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SAG/WGA, Tupac, Barbenheimer, X, and Aliens
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:00
Speaker
All right. Good evening, fellas. How's everybody doing? Hey. Doing good. How are you? Good. Good. But this is episode 22. Can you believe it? We're almost to the halfway point of a year. Is that really the episode number? Because I've just been copying, pasting the episodes over and over and hoping I update that number. Is that our ideal number? I believe it to be, yes. I think it's up and down.
00:00:21
Speaker
This is episode 22. It's July 26th, 2023. I'll get this out of the way right now. Cause I don't think I said it last week. It's just three, this is a squaring minds. It's just three lawyer friends goofing off. Nothing we say should be taken as legal advice that applies to last week's or two weeks ago. That wasn't legal advice either retroactively or factual information or in any way correct.
00:00:40
Speaker
Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes we give legal advice. Well, two out of three of us give legal advice. Uh, but not during this show, none of this should be considered legal advice, especially not for you, dear listener. This is not for you. Uh, meanwhile, uh, did you say your name?
Legal Career Insights and Humor
00:00:55
Speaker
I didn't, but I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey and I'm joined as always by Jason Raimsland. He's a employment attorney.
00:01:01
Speaker
extraordinary, right? I don't know if it's, I don't know if extraordinary is right. Uh, I felt like a lawyer again this week. I actually appeared in court. I wore a suit. Uh, it was outstanding. Yeah. I'm suing somebody who's bad boss for sex discrimination because they said this is a job for women. This isn't a job for women. This is a job for men. So I felt like a real lawyer. Yeah. Don't do that guys. Uh, no, that's bad. You shouldn't do that because it's bad and nasty and illegal and just wrong, morally reprehensible. Uh, but as long as you keep doing it, I'll keep suing you bad bosses.
00:01:31
Speaker
if you're in the who's your state, right? They're giving you money. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Themselves. You know what? If magically everybody stopped being a bad boss for the entire state of Indiana and the state of Georgia and occasionally very rarely one time Florida, uh, then you know what? I'd find a different kind of law to practice. I'd write, I'd write people's wills or, you know, help people adopt children. Like that sounds great. Uh, but for now I'm suing people's bad bosses because it feels like a good thing to do.
00:02:00
Speaker
What about you, Jacob? Tell us about you. What are you doing down there in the sunshine state? Yes, I am a Jake. Not that sunshine state, the other sunshine state. There's more than one. Wait, there's two? Is California the sunshine state? California is the golden state. Not if you ask Tupac. He's going to welcome everybody to the wild by west, a state that's untouchable like Elliott Ness. That's Will Smith. Isn't that Will Smith? What the hell is happening here? That's Will Smith. Oh my goodness, you guys.
00:02:29
Speaker
No, I'm pretty sure I think this is you this time. No, we in that Sunshine State were that excellent. Oh, my goodness, guys, it's California Love by Tupac. Give me a break. Oh, you're saying Wild West. Oh, no, wait, no, but isn't that Biggie rapping that?
00:02:45
Speaker
No, that's Tupac that says that part. Yes. Oh boy. I'm right. You are wrong. Okay. The internet will be clear. This is embarrassing moment in our podcast history. I just want to say. Oh my goodness. Yes. Either way. Either way it goes. I, you're right. That's California love. Should we just stop and start over? I feel like we should stop and start over. No. So I do construction and land use attorney stuff. Okay. Yeah. That's what I do. You can go back to your intro now.
00:03:12
Speaker
No, that was it. That was the intro. I mean, that's all I had. I just want to introduce you guys and let everybody
The Tupac Murder Investigation
00:03:17
Speaker
know who was talking. So when you made the when one person said the lyrics from a Will Smith song and the others correctly identify them and then the first person switched what song he was singing to Gaslight, the second person, because you definitely sang Wild Wild West. No, Wild Wild West is a lyric in California Love.
00:03:35
Speaker
I said, let me welcome everybody to the Wild Wild West, which, by the way, is not a line in the song, Wild Wild West by Will Smith. It is a line in the song California Love by Tupac and Dre. If this was a video podcast, people would see my shoulders just dropped as I realized I was wrong. And OK, Jason is right. You can hear in the background, you can hear Jacob clicking on his clicky key to verify that I'm correct. Yes. Three pock lyrics. Oh my goodness. Three pock.
00:04:06
Speaker
Oh man. Oh, did y'all see that there was a, like, there was a search in Las Vegas in the Tupac killing? Yeah. Nothing came of it, right? Like, I don't know if anything came of it. I don't know if they would say one way or another. It was like a warrant being executed, right? Yeah.
00:04:25
Speaker
Like they're, they're investigating for house of a gang member who something who says he witnessed it. Okay. So what, so why would you be rating as how, what are you going to find in there? If he witnessed it a tape, his diary today.
00:04:40
Speaker
If I had committed a murder in 1994, I don't think I would even I don't think I'd be capable of keeping all that evidence with me until 2023. OK, well, because it would be like 1996 and how 1996. So I'm always saying that because I'm reading the article right now and I can see I flipped it with Kurt Cobain. But I agree with you. Yeah, I would have lost it. I would have lost the like the gun that killed Tupac. I would have been in one of the moves that we wouldn't have made it to college or something. Yeah.
00:05:09
Speaker
You know, maybe he made a confession and it got recorded on a home security system and they're taking the SD card out of the recorder. I don't know. It could be any number of things. And I've never been a criminal lawyer. I've just spit ball in here. Jake, you were a public defender. You know all about these shenanigans. Yeah. I mean, there's a million things that it could have been, if you're an officer.
00:05:34
Speaker
I'm really curious as to how they ended up getting a warrant for a search in this kind of case of a place.
00:05:42
Speaker
in general, they must have had something interesting coming to the lab to make it worth searching a place. Cause at some point you lose your probable cause that there is evidence there once it's, I don't know, right? 30 years. I think 30 years is pretty long. So apparently they were looking for laptops and other I'm reading from, I'll put it in the show notes on NBC news article, looking for laptops and other electronic devices at the home of a gang member who said he was in the car with the superstar rapper when he was fatally shot in Las Vegas in 1996. Wayne.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah. But I wonder, I'm, I'm assuming what it would be was like really close to the joke you've made, which is like somebody's diary or post they made or something. They're right. Maybe they see, maybe he said he was working on a book or something, right? Maybe. Uh, probably what they're doing for is trying to find the shirt that he was wearing that night and looking for, you know, a hair that's left on it now, what? 27 years later, 29 years later, whenever it is. Yeah.
00:06:38
Speaker
They think that he was in the car. He knows exactly who did it. Doesn't want to snitch. But he wrote it down in his laptop. Yeah. He wrote it down in his diary, which he then digitized for posterity. But presumably it wouldn't be a laptop from 1996. So he wrote it down in his diary probably later. He emailed it to someone. He emailed something to somebody saying,
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah, never believe what I just saw. Yeah. Guess who's dead. He paged somebody. Right. And they're getting records of the pager. Yeah. Right. OK, so believe it or not, listeners, this was not a whole mini topic. That's a whole litany of terrible ideas. Yeah. This was not a rehearsed mini topic that we were going to cover. We're going to cover a lot of weird stuff, but the killing of Tupac was not one of them.
