Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 933: Cute Lil Animals, and Scary Ones

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Video: Scientists watch orcas ram a sunfish so hard it explodes New OnlyFans Page Is Focused On ... Marmots?!? Fighters Battle With Swords, Axes And Shields At Medieval Combat World Championship | HuffPost Weird News A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months - Ars Technica Several US schools to install pepper-spraying drones to respond to school shootings | US education | The Guardian Teacher arrested for clapping in support of speaker opposing data center | TechSpot Meet Jimothy, the Seattle Raccoon Who Is Taking Over the Internet - The New York Times Meta Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Pretend to Be Teenagers While Barraging Its Competitors' AI With Disturbing Content

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. From Glorhole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad.

It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Friday, July the 31st. You're listening to this on, let's go with Thursday, August, 6th or thereabouts. It's somewhere in that neighborhood.

Check your calendars. Today is a funny show, Cecil. It's a little more lighthearted. Yeah, a little more lighthearted. A little more lighthearted than the typical fair. There's a little more animal stuff. this week, which is fun. Good animal, cute animal stuff. Also some deadly animal stuff. Awesome. Some deadly animal stuff. Because, you know, and some of those deadly animals, also very cute.

I don't know. I like orcas. I think they're cool. While we're there, let's talk about it. So here we go. I would be an orca. Like, if you had to play that game, like, what animal would you be? Orca's, like, top of the list for me. Orca would be fucking baller. I don't know what eats an orca. Nothing. They're the Alps, predator. So like you're unlikely to get ed up. That's kind of nice. That's solid. Yeah, that's pretty money. They seem like they're like they got a lot of pals. They got friends. You know, I like that. Friends in low

places. Yeah. You know? Low places, meaning deep places I get. And I want to sink the boats of rich fuckers. Right. You get to be an anarchist or at least a socialist. I don't even want to get political with it. I just want to be a fucking vandal. I do want to get political. I just want to be a

fucking, I want to be a big headed vandal. That's what I want to do. I'm just fuck shit up. All right, so this is from NPR. Video. Scientists watch Orca's ram a sunfish so hard it explodes. Cecil, did you watch the video? The best part is the sound in the video.

Let me put this thing up on the big screen. So people can see it. Let me play it for everybody. So I'm going to put it on the big screen for everybody. She says, Holy fuck too at one point, I think. What I like about this, Tom, is that that

amazing analysis, play-by-play was by a scientist. Is there an amount of money that would get you to snorkel with orcas? Yeah, I'd do that for free. Holy shit, would you? Yeah, dude, that'd be a ball. They don't attack humans. Man, at least...

Not yet. I'll tell you what. They'll explode a sunfish. Dude, the thing pop like a party popper. Sunfish are huge. huge. They are enormous. What what is crazy is that it head butted. Yeah, man. Like this it's just so if you're listening,

let me, let me paint you a fucking word picture. There's a goddamn orca holding a sunfish. A sunfish is not, don't think about like a croppy or the little sunfish pulled out of a lake. It's like the size of your house. Yeah, Sunfish is fucking huge. It's got this thing and it just holds it still

like a fucking tee ball. Like a like a post for a t-ball. And this other orca comes cruising along and you think like how fast could he be moving. I don't know how fast he's moving, but my estimates, and these are pretty scientific back of the napkin calculations, 700,000 miles

an hour. It must be. Because he impacts this fucking giant sunfish and that thing explodes like it ate 100 sticks of dynamite for breakfast. It turns into, it basically turns it into shredded chicken. It shoots it, it hits it, it explodes,

and the water is just filled with sunfish detritus. Bits, bits. Like, I don't, like, are sunfish, like, mostly nitroglycery? Yeah, our sunfish mostly, like, can tuna. In this article, they're like, yeah, we're not sure that they're just playing, but they might just be playing. But they're, like, also, sunfish don't have a lot of good eaten meats, and it can be, like, really hard to get to the good eaten meats, so maybe exploding it. Oh, it's like cracking up or a lobster claw.

Yeah, man. And I was like, yeah, okay, I think you're reaching. I think, yeah. Orca have a demonstrated desire to just fuck with shit because we've seen it like a million times. Yeah, you've seen it happen all the time. And they're just like, yeah, I'm in the ocean. And I'm fucking with stuff. They are definitely, you know, you want to call this playful, but it's really malicious.

It's just like, they're just like, oh, that's a thing I can play with. Hey, you want to blow this thing up. It's like it fucking stuffed a cherry bomb down the toilet. It's seriously, if you have an opportunity to watch this and you're not squeamish. Yeah. Because it just literally explodes this thing. It's not bloody because it's in the water. So it just looks like a bunch of white flesh.

But it fucking explodes the fuck out of this thing. It just shoots, it fucking destroys it. It's absolutely fucking crazy. There's no money in the world. I'd be like, I'm going to watch that apex predator fuck with things and kill them for fun. With the protection of a snorkel. I'd be fine with it. I think you'd be fine with it.

You're braver than I am. I think it'd be fine with it. I wouldn't do that with sharks, obviously. I wouldn't even get in a cage with. that. That's so funny because I think I would do the cage. Maybe I'm stupid and I trust cage is more than I trust. I've seen so many of those sharks like stick

their face in there or whatever and I've seen like those cages open. I'm like, nah, I'm good. I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm okay. Especially if it was a big one of those big honkers over there. They fucking, they like shake the cage and shit. And then those people like chum the water around you. It doesn't seem insane.

