shuttering Nifty Gateway. We pivot to MEDIA CANDY, where the Patriots and Seahawks are heading to Super Bowl 60, and the Winter Olympics are descending on Milan. We’re doing the math on the Starfleet Academy timeline, celebrating the return of Ted Lasso and Shrinking, and trying to decide if Henry Cavill is the second coming of Timothy Dalton in the Highlander reboot. Plus, Jessica Jones is back in the Daredevil: Born Again trailer, and Colin Farrell’s Sugar is returning to explain that wi...

Ethical Broads

Jan 23, 2026 1 hr 26 min

Ep 730: Ethical Broads PRIVATE We kick off FOLLOW UP with California’s AG sending a cease-and-desist to xAI over Grok generating creepy deepfakes of minors, while regulators finally notice Elon Musk’s xAI datacenter illegally running methane turbines in Memphis. The FTC is also appealing its loss in the Meta monopoly case, because apparently breaking up Zuckerberg’s data empire is still the hill they want to die on. IN THE NEWS, Washington joins the age-verification-for-porn parade, the UK considers an Australia-style social media ban for kids under 16, and governments everywhere continue demanding your ID before you’re allowed to enjoy the internet. OpenAI rolls out age prediction for ChatGPT accounts ahead of a rumored adult mode—though hey, at least you can now group tabs in ChatGPT’s Atlas browser. Anthropic rewrites Claude’s “constitution” to make it more vibes-based, Nevada moves to block Polymarket because gambling is only legal when the house owns the house, and YouTube promises even more AI features in 2026. Elsewhere, a Swiss suicide pod gets an AI “mental fitness” upgrade, Microsoft’s CEO begs AI developers to do something useful before the grid collapses, Musk hunts for a $134 billion payday from OpenAI and Microsoft, and makes yet more Davos predictions about robotaxis and aliens that are absolutely happening this year. On the bright side, A-list creatives push back on AI and Comic-Con bans AI art, buying humans a little more time. MEDIA CANDY finds us slogging through Wish, The Pitt, and the “Mel’s Diner in Space” look of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. We confirm 20-year-old CGI wargs still look terrible, get cautiously excited for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, and note that Fallout Season 2’s weekly drops may not be working for a binge-rotted audience. In APPS & DOODADS, X launches Bluesky-style starter packs—presumably to help you find more Nazis—while ICE becomes one of the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky. Threads edges out X in daily mobile user...

Alright Alright Alright™

Jan 16, 2026 1 hr 24 min

We kick things off with the existential dread of FOLLOW UP and the absolute joy of jury duty. While xAI’s Grok is busy getting banned in Malaysia and Indonesia for its CSAM-generating "features," the Senate is unanimously passing the DEFIANCE Act to give us some legal teeth against the deepfake machine. Meta is busy nuking 550,000 Australian accounts to appease regulators, while Roblox’s age verification is so broken that a drawing of stubble or a photo of Kurt Cobain can get you into the adult lounge. Moving IN THE NEWS, Meta is trading its $70 billion Metaverse graveyard for a Reality Labs layoff and a pivot to AI hardware, fueled by an "AI infrastructure" buildout that’s hiring former Trump advisors. Bandcamp is heroically banning AI "slop," Matthew McConaughey is trademarking his own face to fend off the bots, and ICE’s AI hiring tool is such a disaster it’s accidentally fast-tracking mall security as "officers." Between self-help gurus charging $99 for chatbot "advice," GM finally settling its driver-spying suit with the FTC, and NASA prepping for a February moon shot while China plans to launch 200,000 satellites into our already crowded orbit, the future looks exactly as messy as we expected. For MEDIA CANDY, we’ve got Lord of the Rings marathons, the diner-bridge of Starfleet Academy, and the usual joy of streaming price hikes hitting our "Premium" plans. We’re tracking the 2025 "In Memoriam" and Gabriel Pagan’s exhaustive movie list before sliding into APPS & DOODADS. Jony Ive and Sam Altman are reportedly building an hearing aide called "Sweetpea" to kill your AirPods, Siri is officially Google Gemini’s new puppet, and Apple is finally bundling its creative apps into a "Creator Studio" subscription trap. Tesla is making Full Self-Driving a subscription-only Valentine’s gift (good luck with that), Ring is rebranding surveillance as a "fire-watching" assistant, and a Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" is the new must-have for the lonely. To cap it off, the i...

No Face to Shoot

Jan 9, 2026 1 hr 15 min

Welcome back to the digital wasteland, fellow survivors. We kick things off in the FOLLOW UP by marking a year since the LA Fires—hello, PTSD—alongside a 4th Strokiversary and three years of sobriety, all while wondering why America is currently obsessed with shooting its own civilians in the face. In the IN THE NEWS segment, Wired is finally teaching us how to protest safely in the age of surveillance, and the EFF is cheering on the hackers fighting ICE’s Nazi-adjacent tracking tactics. Meanwhile, Meta is harvesting your AI chats for targeted ads, Disney is paying $10 million for spying on kids, and Grok has spent the holidays generating nonconsensual child abuse material—a problem Elon Musk won't have to legally reckon with until the Take It Down Act hits in May. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri has basically surrendered to the AI "slop", suggesting we fingerprint "real" media because the fake stuff has already won the war. As we continue the descent, OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT Health portal despite their "loser energy" and compute limits, while Character.AI and Google are quietly settling lawsuits for bots that encouraged teen suicide. Polymarket gamblers are learning that "decentralized" juries will fist you over the definition of an "invasion" just as fast as a bank. Uber showed off a new Lucid-based robotaxi, but we’re pumping the brakes on the safety hype given that autonomous vehicles are five times more likely to crash at dusk. To wrap up the news, Tim Cook took home $74 million last year, which is a lot of "systematic philanthropy" he could be doing right now instead of just writing checks to his own ego. In MEDIA CANDY, we’re suffering through the Stranger Things wrap-up and a John McTiernan holiday marathon, though the real highlight is MTV Rewind’s tribute to music videos. We’ve got Traitors, The Pitt, and even a John Candy doc on the list, while APPS & DOODADS brings us the DJI Osmo 8, Victrola’s turntable-vibrating speakers. At least California’s DROP tool...