AI and the Hollywood Strikes
00:07:30
Speaker
I think our first thing is we want to talk about the strike a little bit.
00:07:33
Speaker
Right. The writers guild writers guild screen actors guild. You know, this is like old news at this point. But yeah, I mean, this is kind of crazy that like all of Hollywood's basically shut down for seemingly for a while because they're like they aren't even talking at this point. Yeah. And now stuff is movies are getting pushed back.
00:07:55
Speaker
Uh, and it's like partially connected to our stuff because one of the big fights is like, is AI and how, how Hollywood studios are going to be able to use AI voice and AI, you know, person personality stuff. Cause the last, apparently the last offer from the studios who are all represented by AMP, PDP.
00:08:18
Speaker
The last offer from the studios was for background actors, we basically, if you sign up for your, if you are a just normal working actor, you sign up for one day, we get to use you forever as a member of the background, not as like a starring member, but as a member of the background, which is kind of nuts. Yeah.
00:08:43
Speaker
But also theoretically, they could just like make CGI back. I don't know. That was my thought too. I read it. So my initial thought when they were talking about the concerns over AI likenesses was I thought obviously the lead actors and actresses, right, is what I was imagining was like the top build people would be just duplicated and used in everything or whatever. But I hadn't considered the background actor thing. So my initial take on it was when I heard
00:09:07
Speaker
Like, oh yeah, that sounds like a real concern. They hire you for one day, they put you in a trailer. And somebody, one of the articles I read, there was a background actor that said this happened to him. They took him to a trailer, he took some pictures and he assumes that now that that was being used to make an AI model of him. Like a simple, you know, basic, like a skin for a video game almost, right? But then yeah, to your point, Jake, once I thought about it, well, then they just won't even bother using real people.
00:09:31
Speaker
What's the difference? Like background actors, nobody, it's not like a character actor situation where like you look for that, you know, that great background actor you always love. Oh man, he was great as like, you know, guy in park with dog.
00:09:42
Speaker
Nobody cares. So they'll just generate these people to be generous. You know what I mean? I wonder, and also I don't think they don't need to get like a union person to do these things. They can throw in non union people. Influencers can just go in and get themselves, you know, scan and become and be part of the background. Um, so unless I don't know, maybe there'd be a,
00:10:07
Speaker
I'm not a lawyer, a labor lawyer. I wonder if there's some kind of law against the union and studios agreeing to not use that kind of labor. I don't think that sounds right. Right. Because like, yeah, there's like certain like, like a set designers and stuff. Can't you can't just hire somebody off Craigslist to come in and work on set design. Right. So it seems like it's sort of a closed shop type situation that actually might be a term of art. And it's all going to be using.
00:10:33
Speaker
Well, and it's all state by state, right? Like right to work versus, you know, the strength of the unions. And if like country there are there are shows still shooting because the actors were hired through other countries unions like House of the Dragon is still shooting because it was the actors were hired through the British Actors Union. So they're required to keep shooting.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I think there is a question of like what counts as background. Like what if you had a star get scan and then you just happen to linger over that background for a very long time. It would seem stupid, but or like how close you get to that background.
00:11:17
Speaker
Uh, you make a, you make a scene where the whole deal is we have all these famous people attending this party. You never hear them say a word, but you see a bunch of famous people that didn't actually participate in the movie because at some point back in the day you had a scan of them.
00:11:33
Speaker
I think there's like, uh, think of this, the, maybe it's the opening scene from Zoolander, uh, where they're doing like a carpet walk for, you know, some gala event or some fashion show or something like that. And like, if that's the case, then, uh, if that was the rule back in, whenever Zoolander was made, what, like 98, I don't know, 2000, 2001.
00:11:53
Speaker
then you're going to have the right of publicity, one of my favorite topics. I love rights of publicity. You're going to have a right of publicity to use the image and the likeness of Donald Trump, of Natalie Portman, and you're going to drag all these people in because they played itty bitty little bit parts, doing like a goofy intro scene from Zoolander in 2000, whatever.
00:12:21
Speaker
Yeah, that that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And I don't even care about this from a labor law standpoint, or from, you know, yeah, labor law, the power of unions. Really, I care about it from a right of publicity standpoint. And it is a valid exercise of contract rights for somebody to contract away to sell away their right of publicity. Like, you can do that.
00:12:45
Speaker
And the issue here is I think really the union's fight is we don't want strong, the strong man of the Hollywood studios, strong arming the, especially the less influential actors who might need the job and need the money or be more inclined to do this for a pittance instead of, I don't think that we're worried about
00:13:13
Speaker
whether Tom Cruise sells the rights to his likeness so that he can be procedurally generated for Mission Impossible 53. Like, great, fine. Like Tom Cruise, you can do that if you want to. I think there's some indication that Harrison Ford kind of already has done that. And so like, fine, you can do that.
00:13:33
Speaker
Really, it seems to me like if the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild, the writers are less concerned about minor TV appearances and AI generating them with that. But if the Screen Actors Guild is concerned about that, good, yes, more power to you and help the weaker members of the union
00:13:56
Speaker
defend themselves against these strong arm tactics. That's what a union is supposed to do. The influential folks stand up and protect the folks who are not influential, who would be abused. Great. Power to you. Jason, do you know, are there any restrictions on contracting where you're right of publicity in terms of in perpetuity or is it just entirely up to just freedom of contract?
00:14:21
Speaker
I mean, obviously you don't know every state, but I mean, have you ever heard of a restriction, you know, a state restriction on the freedom to contract your right of publicity away for like in terms of term or in terms of something now? You know, the one I'm most familiar with, this will come as a great shock to you, is the Indiana right of publicity statute, which is actually, it's a really good right of publicity statute in terms of like compared against other states. Okay. So after technical glitch,
00:14:49
Speaker
Great point, Jason. That was an incredible point. Yeah, man. I loved it. Okay. So I think we dropped off somewhere where I was talking about the right of publicity and like, I don't know a lot of Indiana. Yeah. Yeah. So the Indiana right of publicity is such a good statute that people will intentionally, uh, venue their lawsuits here because it's, uh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, which
00:15:13
Speaker
Ordinarily, it wouldn't seem like an appealing place to venue lawsuits. It's like the right of publicity equivalent of the Eastern District of Texas or something like that, where they seem to file every constitutional challenge. I'm sure there are reasons for that.
00:15:28
Speaker
So it makes a little bit more sense when you realize that the NCAA is headquartered in Indianapolis. Oh, okay. That's helpful. And that's probably influential in why Indiana has such a good right of publicity statute.
00:15:44
Speaker
limitation on what you can contract away, at least that I know of, there is a copyright-ish limitation on how long after somebody's passing that you can... Basically, it would pass into the public domain, their likeness or something like that. I should look up this exact thing, but I don't think there's any limitation on alienating it. It's the bundle of sticks from property class in law school where
00:16:11
Speaker
You can contract away all of your right of publicity or even sub parts of it. Like you can contract away your voice or a particular photograph of yourself or something like that. So yeah, it's something that I think that actors can do.