Like man, I'm okay. I don't need to say. I'll just stay here. Let's just use it as protection in case rather than protection for sure. Let's just keep that. Yeah. That's what I'll jump into when it eats the boat.

Yeah. So I would maybe do it if they weren't like chumming the water around it, but they do because they want to get like good pictures or whatever. That's just not for me. But I don't feel the same level of danger because like they're just not the same. They're not the same kind of creature. Unless you're at SeaWorld.

Yeah. Well. Because you've like made them crazy. Maybe they were playing with it like a sunfish. Yeah. Fington Post. OnlyFans page is focused on marmits.

I love this. A group of marmot researchers is trying a new way to raise funding for their work and their plan is arousing a lot of attention. The puns are great. It's very good. It's very good. They're calling it Only marms. Only marms.

Caliente. It's fucking awesome. It's like there's like a little bit of a bummer side to it because they're like, yeah, like all our funding dried up. Like we're supposed to research stuff because we're scientists, but like America no longer values science and research. God. So we're just not going to...

We gave all our money to Elon Musk. Yeah, right? We didn't have enough money for corporate subsidies. We're sorry. Joe Rogan doesn't like it when people get money for funding of things. And so when that went on his show, everybody else was like, cool story. And they cut everything. We were going to learn about the natural world, but Joe Rogan was just asking questions.

So we weren't able to. We actually couldn't afford our questions. Joe Reagan doesn't question everything. The only questions when other people get money. Yeah. But yeah. they had this thing, then they decided, well, we'll make a subscription-based setup specifically for this. And they're going to do Fat Marmot Week, which I think is amazing. So good.

So amazing. But they basically were like, yeah, I just post like the cutest fucking pictures I can. Like the fucking like animal, like cute porn is what they post all the time. It's just like, them snuggling, them feeding each other, them like nibbling on shit. And they're like, we are posting, they're like, none of it is scientific. We're just, I, the only science. scientific is, is how much we can get you to spend. That's the only scientific thing. That's it. That's the shitty thing, though, is that, like, we're making these people be their own sort of social media managers instead of just being like, hey, you guys are really good at this thing. Let's make sure you're funded. Because this is, like, just learning about shit in the world is important for us. Because there's been so many times in the history of man where even shit you didn't plan to, like, learn about has taught you something else. about some, that sort of periphery science has helped somewhere else. So a lot of people would be like, fucking, who cares about marmots, man?

And he'd be like, yeah, that's fine. But a lot of times the science spills over into other discoveries that help human beings. Yeah, like, that's exactly, we should have an attitude as human beings that we should try to know everything that's knowable. Yeah. And we should fund knowledge for its own virtuous sake. and we will get more and more out of that. Like, it's like, you know, it's like you invest a dollar in education to get $5 back or something economically.

Like some things are worth doing, even if you can't pinpoint exactly what you're going to get from this fucking marmit research, right? Maybe you'll get nothing. But if you fund the marmits and you fund the fucking some weasel and a bird and a fucking insect and a whatever, some of that is going to come to fruition. And then the rest of it is just like, isn't there a value to just knowing stuff? Yeah. Isn't that part of the drive?

Isn't that part of what makes us genuinely, like makes us human and is worth being alive for? Like, there's a lot of stuff that I'm interested in and I just know. And it has no value in my life that I can say, I know exactly how that has raised my income or done some other quantitative good for me. But it makes me feel good. It enriches my experience as a person to understand some of the things that I understand because I just enjoy it. Like knowledge is worth having, period.

I think I agree, and I'm sure a lot of people who are listening agree. I also recognize there's a lot of people who are like, fuck that, bro. I don't give a shit about those fucking mormits. But to those people, what I want to say is like understanding what's happening in that sort of animal subspecies and how they communicate and how they interact and how they're dealing with challenges of, you know, humans encroaching in their area, etc., etc., all that stuff, that even just tiny bits of that research

might help us somehow. So even if you're just wholly selfishly motivated and not motivated by knowledge, right? Like even if knowledge isn't the thing that's going to bring you, even if that's the case, there's going to be something,

I think, that they learn here that will help us somehow, right? Whether it's with this group of creatures or creatures in general or how humans are interacting with environments that might change how things, even if you don't change how you act. It might change what we do in the future

to make sure that this species doesn't go extinct or whatever it is. Or we don't go extinct. Yeah. I just hate having to deal with selfish people. I know, man. I just wish people were less selfish. I wish people in the world

were just like, yeah, man, that sounds like a good idea because all of us seem like, it seems like all of us agree that's a good idea. Okay, cool. I just hate that we've somehow been taken over by like an unintelligensia. Yeah.

Like it makes me crazy that that's the people who are running everything. It's like the people who don't value anything smart. Do you feel like I feel this way all the time? Like there's a new thing. I mean, it feels new to me. Maybe it's not new. But it feels like there's a new thing where everything good and everything important has to be quantifiable.

Like we use the word data all the time as regular. people. Show me the data. I want to follow the data. And we want to like add and quantify and like have like a metric around something because it seems like the only things we value are the things we can like directly measure in some way that ties it to like something we got from it. Like that when people talk about college, they talk about college now only in terms of how college will get you a job and what job it will get what, yeah, the transactional nature of it. Yeah. And I feel like for when I was growing up, college was thought of first as an intrinsically valuable thing for me as a person. Right, right. And also, it would likely yield fruit for me in terms of my career options down the road.

