726: Sycophantic and Delusional
Grumpy Old Geeks
Jason DeFillippo & Brian Schulmeister with Dave Bittner
4.8 • 6.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Show notes at https://gog.show/726
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eJbLlVhIQ-Y
FOLLOW UP
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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 the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. |
| 0:15.6 | Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schomeister. Brian, I have to set the record straight |
| 0:21.6 | real quick. Uh, the lights behind me, there was a lot of people saying, you know, what, what do they mean? What do they mean? I'm like, it's fucking Christmas. Yeah, it's red, red and green. Like, that's it. You know, I'm in a garage. What do you want? I'm trying to juge the place up a little bit, but... |
| 0:36.9 | I got a guitar. |
| 0:38.1 | Yeah, you do, and a platinum |
| 0:39.6 | record. |
| 0:40.6 | Well, yeah. What do you want? I'm trying to juge the place up a little bit, but... I got a guitar. |
| 0:38.1 | Yeah, you do, and a platinum record. |
| 0:40.6 | Well, yeah, that stuff, too. |
| 0:43.1 | I probably would have picked a different band if I had a choice, but this is mostly my wife's |
| 0:46.5 | office and one of her favorite bands, so there you go. |
| 0:48.9 | So there you go. |
| 0:50.0 | Okay. |
| 0:51.1 | Who would you put up if you could? |
| 0:54.8 | I've got a signed lyric sheet written by Daniel Ash from Tones on Tail from Slender Fungus, which was my company name. |
| 1:03.1 | So I probably would have put that up. |
| 1:04.8 | All right. |
| 1:05.4 | That would have been cool. |
| 1:06.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:07.0 | Maybe we'll fix it in post. |
| 1:09.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:09.6 | Or not because I'm the one that has to post. |
... |
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