00:16:28
Speaker
If the strike is about what I understand it to be about, and it's probably like an onion, right? There are multiple layers to it. Yeah, for sure. But if this is one of the big points of contention between the parties, I think it's a great point of contention to have. You want to prevent these less powerful members of the guild.
00:16:48
Speaker
from being exploited in a way that they are more likely to be experiencing economic duress and exploded into it in a way that's ultimately very harmful to them, but they can't help it.
00:17:00
Speaker
I will say, I think the AI thing is like a little pittance. It's not the real thing that's stopping them. I think it's the fact that actors want residuals from streaming the same way they've been getting it from broadcast, because that's the way that they made it into a sustainable income, which is every time an episode got broadcast, they'd get meaningful money.
00:17:23
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And that's what they're losing from streaming. And everybody that isn't named Netflix is still not losing a ton of money on streaming. Netflix is the only company that's figured it out because everybody else was just like going growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, and never had enough to justify its existence or justify the price that was necessary.
00:17:51
Speaker
So really it's the streaming residuals that are like completely off of, are like completely the thing that seems to be the huge barrier between the deal. It sucks because we got all this excitement from, from Barbenheimer and we're going to like suddenly not have any movies to watch. Yeah. And all of our TV is going to get bad. Yeah. I think we're going to talk about Barbenheimer, right? Have you seen both?
00:18:16
Speaker
I've seen both. You've seen both. Okay. Quickly, I just want to say what seems interesting to me is we live in an era now where so I was just looking at things that have been put on hold or have been outright canceled for now, right? The Tonight Show is off the air late night with Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live, Late Show with Stephen Colbert, even just the Tonight Show.
00:18:33
Speaker
I, that seemed like that would have been even 20 years ago, a huge deal if there was some strike and there was just no tonight that that's not, there's nothing on the air at that time or there's reruns or something. That would have been a massive deal. Sure. I mean, I remember the, the writer strike. It was pretty, it was pretty bad. It was dire. Uh, like 2012, 2006. Right.
00:18:54
Speaker
Is that when did you say Jason? I think it was in I think it was in 2012. I might be wrong about that, but I distinctly remember a few shows that I like that were on the air and maybe there was more than one. But I want to say that Parks and Rec was on the air when it happens. Yes, that's right. Because the government shut down.
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe 2012. Yeah, the government shut down Parks and Rec. Yeah, but it was a much more mainstream media big deal front and center headline everyday thing that that right to strike was going on than this is. This was a big deal. Like we've already said it's sort of old news-ish.
00:19:36
Speaker
It's only been going on for a relatively short amount of time. And I think, I mean, is that owing to streaming being such a, with such a long delay that for the most part, nobody's watching anything that's live anymore. And so you're not really feeling it yet. Yeah. Or I don't watch TV anymore, really. I don't even have sports.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah. And sports are on strike. So I wouldn't, uh, Jake, you were right. You were closer than I was. The last one was 2007, 2008. It lasted for 14 weeks from November, 2007 to February, 2008. So maybe it was lost that got affected by it or something like that. In fact, I bet you that was it.
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And of course the writers have been on strike since like May. So they've been on strike for a while. That's an even longer delay to feel that though, right? That's yeah. Yeah. And that ruined heroes that ruined a lot of shows. Yeah. And that's very sad. They are going to try. Oh my gosh. They're going to try to write episodes with AI and it's going to be the worst thing in the world.
00:20:35
Speaker
I am not looking forward to that. Andor didn't finish filming. That makes me very sad. Well, yeah, I have a list here. Here's some things. Disney has reportedly pushed back the release dates for several films in its Avatar and Star Wars franchises amid the WGA strike. I had no idea any of these were in the pipeline, but apparently Avatar 3 is not going to happen until 2025 and Avatar 4 will be in 2029 and Avatar 5 will be in 2031.
00:21:04
Speaker
This is an actual, this is from a variety article. And then a pair of untitled Star Wars films are going to be pushed back to 2026. I did. I did know that they green lit like four of those at once. And our two made a ton of money. So, you know, they justified themselves. Yeah.
00:21:24
Speaker
I think it's great that we're going to have some time to take a deep breath and get off the sequel or the, uh, the train of never ending sequels that seems to have been going on for the last few years. Like you, every once in a while you get a new bit of intellectual property that they just can't resist serializing. So I'm sure that like, there's already talk about Barbie to Oppenheimer to, uh, no, really Kennedy.
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah, maybe there's going to be a bunch of procedurally generated AI content. What I really hope is that they just take a breath. There are a lot of good movies that have come out and a lot of good streaming shows that have been published in the last few years. Nobody's caught up on them. We got plenty of content, guys. There's plenty of time. You can take a spell.
00:22:18
Speaker
They still have a broadcast TV schedule to fill though. People still watch that. Yeah. But those people are all going to be dead pretty soon.
Barbie Movie: A Cultural Reflection
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah. They can't stand it. When the climate really starts warming up there, you know, the pacemakers get in the next like two months. Yeah. No, not in the next two months. In the next, I don't know, 20 years. Broadcast TV is over in 20 years. Mark my words. Sports accepted.
00:22:41
Speaker
Okay. But speaking of good media properties, uh, Jake, you gotta tell her cause I don't think Jason has seen Barbie. Have you seen, I haven't seen any of this. You haven't seen any of it. Jason, have you seen any of it? But I only one.
00:22:52
Speaker
I would like to ask Jason if he'd be willing to give up any claims to spoilers and like, we're like, are we both just totally fine with Jake can talk about anything he wants? No, I mean, I'm not going to go spoilers. Okay. Okay. I'll tell it like, so, uh, I was stoked for this cause, um, I guess, I guess this will just be like a recommendation drop in the middle of the actual topics. But, um, I,
00:23:22
Speaker
love Greta Gerwig, the director behind Barbie. I was early in on Gerda Gerwig. Uh, lady, she's made like free total movies. You're a Greta Gerwig hipster. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a Gerwigian. I don't really know her, her, her oeuvre. So like, what is early in? What is the, what is the, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but
00:23:41
Speaker
Early in terms of the general population, not film people, but so she started as an actress, I think. There's like some indie movie she made like 10 years ago that had a budget of like 300 grand that she made as a director. People liked it. I haven't seen it. I'll probably try to see it now. But then she was an actress in Frances Ha. Have you guys watched that?
00:24:09
Speaker
Nope. No, I've never even heard of that. It's a good movie. Um, it's like a, it's a very like Oscar-y movie. If you know what I mean, like character study kind of thing. Oscar. Um, yeah. Uh, and that's what I thought lady bird and little women were going to be, which are the, the two major movies she's made before bar lady bird lady bird kind of was.
00:24:33
Speaker
Did you watch Lady Bird? No, I'm just saying, they won a bunch of awards for it, right? Yeah. Well, they got, I'm not sure what they won, but they got nominated. She got nominated for both of these. It was an honor just to be nominated, Jake. Yeah. When I say Oscar, I mean like, you know, uh, boring. That's, that's what I mean. Uh, high quality acting and performances, but like super understated. Um,
00:25:00
Speaker
And so there's always one darling like that where it's like Shakespeare in love or whatever. It's just about like a florist and one flower. And that's the whole movie. And it's in black and white. Yeah, and Francis Hall was that. It was good, but it was like a character study. It was like a very good character study of somebody I didn't care about. The critics rave a very good character study about somebody you don't care about. Yeah, OK.