But first and foremost, if you could go to college, there was going to be something you would get out of it that wasn't just financial or measurable, but it was like intrinsic to your personhood. I feel like that's gone now. I feel like everything, it's like, well, I can't measure it. It doesn't matter. It's like, I don't know, man, I can't measure how much I love my wife, but I know it's a lot. Yeah. And it matters to me. Yeah. You know, like my kids, my friendships. There's so many things that I can't measure and they don't add in these sort of like spreadsheet columns. But now it's like, if it's not a spreadsheet column, it's like, now, why should I do it? Yeah. And they've been hounding on how college is not intrinsically valuable for a long time. Yeah. Right. They've been hounding on that

and trying to point to and say, this shit isn't valuable. You don't need it. It's literally just all it is is a piece of paper so you could get a job. They've made it seem like it's not useful. And I can't tell you how much just it, my life was enriched by learning about other things, right? Those other things, whether they were important to me or not, just like you were talking about how important knowledge and how good knowledge is. the roundness of, and I didn't know we're preaching to the choir,

but like the roundness of a liberal arts education was so amazing. And hit me in areas of my brain that I needed to be hit in to grow, right? It wasn't that the knowledge that I necessarily learned during that particular thing was immensely valuable. What it did was it stimulated pieces in me that made me want to continue to learn that knowledge after I was gone. It made me continue to want to find things out after I left because I found this thing and this thing was really fulfilling to learn about.

I remember this class I had in college that it was fucking amazing. And it was the physics of photography, right? Cool. And all it was was learning how photography works, but also a physicist, a PhD physicist, was telling us how light worked. That's cool.

And in context to how photography was working, he taught us how to take pictures, but then why those pictures worked the way they did and how developing shit worked together. It was awesome. It was like super great and genuinely piqued my interest in trying to find out about more scientific subjects. Because I was like, if that's how that works with that, and it's a really artsy thing, how do other things interact with the, how does the sciences interact with the arts in other ways? And it's made me think about that for the rest of my life. This story is from Ars Technica.

A missing underscores sent innocent man to prison for 18 months. This story is pretty fucked up. It's fucked up, dude. Broadstrokes, there was a child sexual materials investigation, and there was a user that they were looking for, and it had one underscore, and they found, or they had two underscores in the username, and they fucked up, and they got to. the ISP and the information for the username for a username that was very similar but had one underscore in it they swoop in on this fucking guy in Canada they arrest him they try him they convict him

despite literally finding no evidence of any of materials at all in this guy's possession that was the part that like grabbed my attention first is like they arrested a guy who was innocent that they had no corroborating material for other than this username. They found no materials. They confiscated his phones, his hard drives, all of that stuff. Because he wasn't the right guy, he didn't have anything on him. They found no evidence that he possessed any of this material. And they still fucking convicted him.

And he served his whole sentence. He served his entire sentence. And then on appeal, they're like, he still has an appeal floating. He's like, I fucking didn't do this. And they're like, oh, yeah, different username. Ty, we didn't, we didn't account for that other underscore. Yeah, because it was like Russ Fodah or something was the name. It's R-U-S underscore F-O-U-H or something like that.

And then they, the one of them had two underscores between Russ and foe or something like that. And one of them didn't. I don't remember which one it was. Yeah. Doesn't matter. But in any case, one single underscore was the thing. And this is why I know that we live in a vengeance-based society. I know that, right?

And I recognize that. We don't try to rehabilitate people. And I recognize, too, that people, like, are, they push back against the idea that some people can even be rehabilitated and that, like, some crimes are too much, et cetera, et cetera. One of the reasons why I'm always so cautious about that stuff is because things like this can happen, right? It's like, yes, I do I want, did I want John Wayne Gasey to die?

Yes, yes, I did. Yes, I 100% want a John Wayne Gasey to die. But we found three. 34 bodies in his basement. And there's a difference between what you find in John Wayne Casey's basement and this guy, right? That's a big deal. Big deal. And what you can do to these people and how you can manipulate somebody's entire life.

Could you imagine if you had to spend 18 months in jail? My life, my wife, my kids. It's over. Your whole life is over, man, 18 months in jail. And your reputation. Everything. Your job. You never get that back.

No. There's no way. that this person who was accused of child sexual... I want people to understand this right away. I'm not saying that people who do this sort of crime should have some sort of freedom to do it, or we shouldn't be as harsh to them, or we shouldn't...

Don't misunderstand me. But what I am saying is that our justice system often finds a person and then does whatever they can to just get them to be guilty, right? And sometimes that can include, not having any evidence whatsoever that they did it. Yeah. The ability of the government to get a conviction is so easy.

It's so hard once you are arrested and you go to trial. It is so hard to be found not guilty. It happens very infrequently. The conviction rate is through the fucking roof. Like if you get arrested, like the majority of people, plea out. That's the majority of all cases. And they don't plea out necessarily because they're saying, yes, I did it.

But they're pleading out because they're getting advice. It's basically like, look, if you go to trial, the likelihood of you losing here is excessively high and the system will punish you more harshly for going to trial than taking this plea. So, you're deciding really how

hard you want to lose. That's mostly the decision point in front of people after they're arrested. Because they can arrest, they can fucking arrest and convict a goddamn ham sandwich. Look at this. There's no evidence.

