The Nextlander Podcast Special Ep: Never Been a Better Podcast 010: Making it Happening
Mar 19, 2026
Austin Walker, writer and games commentator, and Jeff Bakalar, media personality and longtime pop-culture raconteur, trade stories about studio life, tech running amok, and the internet’s golden window. They debate AI, data ethics, and cyberpunk realities. Then they detour into comics talk—Farside, Heathcliff, and nostalgic strips—and celebrate electronic drum kits and midlife hobby thrills.
AI Snips
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Transcript
Episode notes
Behind The Scenes Of The Giant Beast Cast Studio Politics
- Jeff Bakalar recalls Giant Beast Cast's early studios evolving from a windowless small room to larger fishbowl studios.
- He recounts studio politics over space allocation and 200 vs 2000-square-foot debates at Giant Bomb.
Podcasting Started As 'Fake It Till You Make It' For The Crew
- Jeff describes leaving and staying in touch with former coworkers, meeting for lunch three times a year to avoid real work.
- The crew used studio time and daily shows as a way to 'fake it till you make it' in podcasting.
Language Models Are Autocomplete And Risk Corrupting The Web
- Large language models are fundamentally autocomplete and will degrade internet truth if their outputs are repeatedly used as training data.
- Austin Walker and Vinny Caravella cite Ted Chiang's "ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web" and concerns that future scrapes will be contaminated by machine-speak.