00:25:29
Speaker
And, but Lady Bird and Little Women were like very, very good. Like if that's what, if that's what I've been missing by saying, oh, that's a boring Oscar movie, I would be, I'd be lining up, except I've watched the hours and stuff like that. And I'm like, no, thank you. And Trumbo. Anyway.
00:25:50
Speaker
Uh, lady, lady bird, super good little women, one of my favorite movies of all time. And I have no connection to little women, the books or any of the previous adaptations. Uh, so I was in on it early. I led
00:26:06
Speaker
And I was really excited for what she would do with like a real Hollywood budget and everything that has come out about the movie. But what's your guys perception of the like the marketing is everywhere? What's your perception? What was your perception of the movie before it came out of the Barbie movie?
00:26:23
Speaker
Yeah. You go, Andrew. It's hard to disentangle my perception prior to it coming out from your cheering for it really, really loudly from Slack and all the social media platforms I follow you. Yeah. So I'm trying to think, I mean, I would assume that it was going to be sort of like a goofy, like it's going to be something that we'll look back on in 10 years and can't believe it was ever made.
00:26:49
Speaker
Like it just seems like a terrible idea. And so I probably kind of proceeded from there.
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah. I think I probably assumed that it would be like a bubblegum pop sort of like a summer, summer romp. That's just like, yeah, okay. This is a good summer vapid entertainment. Right. Yeah. I'm sure when I heard that Barbie movie, a Barbie movie was being made, I was like, who the heck wants this? Like what, what even is a Barbie movie? Um, that sounds very stupid.
00:27:19
Speaker
Is it even still popular as a brand? I mean, that's something I would have thought too. Is that even really something that it's sort of like how the Super Bowl halftime performer is almost always someone who hasn't been popular in like 10 years. Yeah. You kind of see if you can kind of feel the this was like thought up in a boardroom full of people that are 47 years of age or older. You know what I mean? Yeah. And they've been trying to make a Barbie movie since like 2014 or something. And then Greta Gerwig wrote this thing that is like it's funny because the movie is
00:27:49
Speaker
very directly addresses that many people hate Barbie now. Uh, okay. And so it's very, it like in a way that I, apparently Mattel had a brief, like needed to have a meeting once they'd seen that there was this like, uh, there was this rant about how terrible Barbie is. Like right in the movie, they have all of the arguments about how Barbie is terrible for society. Um,
00:28:17
Speaker
Which I've heard before. Anyway, I was in on this early. I made it a thing. We bought tickets early. Me and my wife went. I asked her to go get us pink clothing so we could wear pink.
00:28:34
Speaker
I get to the theater, the theater is popping like crazy. I have never seen the theater like this. And I went to end game. The thing is, you go to end game. I went to Avengers Endgame, which is the biggest weekend in history. But everybody's dressed normal. Here, everybody is dressed in pink and is just like so happy to see each other.
00:29:01
Speaker
It's, it was a totally new experience. Do you think that's a little, I mean, obviously that's a little post COVID kind of, I can't believe these things still happen. We're back together. There's a little bit of that for sure. Um, as for the movie itself, I definitely, I definitely don't want to, I don't want to give away very much. Uh, but, um, it's like, uh,
00:29:23
Speaker
And so, and then I saw Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer the next day. I really liked Barbie. And I've been encouraging people to watch it. It's just something totally new, something very different from what's out there. And there are some moments
00:29:40
Speaker
that are so amazing and some moments that are so funny. And like laser targeted at like it is so specific. There are some movies where they're like, we're trying to be we're trying to be timeless as a movie. This is not that at all. This is like we are making fun of millennials that went to college between the years 2006 and 2010. That's who we're making fun of.
00:30:08
Speaker
And also specific habits of people, even when it doesn't apply to me or anybody I knew, the specificity was so funny that I know people who this would apply to, and it's so funny that they're being called out specifically.
00:30:27
Speaker
Um, and, uh, yeah, I, I highly recommend anybody watch it. Uh, there are definitely like some clunker moments in there, but the moments where I was just like levitating from how amazing or how funny it was, it was like, you can't get that anywhere else. Um, Jake, was it feminist propaganda?
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, it is explicitly feminist. Sure. Yeah. It's when you, it's not anti man. That's something I've seen. Okay. Well, I'm going to stop you right there because Ben Shapiro explicitly said that it is indeed anti man. And that all, I think, I think you said all the Ken's are, are, are gay or gay men.
00:31:09
Speaker
is what he said. All the Kens in the movie. Have you not heard this? He had like a 46 minute review. First of all, apparently I only watched a couple seconds ago. I do know that part, yeah. I can't stand the guy. I won't put it on. Well, this part is great. He wants to, he clearly wants to set a Barbie doll on fire.
00:31:25
Speaker
Cause that's a super sane thing for a 39 year old man to do. He puts it in the garbage and he then, or I'm sorry, he tries to throw it in the garbage, clearly misses in the video, does not get it in the garbage, but in the next jump shot, it is now in the garbage and he throws the match on it. So like they stopped filming. All right, you know, don't worry about it, Ben, we'll fix it in post. They popped the Barbie in the thing and then burned it. But yeah, he said it was all the Ken dolls, all the Ken dolls, sorry, all the Ken's are gay. And the quote I pulled out was,
00:31:52
Speaker
It's as though you're going to make Toy Story, except the toys are all evil. They're all bad, and you're supposed to hate them, and you're supposed to burn them. That was a quote from his review of Barbie. That is not the correct takeaway of Barbie. Barbie and Ken were in, they were in Toy Story. Were they? Yeah, not Toy Story 1, but Toy Story 3, I think, the one where they were at the daycare center. They were pretty explicitly in that one and very explicitly not gay.
00:32:23
Speaker
Well, the reviews, the reviews of his review I was reading were saying, like, honestly, I'm concerned for him. Like, like, I don't know if he's OK right now. Maybe somebody should go check on Ben. No, I think what happened was so there's a joke in the in the, you know, Ben Shapiro, I did not know this, but apparently he's like an amateur like screenwriter. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there was a joke. Great. Yes.
00:32:47
Speaker
There is a there is a joke specifically directed at dudes who are too into movies. And I think he got sniped like real hard by that. I got sniped by one of those jokes. And I just thought I was just like, oh, they got me. Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm a trope. Yeah.
00:33:07
Speaker
But you have some self-awareness in a way that you can hear a joke about yourself or a joke that's targeting you and be like, oh, yep, got me. And Ben Shapiro hears a joke about himself like that and his whole identity collapses. So that's great fun for everybody.
00:33:23
Speaker
But it's not feminist propaganda. It's definitely pro-woman. It's not anti-man. The men are portrayed very sympathetically. I have heard people say that
00:33:38
Speaker
uh you know like oh man they talk about the patriarchal patriarchy all the time not ironically and the funny thing is like it's they use the word patriarchy all the time but it's like what if you were a a here a blank human being with no knowledge of our culture uh you know how to read and write and everything but you have no knowledge of our culture then you heard the word patriarchy had to figure out what it meant in 10 minutes
00:34:06
Speaker
And that's what you think the patriarchy is. That's what that is. Like it is played up. So it is so funny the way that they use the word patriarchy in this movie. And it's like somewhat tongue in cheek like that tongue in cheek. But it's not. Yeah, it's not. It's like a very. Yeah. There's a lot of layers there.