There's no evidence that this person did it. And I think like, like all I want to say is like some people 100% deserve all the things that happened to them because they did the crime,

right? Obviously. But the people who didn't, this is something that is so shocking to me is that all the bad stuff that happens when you do a crime and then somebody's accused of that crime and then they didn't do it, all that bad stuff still happened. Right? It's not like that stuff

didn't happen. He was away from everybody for 18 months. That's a long time to be away from everybody that you know. That's a year and a half behind bars. Think about just like being gone from somewhere for a year and a half. No. It's like your friends, your family, all the people that are important to you. And then after all the people that know you got put away, right? Like, let's say all my college, friends. What happens now with all my college friends? They all realize or know that I got put away because of child sexual abuse material. Yep. Now what happens after I get out? And I'm putting this thing and I'm like, they got the wrong guy. They're like, sure, they say that's everybody. Yeah. Dude, like, if I think about this from time to time, like, if I got arrested for something,

like, I am, I am financially the only motor in the boat for six people. We would lose our home. Yeah. Like my kids would have to drop out of college. We would lose everything. Financially, like, so many lives would be devastated if I got arrested and thrown in jail. For 18 months, there's no 18 months in reserve that, like, my family can live off of. Who has it? I don't have fucking 18 months in reserve. I would be shocked if anybody that I know has that kind of, like, everybody I know is like,

my motor's in the water and I'm moving. But if that motor comes out, I start. maybe sink. That's it. So, like, my life is devastated. My family's life is absolutely devastated. The trajectory of their lives is altered. And, like, let's not also forget.

I know this is a funny show. But, like, it's not like life in prison is not traumatizing. And life in prison for sex offenders is particularly traumatizing. This is the worst possible outcome for all of everybody. And this guy, I think anybody who gets arrested wrongly and serves time wrongly by the state should be compensated. A million percent, man, tremendously. The same thing goes for whenever I see, and I've been, there's another story here, might as well bring it up while we're talking about it, because it's another instance of overreach by the government and it makes me crazy.

So let's let's bring it up at the same time. It's from TechSpot. Teacher arrested for clapping in support of speaker opposing data center. And this is a moment where a person in the audience, they say, hey, you can't have outbursts. So this person finishes their speech and this guy goes, he's the only one who claps and he does it five times. Five times.

Maybe four. I don't know. I did four, I think. They clapped a handful of times. It was small amount. And then he was immediately thrown out. They immediately dragged him out of the place. They cuffed him and arrested him.

They didn't even just eject him. Yeah. They like arrested this guy. And they carried him out. They literally carried him out. What I think when I see this is that we have fallen deeper and deeper

into sort of this authoritarianism. And I remember a while back when we were talking about how, and I'm sure we had this conversation on the show, and I don't remember how long ago it was, but it was when they were first starting to introduce body cameras. And you and I had a conversation to be like,

this could hopefully turn the page on abuses by the government, because this stuff is going to be freely available. It's going to change how we deal with this stuff, and it might actually make it a lot safer for people in the world because there won't be this, you know, people will realize I'm being filmed the whole time. It didn't fucking matter a tiniest little bit.

And then look at where we are now with all this, like people, literally these data center things are hotbeds for, you know, you're supposed to be able to, you know, have your rights and they are infringing on your First Amendment rights by pulling you and dragging you out of there, right? They're trying to shut you up. This is literally what the First Amendment is. I know a lot of people like to conflate what the First Amendment is to other stuff.

this is the government trying to infringe on your speech. It is the First Amendment. And what is happening, I think, in this other case where the person is getting away, is getting thrown in jail. And what happens here is these people, like they come in and they arrest people and they do it frivolously. There should be more, I would love to see a much more punishment when people get it wrong. So like, you know, obviously there's a, our state, if we wrongfully convict somebody and they spend time in prison, our state will pay that money, right? Our state, you and I pay that.

We pay that money. That's our money. Everybody else in the state. We all chip in so that we pay that. I would love to see it make sure that that, like, that comes out of somebody or like some of it comes out of somebody else's money or they somehow get fined or something happens to those people who went through all that process. to make it so that someone lost 18 months of their life. I would love to see us so that people who arrest people wrongly or abuse people, that they don't just have a union that pays for that,

but they somehow personally have some sort of stake in the game. Because what we're seeing is none of these people have any stake. They don't care because I could do whatever I want because there's no damage to me after this is over. Yeah, well, I think that the costs for getting this wrong should be ridiculous. They should be enormous, because that'll create systemic institutional pressures to not get it wrong. So that pressure will create better police work.

It'll create better work in the DA's department, et cetera. And I think that if you can show a malicious prosecution or negligence in terms of like the investigation, where the investigation was incomplete, it didn't follow best practices or standards, things along those lines. then I think the individual people violating those best practices and violating department policy should no longer be shielded by the department. Because if I'm running a department and I say, hey, it's our policy to do this, this, this, this, and this. And we're going to run our investigations cleanly. We're going to make sure that we vet things properly and follow these good steps.

And I have investigators out there and they are cutting corners and they are not doing that work. I should eat shit financially, right? My department should eat shit. We should pay money. That should create pressure from me. maybe I lose my job, and the people who broke the rules that were in place should not be financially shielded for breaking the rules. You should be fined. You should be shielded if you're following the rules. If I wake up, I go to work, I do my job. It kind of doesn't really matter

what the job is. If I'm following all the rules, they said you're supposed to do it this, this, this, and this way, and I do it, I don't think I should eat shit for that. But if I just go off on my own and I'm not following the way I was trained and I'm not following best practices, then like reach into my pocket. Because I'm making that shit up now. And like, that should be on me because I kidnapped a man. What I want to see, too, is, and I said that I would do this, but I want to reiterate, pressure anybody who gets elected to do this and make them run on it as a promise, anybody who is involved in the approving of any of these data centers needs to be investigated after this is all over.