Merry Slopmas

Dec 20, 2025 1 hr 21 min

Welcome back to another hour of digital cynicism. We kick things off with a FOLLOW UP on Amazon’s Fallout recaps, which were apparently so hallucination-heavy they made the actual wasteland look organized; naturally, they’ve been nuked along with the "Video Recaps" feature. In a massive dose of IN THE NEWS, Tesla is finally getting a legal side-eye in California for its deceptive "Autopilot" branding, while TikTok is performing a corporate shell game by selling a 45% stake to Oracle and friends to keep the feds happy. Reddit is fighting Australia’s under-16 ban like it’s a constitutional crisis, Louisiana’s age-verification law just got benched by a judge, and Merriam-Webster officially crowned "slop" as the Word of the Year—which is fitting, given that OpenAI is selectively hiding chat logs from murder-suicides while their Chief Scientist warns that recursive AI self-improvement might end the human experiment by 2030. If the "intelligence explosion" doesn’t get us, the CRASH Clock says we’ve got roughly 2.8 days before Elon’s satellite swarm turns low-earth orbit into a permanent scrapyard. In our MEDIA CANDY segment, we mourn the transition year of Star Trek, which was mostly a series of unmitigated disasters and corporate retreats, though the Oscars moving to YouTube in 2029 means we can finally ignore them in 4K. Meta is testing a "pay-to-share-links" feature because they clearly haven't alienated creators enough, and a new study suggests Amazon’s "dynamic pricing" is basically just a high-tech way to gouge public school districts for pencils. Moving to APPS & DOODADS, iOS 26.2 is here with a "Liquid Glass" slider—groundbreaking stuff, really—while Microsoft’s Copilot+ push is effectively killing the laptop market by making 16GB of RAM a luxury item only a data center could love. Meanwhile, iRobot has officially sucked its last bit of dust into a Chapter 11 filing, proving that even a twenty-year head start can’t save you from a 46 percent tariff and better Chin...

Sycophantic and Delusional

Dec 12, 2025 1 hr 17 min

The labor market has swung from the Great Resignation to “job hugging,” where workers cling to their roles out of fear of AI-driven layoffs and inflation, crushing engagement and accelerating burnout. At the same time, OpenAI is accused of suppressing research showing job losses, ignoring internal warnings about chatbot mental health risks, and bleeding safety staff, while state Attorneys General fire off an opening salvo likening unchecked AI harms to an opioid crisis-in-the-making. The AI boom is now colliding with reality. Environmental groups want a halt on new datacenters as power prices spike, and the industry is starting to look financially radioactive, with opaque financing schemes, hidden debt, and trillion-dollar infrastructure bets that could vaporize household wealth. Regulators are pushing back too: the EU is fining X, probing Google over training data, and floating a statutory licensing scheme for AI scraping, while Disney dives in with a billion-dollar bet on “responsible” AI storytelling that mostly translates to fewer humans on payroll. Meanwhile, everyday tech dystopia rolls on. Uber is monetizing your movement data, Instacart is quietly price-discriminating groceries, Waymo is spinning a robotaxi birth as a feel-good story, and crypto fraud finally earns real prison time. Add in AI-generated marketing slop, government sites hijacked by SEO porn, billion-dollar festival scams resurrected, and Congress kneecapping right-to-repair, and the takeaway is simple: the machines are hungry, the adults are absent, and the vibes are aggressively bad. Sponsors: CleanMyMac - Get Tidy Today! Try 7 days free and use code OLDGEEKS for 20% off at clnmy.com/OLDGEEKS Gusto - Try Gusto today at gusto.com/grumpy, and get three months free when you run your first payroll. Private Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month. SetApp - With a single monthly subscription yo...

See all 200 episodes

–

0 ratings from members

Rate this podcast

No reviews yet — be the first member to rate "Grumpy Old Geeks".

This podcast, its content and its artwork are not owned by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Castquire.

Streaking, Mooning, & Quicksand

Share this podcast

Live Chart rankings

Chart history

🇳🇿 Tech News Best #21

🇮🇪 Tech News Best #24

Holding at #24 — the line fills in as this chart moves.

Podcast details

Created by: Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner
Status: Active
Latest episode: Nov 5, 2026
Episodes: 779
Release period: Several times a week
Avg. episode length: 1 hr 11 min
Explicit: Yes
Language: English

Links

Official website ↗ Apple Podcasts ↗ RSS feed ↗

Is this your podcast?

Claim it to show it on your profile. Using the email from your RSS feed approves it instantly.

Keep listening

Discover more podcasts like this.

Browse podcasts See the charts