00:34:24
Speaker
I, anyway, this is one of the, one of the reasons I recommend it with all the cultural baggage that we have in 2023 around the term, like set aside because they're just doing it like Tabula Rasa. Like we, we are, we are applying the term patriarchy to do I have this right? Jake, is that what it is? Yeah, it's
00:34:42
Speaker
It's it's in conversation with how we actually use the word, but it's all like as a it plays into this fictional world that they're in because they're in a weird world where Barbies are walking in and out of the Barbie world. Yeah. You know, anyway, I don't want to give up a giveaway too much, but it is that when patriarchy first starts getting discussed, it's it's very funny.
00:35:11
Speaker
So with Jake standing for the Barbie movie, so hard and standing for Greta Gerwig, I do want to take my chance to make a mid episode or I don't know, near the end of the episode, recommendation of there is as annoyed as I am with Michael Barbaro and the daily podcast, there is an excellent episode from last week, maybe the week before.
00:35:34
Speaker
where they did interviews with Greta Gerwig and like the whole episode is devoted to her in anticipation of the Barbie movie coming out. Very, very good episode of The Daily, probably because Michael Babar is not on it. Are we starting our first interpod rivalry? No, nobody cares.
00:35:59
Speaker
But yeah, really great episode on there, talks about her. And now looking at her forecast for what's in her future, I am psyched. It looks like she is going to be directing the film live action version of Snow White. She wrote that. She's not directing.
00:36:16
Speaker
Okay. Got it. Oh yeah. She'd done work on the screenplay. Okay. Uh, and it looks like she has been hired to write and direct two adaptations of CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Like, yep, great. I'm here for it. I don't know which two she's getting because we just did a few years ago, what, um, the line, the witch and the wardrobe, Prince Caspian and the Dawn Tredder, but like, she's doing other ones. She's gonna great. Awesome. She hasn't said which ones she's going to do.
00:36:43
Speaker
But I'm excited for whatever her vision is for that. Yeah. Yeah. The people who are upset with Barbie, I feel like will lose their minds over her adapting CS Lewis's works in any way.
00:36:58
Speaker
Right. The thing is, the ladybird and little women were less were less explicitly feminist than Barbie is like Barbie is Barbie talks directly about like women's issues. And that's part of the central
00:37:16
Speaker
the central themes. It's not the whole movie, but it's a big part of the movie. As opposed to little women, it's there. Life as women is there. The way the world treats women is there, but it's not the feature. It's not the point of the movie.
Oppenheimer vs Barbie: A Cinematic Comparison
00:37:42
Speaker
She's clearly very versatile in what kind of stories you can tell. But I wouldn't be surprised if it has an edge that maybe we're not used to seeing in Hollywood so much.
00:37:55
Speaker
I did see about Oppenheimer. What did you think about that movie for women or not? That was good. Oppenheimer for women. It is funny going from Barbie to Oppenheimer, which are like so, so different. Oppenheimer is great. It's a Chris Nolan movie. You know, there's not, it's funny cause there's, you know, an atom bomb ends up blowing up in this movie. I thought you said you weren't going to do spoilers.
00:38:24
Speaker
That's the spoiler. But there is like a twist to it. A twist is the wrong word. But I didn't know what happened with Abenheimer after the bomb blew up. And he's like Andy Nukes and he gets his security clearance cleared, taken away, right? Doesn't he die on an island somewhere? Did he die on an island? That wasn't part of the movie.
00:38:51
Speaker
How he died was not part of the movie. But yeah, there's like, there's a bunch of stuff that came after based on things that he said, or like, and the things he did once he was a famous bomb, bomb guy. And I think it was, and it's funny, some people hated that part of the movie.
00:39:10
Speaker
Um, I liked it because the rest of the movie, it was very well done exactly what you think it's going to be, which is here's, here's this guy on a project you've seen the, the, the, you know, problematic genius story a million times, uh, and working on a project to, until it comes to provision provision and it, and it wins. Um,
00:39:37
Speaker
It's just like a very well executed version of that. There are some... Barbie and Oppenheimer share the fact that there are some scenes in both of them that are just total clunkers like why is this here? But they both are excellent despite that.
00:39:57
Speaker
And for a lot of people with Oppenheimer, it was the last third of the movie to them. Wasn't that good? While Barbie has a ton of scenes that are like, oh my, this is incredible. A ton of jokes that just land. Robert Downey, I would say the acting performances really pulled
00:40:18
Speaker
like really shining Oppenheimer, especially Robert Downey Jr., who plays a character that I didn't know. I was like, is this a real guy? Yes, it's a real guy, because I didn't know the history. And he's awesome at what he does.
00:40:35
Speaker
And Kelly and Martha, he was great. It was all great. And by the way, Margot Robbie and Oh, Ryan Gosling, Ryan Gosling, maybe we'll get nominated for an Oscar for Ken. He is so dang funny. I know they usually don't give that to comedic performances, but it's like one for the ages. I'm going to be thinking about his performance as Ken and Barbie.
00:40:57
Speaker
Like it just, it just pops up in my head multiple times a day right now. Um, do you think, I mean, Oppenheimer feels to me like you were saying, uh, Oscar-y movie that it seems to me like it has to win. You just have to sort of perfunctorily give them something. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely gonna get nominated for something. Cause I mean, it's a, it's a very good movie. Um, it's, it's hard comparing the two because I'm a person that really values taking a big swing and Oppenheimer isn't a huge swing. Um, it's,
00:41:27
Speaker
I mean, it's very good. In some ways, it's a huge swing in that they put a lot of money into a three hour biopic with no shooting or anything like that. Somebody that doesn't have really a lot of name recognition outside of historians or people are even amateur historians interested in history, unless you're like a World War II buff. You've heard the name in passing. You've heard, I am become death, destroy of worlds maybe because you've played civilization. Heck yeah.
00:41:57
Speaker
That's that i was like we decide how do you do know people know this or do i just know this because it said to me like a million times every time i play sieve four and i get and i get the new tech i get let me say i'm become death destroyer of worlds anyway.
00:42:17
Speaker
I don't think most people know that it's from... While you're talking about it, just to... I'll do my little recommendation here. There's a book from 2005 called American Prometheus. I think it's got a thing after the colon. American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and it's by Kai Bird.
00:42:33
Speaker
Really good book. It's especially well done on Audible. This is not an ad for Audible, but if you're an Audible user or Libby is another, you can get audiobooks through your library. Really good book. Long book, but super interesting. It tells the whole story of Oppenheimer and I think would be a good... I could see it being useful, I assume, prior to watching the movie, but also just if you're into the movie, go find out more about the guy.
00:42:58
Speaker
For further reading, check out American Prometheus. I've already seen the movie. Why would I? That's all that happened. I don't read. I did. I did buy it. Well, I can't recommend it. I just bought a new book, a few new books based on recommendations from other people. Anyway, I shouldn't, I I'll wait until I've actually read them to talk about it on the podcast. All right. So I think that concludes our movie. Sorry.
Elon Musk, X, and the Future of Twitter
00:43:22
Speaker
Cool story, bro.
00:43:23
Speaker
Anyway, we'll move on now to our usual complaining about the actions of Elon Musk, right? Can I make a bunch of DMX puns during the segment? So yeah, obviously the main point here is that a few days ago, it's not important when a few days ago overnight, it seems Elon Musk decided he was changing the name of Twitter to X.
00:43:48
Speaker
because he's going to build the everything app. Oh yeah. He's going to give you it and he's going to build the everything app. And I have, I have,
00:43:57
Speaker
a lot of questions, sort of chief among them is he's pushed this idea of... So he had x.com. He got started with x.com. Him and Peter Thiel was an online banking platform in like 1999. That's how he made basically all of his money was x.com. It was the precursor to PayPal. I think PayPal acquired x and then he became CEO of PayPal, whatever. It was basically an online money sending a receiving platform before that was really a thing. So he's been obsessed with x for some time.
00:44:25
Speaker
He's been talking for a while that he wants to turn, he wants to create this X, the everything app. And that's sort of all he's ever said. It's going to be a marketplace. It's going to be, it's where you trade your stocks. You know, everyone does that all the time. It's going to be how you send and receive money, et cetera. And then I think two weeks ago, when we talked about the last time we had our Elon Musk segment, which was the last time we recorded, we talked about he was just starting a generative AI model, right? There was another like X, X, X, XPT, XAI.
00:44:53
Speaker
XAI, yeah, whatever, right? So now he's just renaming Twitter to X and what that would suggest to me is that Twitter is the everything app and that is really strange to me. All the things he has said that he wants this app to be able to do, why you would think you could take Twitter and hammer that into those things rather than vice versa, I don't understand at all.
00:45:19
Speaker
But wait, I'm confused. Isn't there already a social network company that has a trademark for X and isn't there already another tech company, like a tech Titan company that has a trademark related to X? There's 900 of them, apparently, but yeah. Oh, really? Well, you know, some patent attorney did a certain, he was quoted in a lot of like CNN and several others, like 900 or 950 different, uh, you know,
00:45:45
Speaker
claims on X of some sort, right? But yeah, Meta has something for the Metaverse stuff. I don't know. For some reason, they have X. Then you have Microsoft, right? For anything involving gaming, apparently they have something from when they first trademarked Xbox related.
00:46:02
Speaker
Mars. And then his logo. So the way he announced this was overnight. He said that if somebody can like come up with a good logo, you know, we could do this now. And someone, I assume earnestly, I don't think it was a troll. I initially thought when this all played out that this guy had like sort of pulled one over on Musk and this was a joke. He sent them a little video of a logo that he designed.
00:46:27
Speaker
But as it turns out, it is the X.org logo for the Linux window manager. It is a logo. There's a million different logos that basically look exactly like this. So I imagine he is just about to be inundated with trademark disputes from all these different holders that hold that particular
00:46:46
Speaker
This is where I show my, I'm not an IP lawyer. It's not just a trademark, right? It's a trade dress. What is it where the actual logo is stylized in this particular way? It's not just about the X. Is that just a trademark, I guess? I do believe it's called a trade dressage, like for the horses. Trade, now you're just messing with me. Yes, I am just messing with you. Well, whatever it is, people are going to be mad is what I'm saying. And this seems like a stupid idea. At Elon? Yeah.
00:47:15
Speaker
There's a million reasons why I think it's stupid, but like one of them, which I think is one of the more boring reasons why I think it's stupid, which is like, why wouldn't you just make it Twitter by X?
00:47:28
Speaker
Everybody knows Twitter or something like that because you don't buy meta, right? Yeah. Uh, or Google like that, like everybody knows Twitter. You can still make it X, but this is the Twitter functionality of X instead of trying to make everybody say, well, I'm not sure if this is real, but making everybody say Z.
00:47:50
Speaker
And it's so funny because they, but they are clearly not doing that because they renamed all the Twitter accounts to X except for X, except for Twitter movies. Uh, because if they changed it to X movies, that would be the same name as a pornography service. Outstanding. So they can't. Next thing you know, tweet is going to be a slur according to Elon and it's going to be banned from the platform.
00:48:18
Speaker
Well, so the other place they've not changed because this is so jankily done and which makes me think that it was genuinely an overnight decision. Sure. As of earlier today, if you go to twitter.com and you're not logged in, the little button that says either log in or sign up says log into Twitter or sign up for Twitter. So the service still seems to be Twitter. It's twitter.com. I'll actually do a real time thing here. Does x.com take you to Twitter yet? Oh, it does. Yeah. But again, it redirects you to twitter.com.
00:48:46
Speaker
hold you at x.com, right? So if I go to x.com slash my handle, I assume I don't... Yeah, it redirects you to twitter.com, the handle, right? So it doesn't... It's not been changed over in any meaningful sense. It's just a redirect. It's like a 503 redirect, basically, is what it's called. So it's a very simple domain thing, like you would do to just redirect your name to your WordPress account or something.
00:49:12
Speaker
So I just went to my Twitter homepage for the first time in forever. And it's been a while. When I go to the little navigation bar on the left-hand side of it on when I'm running it in a web browser, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance tied up in this because it looks like I'm clicking the button to close the window with that X in the top left-hand corner.
00:49:35
Speaker
Yeah. I've done that a few times. So boneheaded on so many levels. The UI is the X of an ad overlay, right? That X that is not a browser X, but is the... Say you go to a website and it has some sort of one of those annoying things saying, well, won't you please turn off your ad blocker? That X is the X that you would click to close that, right?
00:49:58
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's in a different location. Usually those are in the upper right hand corner. And this one's, you know, in the corner where every Mac user is going to look for it. And I know we're small in number, but whatever it's one out of every 10 people, but like, that's right where I would expect to click. Yep. And y'all know that the reason why he owns X.com is because he bought it in like 1999 for, because he wanted PayPal to be called.
00:50:19
Speaker
to be called X, X.com or was it PayPal? Well, then he had to buy it back in 2017 from PayPal for an undisclosed sum though. So yeah, it merged into PayPal and he was really upset about that. So like one of the first things he did when he had, you know, gobs of money was buy it back from PayPal. So he's had it for some time. But yeah, he's obsessed with X. I think one of his kids named X, right? Yeah. This is like,
00:50:45
Speaker
You know those guys who are like their entire personalities about getting their old girlfriend or old wife back, but except it's PayPal and naming PayPal X.com instead of PayPal. But also like being really, I feel like I know all these little decisions he makes, I feel like I know him better and I can sort of identify him with like kids I grew up with in terms of like being obsessed with the letter X. It's the kid that like was way too into sharks in elementary school, just would like tell you shark facts all the time.
00:51:15
Speaker
It's the kid who drew the StuCie S everywhere. Yeah. Is that what it's called? The StuCie? I don't know. I thought the StuCie brand. No, that's a myth, but I'm fine with it. The cool S, yeah. The six sort of slash lines and then the connect them. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's kind of roughly gem shaped.
00:51:32
Speaker
Yeah. The, the, the urban legend was that that was an old logo for Stucy, the skateboarding brand, but that's not true. Uh, and it's, that's not the origin of it, but I, I'm not sure anybody's actually figured out what the origin of it is. It's never had that logo.
00:51:51
Speaker
Yeah, this seems stupid. So I didn't hear the rest of the story, but apparently they were pulling down the Twitter logo off of the actual headquarters. They had already like, you know, projected a big X onto the headquarters. Then they were pulling it down and the police got called. I don't know what that was because I assume it's like, yeah, you need a permit. You need a right away permit for that. Right. To have a crane on the sidewalk and prying the bird off your building. Prying metal letters off your... Yeah, you can't just do that.
00:52:20
Speaker
I'm surprised that they're bothering with putting up a new sign on that building because I assume that they're not paying their rent and they're going to get evicted soon. That's true. That's true. This kind of feels desperate to me. Not to increase use of Twitter. I don't really think this is going to affect Twitter other than people just thinking it's stupid.
00:52:39
Speaker
But like this to me makes me think that Twitter is going to go bankrupt sooner rather than later. Yeah. And so he wants to fulfill his dream of having X, the everything app, even if the everything app is a complete and total bust, it doesn't actually do what he says that it's going to do. He just wants to say, yeah, I built X, the everything app, even if all it does is tweet and
00:53:03
Speaker
do a bad generative AI. And by the way, after that, speaking of the AI, Facebook came out with llama to its own AI and it's open source or like semi open source to open source. People would say it's not open source, but it's free source. And yeah, yeah, for yeah, it's more open source for than open AI for sure. Right. And apparently it's very good. I've heard
00:53:30
Speaker
Um, it seems that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So from the, the, he, I agree with you. I think he's desperate. Um, Jack Dorsey and some other people were saying, we're weighing in and saying like, well, you know, there's a lot of baggage that comes with the Twitter brand. And so X is, you know, this might be a good move. Yeah, there is now. I mean, that's the thing is like, it's all spoken of as though it's just like a law of nature. It's just sort of gravity when he bought it. It was, you know, some people who had been on it for a while.
00:53:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's better. But it's gotten a heck of a lot worse in the last six months. That's the thing. I have a theory. It's not a theory. I don't think anybody planned this on purpose, but when X goes bankrupt, they're going to come out and then this will make Twitter more valuable because they'll be able to pretend none of it happened and say, oh yeah, that was the X era. We're back to Twitter.
00:54:23
Speaker
Uh, and it'll be, they'll be able to often restart it and look, the birds, yeah, they'll be able to, um, yeah, they'll be able to couch all of the bad decisions that have been made over the past six months or whatever, eight months and be like, Oh yeah, that was the bad X era. We're back to Twitter.
00:54:41
Speaker
Yeah. Even though Twitter never made money either. His history compresses things. So yeah, it'll all just look like it's all of one era. Yeah. That's the Musk era was the X era. I could see that. I mean, I could also honestly see this just kind of being the end for Twitter. Another step on the road. Another cut of the thousand cuts.
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah, because I mean, the whole thing is everyone's in my life forget. And then I'm amused again that he was compelled to buy Twitter that like every time he talks about all the things he wants to do, you need to remember that he didn't want to buy it. Right. It's clear he didn't want to buy it. That is crystal clear. He spent a lot of money trying not to buy it and then spent a lot of money on it more than any rational person would spend. If you dump forty six billion dollars into the everything app, just building it from scratch, you'd be way closer than he is right now.
00:55:32
Speaker
I think probably what happens here is that Jeff Bezos comes in and buys the smoldering ashes of what was once Twitter, turns it around and this is his Steve Jobs moment coming back to Apple after the whole next stuff and then invents the iPod. So Jeff Bezos or some other like, you know,
00:55:59
Speaker
kind of despicable, but also in some like niche ways, likable tech billionaire comes in and rescues Twitter. And yeah, I think that's what happens on the next, in the next few months. That would be a great troll for Zuckerberg to just say, okay, so you're moving to X.com. You're Twitter's doesn't exist anymore. It's going to be X. So sell me twitter.com and that's it. Nothing else. Just twitter.com.
00:56:27
Speaker
and then have him spin up and redirects the threads and just like sort of stylized threads more or less to look like Twitter was and see like, okay, let's see who wins here, right? Like your x.com thing that has all the users technically, but no one knows what this is. I mean, just think about like casual users of Twitter that weren't online for a little while and they log in and the whole thing has changed and it seems like a different service entirely. You're going to lose a decent proportion of users just owing to that.
00:56:56
Speaker
right? Like older users and not necessarily technologically savvy. That is super jarring, right?
00:57:03
Speaker
Yeah. And the thinking about that, I was like, wait, it's, it's threads, threads website is threads.net, isn't it? They don't actually own threads.com. And I just looked it up like, yeah, they don't own threads.com. So buy twitter.com. And there you go. You don't need Elon. You're not using it. They'd have to get Elon's approval to do that because, you know, they don't let you, they don't let you cyber squad anymore. Like the good old days.
00:57:29
Speaker
But yeah, I think they would definitely get a lot of people just like knowing because Twitter, people are going to keep calling it Twitter no matter what is the thing. Yeah. Cause it's like the Facebook meta thing, right? I mean, people refer like even in news reports, they'll refer to the parent company as Facebook, or now you're starting to see like meta, the parent company of Facebook, which is, so if you're trying to escape that brand, you're not escaping it. It's repeated every time. Yep.
00:57:54
Speaker
I mean, like you're not going to, you're not going to get rid of the language tweet and retweet. It's just been used for too long. Yeah. Uh, and X is a bad name. So like people, it's not going to be, there's so many confusing ways to say the word X, uh, no Twitter isn't that confusing. So, uh, it's going to stick around and I'm sure it'll annoy him, but yeah. Yeah.
Government Hearings on Extraterrestrial Evidence
00:58:24
Speaker
All right, you guys want to quickly just mention that there's apparently aliens and then we can do our recommendations and go on with our evenings? Yeah. One of the like sixth most important thing to happen in the last two weeks, I guess, is that aliens. This is a real guy with real military bona fides who is testifying in front of Congress about
00:58:44
Speaker
what he believes to be suppressed evidence of extraterrestrial, I think especially aircraft, uh, because there have been these aircraft that have been cited, uh, by various like credible, uh, Navy air force pilots. Uh, and like they're maneuvering in ways that we don't understand the technology of how something like that would maneuver. Uh, and so like,
00:59:13
Speaker
possibilities. Yeah. Lots of possibilities. Like maybe, uh, China has come across, has developed a technology that they have kept from, uh, being discovered that they're using. And, uh, you know, the big, uh, weather balloons were just a ruse and they're actually covering up for the fact that, Hey, we've got these things that do things that you can't even imagine yet. Uh, or it could be aliens. Which one's the more plausible explanation? I have thoughts.
00:59:40
Speaker
Yeah, he's so he's the guy you're talking about. It's retired major David Groucher. It's G-R-U-S-C-H. I have no idea how to pronounce. I don't want to insult the alien guy, Groucher. He claims that, yeah, we've had, we've been aware of non-human activity since the 1930s. And the claim is that from these crashes biological material has been obtained. So like, I guess a body of some sort.