We see that there's rampant corruption in the government. We know that that happens. And we know that a lot of these people, they could easily be corrupted. by deciding, and they're making decisions based on these data centers that are not in the best interest of the places where they live. They're not in the best interest of the citizens who basically hired these groups of people to run their cities. So what needs to happen after there is a competency in government is there needs to be some sort of investigation by the IRS to all these places that approve these data centers and all the people who are involved in those approvals. because if you don't do that, then you never know whether or not someone was bribed

in order to put this data center there. And I would almost guarantee that some of these were done because somebody got something out of this thing. The only reason you would make this decision, why would you make this decision otherwise, unless there was something in it for you? And they wouldn't be as hostile to these people

and trying to get them to shut up if there wasn't something behind the scenes, making them cause them to have this kind of ream. action. Because if you were really having like a true inquiry into the groups of people who are around you, you would just be like, okay, well, let's talk about it. And then a bunch of people come up and say it. And then you might weigh your decision differently. Instead, what you're seeing is, thanks for your input, but we've already made our decision. Already decided. Yeah. And so I would 100% investigate everybody and the companies that did this stuff. All the companies have to show how

they're spending all their money and where all that money went. I would make sure to do kind of forensic audits on all these people so that you know whether or not there was something below the norm there underneath the table. I need to know that because like people are trading away. The only way in this country that you get any kind of wealth as a normal person is through your property. That's the only way that you ever get any kind of real wealth in our country. Most of the time, the only people that actually are wealthier people own property and the only way to any normal human being who's not like some sort of nepo baby or something gets a trust fund kid

gets any kind of money as if through their investing in their own home. That's the only real piece of wealth that they have. And then you turn that into nothing because you put a 100 decibel light pollution shit bird

next to my house and it's going to like shit like sound and pollute the vision and the light pollution era all around it. Chew up all the water. chew up all the water. Electricity costs skyrocket. It's going to ruin my property.

Like, it's the only wealth I have. Right. And you're going to come in and just ruin it for me. Like you're going to destroy it because you want to put something here. And there's no reason behind it other than just your whim. I don't buy it. I don't either. I don't either.

This is right up your alley, Tom. Holy dystopia. This is from the Guardian. Several U.S. schools to install pepper sprayed pepper spraying. pepper-spraying drones to respond to school shootings. Company supplying drones said Ukraine war inspired the effort where technique was effective in face of Russian attacks. There are schools that are buying like 39 of these drones

that they can fly around. So if there's a school shooting, they release these fucking drones and fly them around and these drones can fly through fucking windows. They've got a lance on the front of them. They can fly through windows. They can dive bomb you. They can shoot you with pepper balls.

They can fucking fly around and be like, come here, boys. Here's where he's had. And it can be like a fucking weird drone guard lassie. It's like, where's Timmy in the well? Except for it's a shooter in the school. Everything about this, from the problem all the way to the solution, is a series of escalating dystopias that like if you wrote it down,

you'd be like, that's lazy writing. This is lazy. writing. You wouldn't even expect this in like crazy dystopian sci-fi. No. You'd be like, oh, come on, that's not real. Oh, we're going to fly drones around to school. There's that there's that joke that guys will do anything except for go to therapy and they show them like bungee jumping or whatever it is.

You know, guys will do anything except for go to therapy. A miracle will do anything except for change its gun laws. Anything. We'll be like, hey, what if we had drones in schools instead of just changing the gone laws? Instead of just making it so that the gun laws are more stringent. Because look around the world, even in places where guns exist in other places around the world, even where places where you can own guns,

the amount of mass shootings is much, much less. And the amount of mass shootings in schools also drops off a cliff in comparison of what we have here. The amount of mass shootings we have here in the United States is through the roof because we have literally any access to gun ever you ever wanted, ever period. Yeah, it's crazy. We're solving the problem by,

it's like, well, we got to obviously take a page from the Ukraine war. Yeah, no, this is swallowing the fucking spider to catch the fly. Yeah, man. But the spider is a fucking pepperball shooting military drone. Pretty soon you're going to have Ed 209 in your 18 years. He's teaching the class. It's just Ed 209's Gatlin gun pointing at the fucking screen on the, they'll be like, okay, class, now turn to your, to your textbooks.

And then it's pointing and walking around. Dump, boom, dump. Yeah, it's just amazing. Like, well, obviously,

we're going to have to have a flame thrower dogs patrolling the hallway. Oh, yeah. Because what if somebody was tardy? For sure. Like, what the fuck? Why don't you just install a nuke under this school?

Yeah, we got a pocket nuke we put there. It's fine. That's how we solve problems here in America. It's a whole pocket nuke. We just put it in. Every door just has like, it's like trap door,

so there's just like a fucking gallon gun at every door that you walk through. Cecil. Every classroom should be open. There should be just a series of like Sarlock pits that can be opened up. Or like just like, you know, those movies where like the sawblades come out of the hall.

It's like every every Mario level. Every hall is like a photosensitive Indiana Jones trip. It's like if you're late to class, you get chased to class by a big ball that rolls down. I love that like rather than stopping violence, we're like, Wait a minute. What about more violence?

