693: Let Them Eat Space
Grumpy Old Geeks
Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner
4.8 • 6.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2025
⏱️ 86 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we blast off with a tale as old as grift: Fyre Fest 2 has been postponed—again—proving that you really can fail upward if you squint hard enough and wear enough white linen. Over at Automattic, employees discovered secret watermarks in their internal comms, because what workplace isn’t better with a sprinkle of corporate surveillance cosplay? Meanwhile, Katy Perry took a joyride to the upper atmosphere with Gayle King and Bezos’ better half, giving us the 2025 edition of the cringiest “Imagine”-style celebrity moment yet. Spoiler: no one needed this.
In Elon World™, things are somehow even weirder. Seth Rogen dropped some truth bombs about Silicon Valley’s MAGA leanings, only to have them surgically removed from the Breakthrough Prize stream. Musk, for his part, is managing his growing empire of baby mamas like a Bond villain with a baby registry. Add in a cringe-filled offer to a YouTuber to become Space Karen’s next broodmare, and we’ve officially entered peak simulation. Meanwhile, whistleblowers are spilling DOGE secrets, OpenAI is building a social network (because we clearly don’t have enough doomscrolling options), and 4chan has finally been hacked into oblivion. Pour one out—for the internet’s dumpster fire.
Also in the news: Google lost a big ad tech monopoly case (cue tiny violins), China is no longer buying the “autonomous” car hype after a fatal crash, and Trump’s FCC chair is threatening Comcast for not being enough like Fox News (as if that’s the journalistic gold standard). The Pentagon’s nerd squad resigned after butting heads with DOGE, Reality Labs burned $45 billion like it was going out of style, and AI customer service bots are now inventing policies out of thin air. Oh, and if your AI thinks your Python package has a delivery issue—you’re not crazy, it probably hallucinated it. Welcome to the future.
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Show notes at https://gog.show/693
FOLLOW UP
Fyre Fest 2 Postponed: “New Date Will Be Announced”
Following Layoffs, Automattic Employees Discover Leak-Catching Watermarks
IN THE NEWS
Unfortunately for Katy Perry, That “Space Flight” Turned Out Exactly How We All Knew It Would
We Finally Have 2025’s “Imagine” Video
The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers
A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data
Google loses ad tech monopoly case
China cracks down on 'autonomous' car claims after fatal accident
Trump’s FCC chair threatens Comcast, demands changes to NBC news coverage
OpenAI is building a social network
4chan Likely Gone Forever After Hackers Take Control
Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar
Pentagon tech unit resigns after clash with Musk's DOGE
What Does a Corrupt Election Look Like?
Tesla puts finishing touches on Hollywood charge-n-diner
Inside the $45 billion cash burn at Reality Labs
The business of the AI labs by Max Bolingbroke
MEDIA CANDY
Apple’s ‘Mythic Quest’ is ending with an updated Season 4 finale
28 Years Later Rises From the Grave With a New Trailer
APPS & DOODADS
Apple is reportedly working on two new versions of the Vision Pro
Metacast Ep. 68: Q1 Update - new features, struggles, hope
Spotify was down – here's everything we know about its huge outage
AT THE LIBRARY
British authors want Meta to answer for alleged copyright infringement
Amazon will use AI to generate recaps for book series on the Kindle
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom: A Novel by Jason Pargin
THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE
Disney Teases Its Adventurous New Lion King and Up Rides
The Star Wars that George Lucas didn't want you to see is coming to the big screen
‘End of an era’: The last RadioShack in Maryland is closing its doors
The Alligator King and his seven sons.
CLOSING SHOUT-OUTS
RIP Jed Gould, aka Jed the Fish aka Jeddum Fishum
1997 KROQ Calendar Commercial Featuring Jed The Fish
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing with finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. |
| 0:16.4 | Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. |
| 0:19.5 | And I'm Brian Schomeister. Jason, it looks like we both |
| 0:22.2 | found news stories this week that pissed us off to some degree. Oh, so many, so many. I mean, so many, but I |
| 0:28.8 | mean, just science-based normal run-of-the-mill articles that we would normally like to discuss, |
| 0:34.5 | but there were some frustrating things that happened with both. I will go first. |
| 0:38.5 | Please. |
| 0:39.5 | I'm a big fan of IFL science, or at least I used to be, which stands for I fucking love science. |
| 0:45.3 | It was one of those rare success stories that really came about because of social media. |
| 0:50.2 | You know, there were tons of science-based news sites sites out there but iFL science really wrote the |
| 0:56.7 | social media thing had a tongue-in-cheek attitude you know did very well posting stories all the time |
| 1:01.6 | across social medias and getting people interested in science and and having a unique viewpoint about |
| 1:06.8 | them but i i feel that perhaps they have fallen upon rough times and are now playing |
| 1:11.8 | the clickbait game. |
| 1:13.0 | Okay. |
| 1:13.7 | Because there was a story that did come out this week about exoplanet K218B. |
| 1:19.6 | You may have seen Exoplanet K218B in the news recently, thanks to it. |
| 1:24.1 | Everywhere. |
| 1:25.4 | Yes, it's everywhere. |
| 1:26.6 | And of course, a bunch of these sponsored posts in my feed, |
| 1:29.1 | breathlessly talked about how we had found aliens and all that sort of stuff, |
| 1:32.1 | which, of course, we have not. |
... |
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