01:00:07
Speaker
That's what he's claiming. So it's more than just, his claim is more than just like, I agree with you. That's what I always think now in the drone era is these are Chinese drones. These are Russian, not Russian drones, but these are Chinese drones. And it's just something they're moving in some way. Some technology we don't really have. And it's surprising that they're able to get over the United States and that's it. But this seems to be a larger claim. And this was part of, I seem to remember, like I think under the Trump administration, they like
01:00:36
Speaker
declassified. I remember hearing a lot about supposedly, um, what's the term disclosure, UFO disclosure was coming. That was on Twitter for a while. Anytime now they're going to, they're going to let you know that that's actually, they have aliens. Yeah. This seems to be the, like, this was the big moment and this is the guy. Yeah. The one, the one guy that's like the,
01:00:56
Speaker
Uh, yeah, that is a main, a major problem with the thing, right? Is that this is one part is the only guy who knew it's the, it's the one guy, the retired guy, like saying a lot of stuff that sounds very similar to like the Roswell stuff that we've been hearing since, you know, part of the X files. Um,
01:01:15
Speaker
I don't know. It's crazy. I hope it's true. I hope that aliens aren't mad at us because we killed one of them. I hope they are cool. You know what I hope is true? I don't care. I don't want there to be aliens. I want us to be alone in the universe. That'd be great. What I hope is true is that somebody has developed way cooler, way better air travel technology because that would be awesome. I'm here for that.
01:01:42
Speaker
Just somebody by as in like another country. And so like, we figured out and that's it. Yeah, like, I assume at some point, just like everything trickled down from the Apollo program into like, that's why you have a TI 82 calculator when you're in ninth grade or whatever.
01:01:59
Speaker
Uh, like all that stuff trickle down. I want this technology to be real and trickle down to us and, uh, you know, make it not so terrible to get on an airplane or make them go faster or make it so that I can park one in my garage and use it to fly to my parents' house. Like whatever, that'd be really great.
01:02:17
Speaker
I agree. What always strikes me, so should I talk about this particular guy? What always strikes me with these stories is how difficult it seems to be to suss out whether or not someone's credentials are real in major aspects of major portions of the military and intelligence and these secret clandestine operations. There's always these people who claim, I was a CIA agent for 10 years. And then
01:02:40
Speaker
investigative journalists that uncover the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison can't definitively say this person was not a CIA agent. That seems to be one of those loopholes that is in society that if you just claim this stuff, nobody can really say for sure you weren't. It's the ultimate resume padding. Just put in there, you're a CIA agent for a couple of years and really nobody can call you out on it. That's not legal advice.
01:03:05
Speaker
There's a, what if you, we were talking about that with Twitter, right? Like if you say, if you say you worked at Twitter, there's no real, there's nobody that's going to check whether or not you, you actually work there. And so there were a lot of people that were in court encouraged to say that they used to work at Twitter. But like, yeah, it's,
01:03:25
Speaker
the verification of information. This is something I think a little about actually, which is like just how difficult it is to verify the information of a person. When I when I was a PD, we one time had a person who was like, that's not my name. Like,
01:03:43
Speaker
They weren't in the system, so they didn't have fingerprints that matched to anybody. But they were just like, that's not my name. That's not my name. They keep saying I'm this guy. You got to rest on this one. That's not my name. That's not my name. And just verifying who somebody is without them having a social security card or something like that is so hard, especially if they're not cooperative.
Wrap-Up and Personal Anecdotes
01:04:07
Speaker
The simplest lie is the most difficult one to actually prove is a lie. Yeah, that's what I mean.
01:04:12
Speaker
It's especially hard if they didn't get the COVID vaccine, so you can't check their 5G. Yeah. That's true. You can't scan them if they have any bars. All right. Well, I think we can leave it at that for our stories. You guys have recommendations that aren't things you already recommended? I used Microsoft Designer, which I didn't even know was a tool. Do you guys know about Microsoft Designer? I do not.
01:04:36
Speaker
OK, so I don't know how exactly to tell people how to use it. So it was something that I brought up by accident by using the Bing image generator. OK, so this is a thing that I'm now using to generate flyers for my events. OK. If you open Bing, as one does, and choose the image generator,
01:05:01
Speaker
which is a thing on the right side of the browser, and you generate an image, you can then choose to customize that image, and then it takes you to a whole free design platform. Like Photoshop in the browser type? Yeah, more like a Canva kind of situation. Okay.
01:05:25
Speaker
It's really good and simple and easy and it has AI prompts where you can say, make me a flyer that says this and it'll make you a flyer that says this. That's really cool. And it's not like the outcome isn't perfect, but it'll give you a start on a flyer.
01:05:45
Speaker
Uh, which is like saves me a bunch of time and, and it'll make videos too, like short, tiny little videos, but stuff. Does it then output to something that you can use another application to edit or do you edit within? Like, do you, like, so you said it gives it a start. Then you do the like manual stuff within it. So like, I was, you're able to move the elements in around it when you customize it.
01:06:07
Speaker
That's really cool. So it generates it with AI and then you can move the elements around. Okay. And it'll consider the way that you move the elements around when it makes the video as well. And then you download it as an MP4. It's like very simple. Yeah. Microsoft is really on the bleeding edge of the AI stuff. Yeah. Oh yeah. You guys like it.
01:06:25
Speaker
It feels like it. I just want to note that my first experiment, which I will not read on here, it's G-rated, but designs could not be generated. Something may have triggered Microsoft's responsible AI guidelines.
01:06:40
Speaker
There are responsible AI guidelines. I assume that this is related to, uh, mine involved Gandalf doing something in like, yes, he's a wizard. It won't let me, you use protected properties. I tried to make a, uh, Taylor Swift, uh, poster and it was like, uh, no, you're not allowed to do that. So whoops. That makes sense.
01:07:02
Speaker
Life is hard. Recommendation. I recommended last week Final Fantasy 16. I recommended it somewhat tentatively because I hadn't finished it yet. I've now finished it. It is good. Everybody should play it. It's fantastic. If you don't have a PlayStation 5 to play it on, then you should buy a PlayStation 5 to play it on. It's a good game. I got to do that.
01:07:24
Speaker
You don't. Very cool. Yeah, I will eventually. I will. My recommendation is the book I said earlier, but just a quick one. In the spirit of doing things other than video games and movies, walks like after dinner, like a long walk, like go for a one or two mile walk to the extent you can when there's not smoke from Canadian wildfires or Chinese balloons or whatever the other thing that's going to be that's going to keep us all in the house next.
01:07:49
Speaker
Really good. My wife and I sort of took a break. We weren't walking for a little while and I felt kind of crappy and I got back to it. And I highly recommend exercise every day, even if it's only a little bit. There you go. There you go. No, no, you still talk. That's not pelotonic. I mean, I'm doing it again. Good on you. Nice. This was the second time I had a Leahy speaking in my ears today.
01:08:13
Speaker
Really? I got autoplayed minimum competence today for the first time in a while. I'm like, oh. Hey, Gina. Nice to hear from you. First time in a while. That's terrible. You're just like the cop back. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.