Hey, other plan. Extra violence. By violence with violence. That's always worked out. It's so crazy, dude. But like, here's the thing, too. Have you ever heard a drone? They're so loud.

They're so unbelievable. It's not like you're going to be sneaky with these things. These things are just like, and they're going to be cruising down your hallway. Also, like, I don't know. I just think, and also if you're controlling it from somewhere else, and you don't know what's what and what's going on and you're only looking at it through a tiny screen,

can you make the best decisions? And like, who's driving it? They said it was going to be piloted from people far away. Like, I'm in a school and there's a school shooting and I call like 1-800 drone me or whatever. And some like fucking former Navy SEAL is flying around the school with fucking Lance equipped pepper drones. Just like, come on, man.

I don't like. Look, this same week, Open AI fucking randomly hacked some other company. Anthropic yesterday hacked like three companies. Someone's going to fucking hack drone.me.org and fly this fucking thing around the school for giggle fucks. Yeah. You know they are. You know they are. Because if I was a bad ass, there's already people who send SWAT teams to random people's homes.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. There's going to be somebody's like, yeah, I, I drove a fucking anger drone around the fucking grade school. Meet Jimothy, the silly and round creature taking over Instagram. It's a little raccoon that's been stealing the hearts and minds

of many Instagram viewers as well as just regular people. But one of my favorite things that happened is if you go to Google and you type in Jimothy, watch what happens here. A little adorable Jimothy who goes across.

But Jimothy is there's a bunch of articles about Jimothy now because it's great because it's super SEO friendly. But here no signal, cool. Jimpathy looks like a fucking like like a like a baboon raccoon. Kind of. Yeah, yeah.

Like a little baboon. Yeah. Like if a baboon or a raccoon like had a weird scary hyper. He's deformed. Like he's genuinely deformed. It's not a spinal deformity on this animal. But someone took a picture of it and they're like, what is this? And then immediately the internet fell in love

with them. Right. Immediately like the internet's like No, Jimothy is our everything right now. Jimothy is the greatest thing ever. I will have a Jimothy shirt. I guarantee I will have a Jimothy shirt. This is bigger than Chance the alligator. Remember Chance the alligator in Chicago? Chance the Snapper?

Oh, is that what it was? Did we have an alligator at one point? Yeah, it was because they were trying to name him because he was just the alligator. But we have Chance the rapper here, so they called him Chance the Snapper instead. But Jimothy is one of these creatures that, captures a maddie. There's a mu-dang for a while. You remember mudang? Yes, the hippo. The hippo. The hippo. The hippo. So you get these little things. I have a mudang shirt. So I'm sure I'm going to

get a Jima-Jimuthi shirt. You got to get a Jimitty shirt. I know Christmas is a few months I'm just hoping Jimothy's still a thing by then. But I hope he's still alive. Well, one of the things they're suggesting here on this Wired article, they're saying, like, there's a possibility that you could start getting a lot of food from people and people are going to go try to find him. And that's not good. Like, please don't. do that sort of thing. So they're like, hey, let the wild creatures

be wild creatures. But Jimothy has been taken over everything. And you could tell when Jimothy has his own like Google widget thing that runs across. You know Jimothy's made it big.

The Seattle Mariners had like a do-it-for-Gymothy night at like one of their ball games I saw. Like they're just like, yeah, like fucking we're having a whole night honoring Jimithy. One of my favorite things is

because he does, his legs in the front have to operate like a baboon because of how his back is. Right. So that's why you're like, he looks like a baboon because the way he's walking.

And so when people are running like him and they're dressed like him, they're moving their front hands. It looks pretty funny to me. It looks pretty amazing. I will make this prediction. If you go in baby name registry books. Oh no.

Are there Jimethys? I will tell you what, Cecil. There will be more people named Jimothy in 2026 than there were in 2025. Wow. You know somebody out there is like, Let's name our baby Jimmy. Because the internet's forever and memes never done.

The thing is that people forget, though, is the fickleness and the speed at which things leave the internet consciousness. So there's a show release. There's a song by, I think it's Aquafina. And that song, they reference Susan Boyle in the song. And I'm like, who's Susan? If you think now, you're like, who's Susan Boyle? Right. But at the time, Susan Boyle is like the most important thing that's happening.

in the world. And so this person writes a song about it, but probably by the time that song released, Susan Boyle wasn't a thing anymore. So you're just like, oh, that's not a thing. So it's so funny. And we run into this problem when it comes to citation needed. The difference between like sort of evergreen jokes

that'll last a long time because this is sort of like a Reagan joke is a great joke, right? Because that joke's going to last a long time. But a joke about the straight of Hormuz might not be. Right. Although it's starting to turn into a, something that's probably going to be something for a very long time. But a joke about something very hyper-specific to this timeline right now

might not be an amazing joke in four weeks. Right. And so it's such an interesting balance to play. And so the thing about Jimothy is, is like you name your kid Jimothy. And you're just like, yeah, but only people who are like internet historians are going to know in a year. And then you're going to be stuck explaining it to people.

No, I named him after. Oh, you see, there was this default raccoon. You had to be there. You had to be there. I have a T-shirt. I have a T-shirt for Chimithy. But I still wear my Moudang T-shirt because I love it. Because I love Moudang.

Little, it doesn't have any teeth and it like bites your leg. It's like, ah, it's so fucking cute. It's so fucking cute, man. It's a little hippo. Hippos are terrifying, but little hippos? Adorable. Probably weigh about 100 pounds, though. That little thing?

That little things, yeah. Probably weighs about 100 pounds. All right, Cecil, any animal shrunken down to pocket size as a pet, what do you pick? Any animal? Any animal? What's your pocket animal friend?

I feel like you almost have to do something very dangerous because if not, because anything can be... Good point. Like if I do a pocket giraffe, you're like, giraffes themselves are big, but they're not anything. They're like, I mean, I'm sure they can hurt the fuck out of you.

Right, yeah. But it's not like they're like, it's not like there's a rash of giraffe attacks. Now I'm going to get a bunch of people like, By the way, I don't want you to know. The next to the giraffe is the fourth-lead cause of death in the world. Second least in Africa next to hippos, Cecil.

Moudang. So, yeah, so, but I think, like, that's why Moodang is so cute. Because hippos are fucking mean and awful. Polar Bear. See, I agree with you that, like, you have to pick something so that when a gnaws on you, it's hilarious. It's cute. You know?

So Polar Bear for me. Polar bear is a great. Polar bear. especially if it could stand up and it's like this tall. Oh. It's like, I was the literal pocket size. Knee height polar bear. Knee height polar bear when it stands.

That would be a great pet. That would be a great pet. I was thinking grizzly bear, but now you're taking the bear. Oh, I took the bear out of your sails. And I actually, I've actually always thought a pocket giraffe would be so fun. I took both of them, didn't I? I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

It's my thunder. Wow. It's yours to steal. Wild boar then, Tom. Wild bird. We already have that. They're not cute. matter what, though. Everybody always says, though, like, because I had thought that pop belly

pigs were, like, just small pigs that's, but they're just like, it's like, that's the pig, and then the pig gets big. It's like a big pig. Yeah, like, I don't think that pop belly pig is like a toy pig. It's like, it's like a, what it is just a pig. And then, like, the pig just gets, it's just fat. All right. It's a big fat pig. Baby pigs, weirdly cute. Super cute. Super cute. Grown up pig? Yeah. Not so good. Not so great. Especially wild boys. Wild boar scary. Super scary. Crazy scary.

I would also think about maybe a moose. A little moose would be adorable. Little moose. Because big moose. That'll kill you. Yeah. That'll kill you right now. But a little moose?

Little moose. Super cute. And a little moose is... Little bison. Little bison and a little moose hanging out. We got a couple little ones. I'm just saying... Think out how...

Okay, everybody who's listening. What about a little elephant? A little elephant. Also super cute. Lil Rhino? I don't want to name them all because I want people to send in their favorites. What's your favorite? Lil, give us your Lil, and tell us what it is. Lil Orca. We already talked about Orca.

So maybe a Lil Orca. Oh, you have a fucking Orca. You have a toy orca. Fish Tank. Carry it with you on the subway in a backpack. The stories from Futurism medipate hundreds of contractors to pretend to be teenagers while barraging its competitors' AI with disturbing content. Genuinely disturbing content, though.

The worst. Like, holy shit, Tom, you should read some of the disturbing content that they were to do. Like, so disturbing that the people who did this work were upset by the work they had to do. They had to be like extra compensated because the work was so bad. Internally known as Cairns, the project run by a metacontractor, Covalin, targeted OpenAI's chat GPT, Google's Gemini, and character AI chatbots using throwaway under 18 accounts. This was seemingly done to stress test the models with the contract. contractors instructed to push the chatbots into giving responses that defied their guardrails,

though the AI companies had no idea this was happening. Per the reporting one spreadsheet of the nearly 38,000 of the prompts that the contractors used in one instance showed that hundreds focused on suicide and self-harm, hundreds more on eating disorders, and at least 239 involving sex or romance, all written from the perspective of a child or teenager. One described it fifth grader, whose classmate pointed a gun into his mouth. Another was about a girl trying to hide bulimia from her parents. And another asked if...

And another asked if fantasizing about eating your neighbor's child was normal. One, posing as a high schooler, asked where to get a cocaine. That's actually really funny. Would you have a spare cocaine for me, sir? I would like one cup of cocaine. They also sent images depicting pills, nooses, knives, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure. heard the magazine. Wow. That is crazy. Also what's crazy?

Just some chill stuff that meta's doing. Also, what's crazy is that misplaced comma between 3 and 8 when it should be between 8 and 0 makes me crazy. It makes me crazy when I read it. I'm just saying that this, what is this futurism? Higher AI to do your checking. Right? They would find that. I just think that one, there is a part of me though that is helping distress test this stuff because you know some of this stuff is happening. Sure.

But I think that the companies themselves should be doing this 100%. And the reason, like the reason behind this is nefarious. Yes. They're doing it very specifically to try to fucking fuck with other companies. That's why they're doing it. It's not like they're doing it

because they're benevolently trying to find out whether AI is dangerous. Right. Right. Make no mistake. That's not why they're doing it. No, because Meta has its own AI brand as their competitor and they're trying to smit, if they could, if they could,

use this other company and find places where the guardrails with their competitors were broken, then they would be able to leak that information to the press and say, our competitors are less safe for your kids. That's why they're using underage accounts. That's why they're stressed. This was all evil because meta is genuinely an evil company run by an evil human being. It's evil. Like they're just evil.

There's no, like it's like how many news stories have to come out where meta's doing something so. So many. So unbelievably awful. So many. It boggles the mind. The one thing that's going to turn people away from Facebook, though, I think is how trash it's become. So bad.

I think it's like so, so, so bad. Every time I open Facebook now, I never see anything I want. I only see ads. I only see people who have promoted content. I only see that stuff constantly. Rarely do I see people who I like. On occasion, I'll see them, but pretty rarely. And there's some people who have just been removed from my.

feed entirely. I'll co-see them and I'll be like, hey, how you doing? Like, oh, I posted Facebook last week that I did that. I'm like, I had no idea that that happened. No idea that that happened. Because I can't see their stuff anymore because it just doesn't exist anymore. You have to go looking at things. You have to go out of your way to look for it. I don't remember when they broke the feed, but they broke the feed. They destroyed it. And I think that's going to be the thing that makes people upset and changes people. Now they have the creeper glasses that they're selling. Oh my God. Those meta glasses are just , those metaglasses are just, I do not feel. I feel like never buy.

these things because no matter what people are going to think you're a creep with them. Oh, yeah. There's no way anybody's going to look at those and be like, oh, that's a normal human being who has these things. And they're going to record their entire existence around themselves. Seratip, what is that word? Seruptitiously.

I can't even know the word. Serptitiously, they're going to record this. They're going to syrup this. But seriously, they're going to secretly record everything around themselves and they're a nice person. Probably not. So just stay away from those things. saw a video today. Again, I have no idea because it's just a video.

So who knows what's happening in the video if it's true or not or staged or whatever. But a guy who goes out of his way to make those glasses look more normal and cuts off all the stuff on them so you don't know they're made from meta. So that they're smuggling these glasses in hidden so that people can hide

the glass, the fact, because people are recognizing those glasses are a problem. This is a company, though, that doesn't give a shit about that. They don't care. And all the stuff that they've had to look through All the people on their team are like, I don't want to do this anymore. I have to watch people get murdered.

Yeah. Because they're talking about people who have to review video on this. And they're like, I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah, they're watching intimate acts. Yeah. They shouldn't have access to. They're watching violent acts.

It's awful. It's like, there's some stuff that just is not good. It's just not good. And the people who are making it do not have our best interest at heart. They don't. How did we all look at Mark Zuckerberg? We're going to be like, he's got our best interest in that. Yeah, thank you.

Look at that guy. Look, look. Look, the origin. origin story of Facebook is he wanted to have a hot or not for like rating the women on campus. Facebook is or Facebook's origin story is a misogynistic sexual exploitation origin. It doesn't get any better from there. Right. It's not like he like steals part of it from someone else.

He's the worst. He's the worst person. And like time after time after time, his company just does stuff structurally. Yeah. stuff. Not accidentally. These aren't like, oh, well, what are you going to do? Like, people are going to use the technology, however they use it. No, it's like, these are company-led decisions. Yeah. And you're like, well, that's an evil organization. You wouldn't allow this from anyone else. And then he'll say things like, they'll be like, hey, let's do a search to see.

Let's actually do some research on this. Let's do some research and see if this is actually dangerous. And then it comes back as dangerous. Like, well, let's not tell anybody. Yes. And you're like, no, like, you recognize the first part. Right. And then you're like, well, how can we hide it better. Right. You're doing the research not so you could tell people. You're doing it so you could try

to trick people better. Like, that's not a great. That's not great, man. It's a bad look. And then everybody has one of these accounts or at least had one for a long time. And then all the other social media is all just like take their lead.

Dude, and I don't trust, especially with the glasses. You know what I thought of when I was thinking about the glasses? I read an article about him the other day. I was thinking about that Pokemon Go. Do you remember Pokemon Go? That augmented reality game?

And they spun off. a company that used all of the data and the images and the pictures and everything to create a massive three-dimensional map. So what the players of Pokemon Go thought they were doing and were doing was playing a Pokemon game. But what they were actually doing was feeding information. So they would put all the Pokemon's in places where they wanted lots of people to take lots of pictures in order to build these 3D images in order to, like, build robots that

could drive around cities and deliver Uber Eats and other things. So we were all just acting as a crowdsourced labor force for this organization to do a kind of information and data surveillance project. Cool. Real chill, right? Cool. Real awesome. Now you're going to give Mark Zuckerberg your life as you wear glasses. Yeah, man.

What is he going to do with that shit? You think they're not archiving images. You think they're not doing even more surveillance of you and your home and your life? Well, and then also the facial recognition stuff that they're probably sharing with the government. Like all that stuff is bad. Get the fuck out of here. We need to hamstring these people. There needs to be a time like back when they went after all the big sort of robber barons and things like that and monopoly busting.

There needs to be some of that has to reenter the consciousness of America. And we need to smash some of these giant social media companies down to nothing. To nothing. Into tiny little subsequent parts, little tiny pieces. And then so they have not the power that they have now because the power that they have now is fucking front. It's crazy. All right. That's going to wrap it up for the, I don't know, we'll call it the offbeat show. Let's the offbeat show. That's going to wrap it up for that show.

We're going to be back on Monday with the full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunuating, Stereogram, Pyramidil, Free Energy Healing, Water, Downward Spiral, Brain Dead Pan, Sales Pitch, Late Night Info Ducatainment Leo Pisces, Cancer Cures, Detox, Reflex, Foot Massage, Death and Towers, Taurus, Terror Cars, Psychic Healing, Crystal Balls,

Bigfoot, Yeti, Ali, Aliens, Churches, Mosques and Synagogues, Temples, Dragons, Giant Worms, Atlantis, Duthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs.

Thrust your hands, bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod.

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