Missing scientists conspiracy goes mainstream

💸 What I’m writing off: Taxes (not really)

👀 What I watched: 20 airplane hours of movies and TV

🍝 What I ate: Pasta

😭 What I’m laughing at (until I cry)

👨🏼‍💻 What I’m processing: More misinformation

Friday’s video covered a relevant news story about Italy and the U.S. while in beautiful Perugia. Readers of this newsletter will know that I was there to speak and network at the International Journalism Festival. Naturally, many of our commenters assumed I was on vacation and made the video for a tax write-off.

So, yes, this trip will be included in the 2026 tax returns Local News International, but not for the reasons many thought. Still, I appreciate that people on TikTok, Reels and YouTube all assumed I would go to those lengths for a write-off.

Two other videos from this week featured Chicago’s O’Hare and New York’s JFK airports. As I alluded to in both, it became necessary to shoot videos in the airport after four rescheduled flights and one canceled flight because a “200 pound part had to be replaced” (which is a very rude way to tell me to get off of a plane).

Anyway, while in the air and stuck in my comped hotel room, I caught up on a lot of TV and film. Here’s a quick blurb for everything I watched:

Rooster on HBO

Yet another show created by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso, Shrinking). This one stars Steve Carell as a visiting English professor at a liberal arts school. As an English writing major from a liberal arts school, and massive day one Office (US) fan, this show was basically made for me. And only me. So don’t watch it. Let me have it for myself.

5/5 stars.

The Boys, season 5 on Amazon Prime

While I agree that the show hasn’t been quite as good as its first couple of seasons, it still is far and above most other new shows streaming right now. And I do feel like they’re doing a pretty good job of wrapping things up for this final season. The satire is so on point, episode 3’s Christian imagery even landed on the same day Trump posted a photo of himself as Jesus.

4/5 stars.

One Battle After Another streaming on HBO

I get why it was nominated for a ton of Oscars. Sean Penn was especially deserving of his win (he’s very good at being hateable!). At times, I felt like the story was a little unfocused and all over the place, but that’s just the nature of Paul Thomas Anderson movies. I also thought the right-wing ideology represented in the movie, while sometimes very funny, was clearly written through the eyes of someone who had never really met the conservative archetypes they were writing about. Ultimately, everyone’s acting made up for all these sins though.

3.5/5 stars.

Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix

This is the third iteration of Rian Johnson’s whodunnit films starring Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc. While some people really hated the second in the series, Glass Onion, I’m a big defender of it. While its villain isn’t exactly Elon Musk, it’s clearly poking fun at him. For that alone, I was delighted. This third go-around had some really spectacular set pieces and an impressive cast. Our main character, a humble priest just trying to do his job, played by Josh O’Connor, was a huge highlight. Like Ana de Armas in Knives Out, he really brought some soul and goodness to the film. Ultimately, I felt like the ending was too contrived, even for a whodunnit. I just felt slightly unsatisfied by the end. But worth watching.

3/5 stars.

I haven’t finished the Malcolm in the Middle revival, but so far, so good. For now, I’ll direct you to the press junkets the cast is doing for the show. What a wonderful cast of humans that show has, truly. Bryan Cranston has been especially refreshing in his honesty in interviews, whether it’s talking about his restaurant pet peeve, encouraging Shia LeBeouf to get help, or talking about the half-sister he only met a few years ago:

So much pasta in just 48 hours in Italy. Then pizza in the airport because I forgot to eat pizza while eating all that pasta. Also gelato, you know, for that Friday video. I had to for the integrity of the story I was telling. Anyway, just call me Pasta Dave now. That’s me.

A few months ago, I made a video then wrote a newsletter about how AI scrapes articles to generate lots of false information for Google searches. It’s so easy to deceive the internet these days. While my story about Sam the Spam can received some essential quotations, I would still say our experiment was successful:

And here’s a refresher on how this can happen:

Anyway, I was on Threads (don’t judge me), and stumbled across this terrible, wonderful post that also tricked an AI summary:

I’ll summarize the post for you (as a human). Someone wrote a long post explaining why buns are always askew in photos of Japanese food. It was genuinely very convincing, getting into the details, and using “postwar” Japan as the driving force of this phenomenon. It reminded me a lot of this Fred Armisen bit from a recent Amy Poehler podcast:

Well, like that Armisen bit, it was completely made-up. And to the credit of the commenter, they said that at the end of the comment. It was a real lesson in “read to the very end.” Well, AI did not read to the end. And these “facts” about Japanese food displays were presented as real.

It’s funny, it’s terrifying … it’s AI in 2026. I guess I’ll never run out of content for our weekly iDave series on AI, so that’s good? And I do love thinking of more opportunities to mess with AI.

Anyway, remember to comment all week in my videos, referring to me only as Pasta Dave. If you want to make your own video about that being my legal name, go for it! That’s me. Pasta Dave.

Speaking of misinformation, I’ve been baffled the last week or so watching a completely unproven conspiracy theory get write-ups from all over the internet. Fox News, The Hill, and USA Today have all dedicated online ink to the theory that multiple scientists who have gone missing or died are all related. To their credit, some of these sites at least acknowledge the ties are “inconsistent.”

Also, most of these write-ups came after the White House said they were looking into it. This is somewhat funny for a few reasons. For starters, in some of the versions of this conspiracy theory, scientists have gone missing because of the government trying to shut them up. The other reason, which is perhaps less funny, is that this is clearly a welcome distraction for the White House as gas prices rise, the Epstein files just won’t quite go away and Trump’s approval ratings continue to fall.

I’m going to dig more into this conspiracy theory tomorrow, which will likely result in a Misinformation Monday video. As always, I’ll be happy to give credit to any part of this theory that holds some water. After all, the best lies have a little bit of truth. But ultimately, I hope to show that this is yet another example of how a conspiracy theory can take hold on the internet and snowball for various reasons.

My favorite creator on Instagram just gets better and better. Since I first spoke about @husk.irl a few months ago, he’s caught the attention of Sam Altman. Afterwards, Husk expertly used Altman’s words against him, toying with his AI chatbot yet again. That video went uber viral.

But the follow-up was even better. After his viral success, he was invited onto NBC News to talk about Altman’s reaction. It’s worth a watch: