Episode Details

We kick things off with the existential dread of FOLLOW UP and the absolute joy of jury duty. While xAI’s Grok is busy getting banned in Malaysia and Indonesia for its CSAM-generating "features," the Senate is unanimously passing the DEFIANCE Act to give us some legal teeth against the deepfake machine. Meta is busy nuking 550,000 Australian accounts to appease regulators, while Roblox’s age verification is so broken that a drawing of stubble or a photo of Kurt Cobain can get you into the adult lounge. Moving IN THE NEWS, Meta is trading its $70 billion Metaverse graveyard for a Reality Labs layoff and a pivot to AI hardware, fueled by an "AI infrastructure" buildout that’s hiring former Trump advisors. Bandcamp is heroically banning AI "slop," Matthew McConaughey is trademarking his own face to fend off the bots, and ICE’s AI hiring tool is such a disaster it’s accidentally fast-tracking mall security as "officers." Between self-help gurus charging $99 for chatbot "advice," GM finally settling its driver-spying suit with the FTC, and NASA prepping for a February moon shot while China plans to launch 200,000 satellites into our already crowded orbit, the future looks exactly as messy as we expected.

For MEDIA CANDY, we’ve got Lord of the Rings marathons, the diner-bridge of Starfleet Academy, and the usual joy of streaming price hikes hitting our "Premium" plans. We’re tracking the 2025 "In Memoriam" and Gabriel Pagan’s exhaustive movie list before sliding into APPS & DOODADS. Jony Ive and Sam Altman are reportedly building an hearing aide called "Sweetpea" to kill your AirPods, Siri is officially Google Gemini’s new puppet, and Apple is finally bundling its creative apps into a "Creator Studio" subscription trap. Tesla is making Full Self-Driving a subscription-only Valentine’s gift (good luck with that), Ring is rebranding surveillance as a "fire-watching" assistant, and a Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" is the new must-have for the lonely. To cap it off, the internet proved its maturity by using "Words.zip"—an infinite word-search grid—to draw a giant phallus, because of course they did.

AT THE LIBRARY features the Anthony Bourdain Reader, the return of Bob in the new Laundry Files book, and Jimmy Carr’s guide to happiness, which is apparently cheaper than therapy. Then we descend into THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE, where the dishwasher-installing, ham-radio-lunching Dave Bittner reveals Disney World has job openings for those of us who spent high school in the AV club. Lucasfilm is finally entering a new era as Kathleen Kennedy steps down, just as Galaxy’s Edge admits the original trilogy exists, and we wrap it all up with lock-picking kits and the terrifying realization that Seymour from H.R. Pufnstuf is the ultimate Gen-X fursona.

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