Grumpy Old Geeks
by Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner
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.
Episodes
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768: Rosetta Broccoli
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...
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Operation Quiet Piggy BONUS: Dark Side with Dave!
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…
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767: Operation: Quiet Piggy
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...
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767: Skibidi! BONUS: Dark Side with Dave!
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…
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766: Skibidi!
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…
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25 Door Refrigerator BONUS: Darkside with Dave!
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:...
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765: 25 Door Refrigerator
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...
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Super Duper Intelligence - BONUS - Darkside with Dave Edition
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…
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764: Super Duper Intelligence
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...
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763: Dr. Strangeclippy
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...
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762: ‘Tis But a Misalignment
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...
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761: Whatever...
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...
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760: Level 5 Podcasting Accident
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...
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759: Seeking Mrs. Claude
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…
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758: Perverts at Large!
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...
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757: This Time With Chicks
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…
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756: Log Off, Touch Grass & Touch Ass
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...
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755: Less Chatty Mode
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...
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The Darkside with Dave's Not Very Christmas Special Special
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...
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754: Frankly Asinine Questions
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...
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753: No-Talent AI Clowns
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…
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752: Grandma Got Run Over By a Tesla
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...
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751: Brewster’s Trillions
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...
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750: Douchebag Ping Pong
Episode 750 arrives with a simple reminder: the bullshit 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...
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749: Surge Bananas
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...
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748: Space Bone
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...
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747: Why We Sigh
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...
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746: Reality is Frequently Inaccurate
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...
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745: Unwanted Senior Discount
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…
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744: Goblin Mode
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...
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743: Category Five Dystopia
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…
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742: Uncouth Yet Highly Litigious
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…
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741: Moon Joy
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...
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740: To the Moon!
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…
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739: The Thin Black Line
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: SquareSpace - go to...
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738: A Sprinkling of Random
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...
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737: Monetizable Content
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,...
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736: People Aren’t People
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...
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735: We’re Walking on Sunshine
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...
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734: A Bald Woody
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…
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733: Predator Friendly Hunting Ground
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...
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732: We’re Not In the Files!
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...
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731: I Want My 13 Trillion Dollars!
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...
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730: Ethical Broads
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...
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729: Alright Alright Alright™
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...
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728: No Face to Shoot
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…
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727: Merry Slopmas
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…
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726: Sycophantic and Delusional
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…
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725: The Mistake Machine
FOLLOW UP starts with the realization that Spotify Wrapped thinks we are 82 years old, which honestly feels accurate, followed by a massive shout out to Bama Bryan on Bluesky for listening to us for over 3,000 minutes. We look at the grim stats from the Department of Government Efficiency…
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724: Sam Altman’s Boutique
After surviving Thanksgiving and the subsequent biting cold, we jumped into the FOLLOW UP with news that Malaysia is joining the trend by taking steps to ban social media for children under 16, mirroring similar actions in Australia and Denmark—it seems the world is finally realizing the internet...
About this 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.
Hosted by
Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner
Categories