2025.08.08: The Long Game

How are you, gentlemen?

Oh, your base are belonging to us.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because

it is morning somewhere for August 8th, 2025.

My name is Bertie Burns.

Sitting right over there.

She's ready for the weekend.

That's your burns.

Actually, you're not ready for this weekend.

I'm not ready for this weekend at all because i may have committed to something that i'm i'm terrified of doing you're terrified of doing this this weekend i am taking ashley to see the movie weapons and and i have to do this this is this is one of those like couples obligations right bernie has gone to see

like adventure rom-coms with me like what was it the lost city the one with sandra bullock and channing tatum where she's like getting like leeches off his butt and stuff yeah and um and you have you've gone to see those movies with me even though you have no interest whatsoever in that genre of film.

So turn it out as fair play.

And now I have to go see weapons with you, even though I would rather chew my own foot off.

It has been a long time since I have seen a horror movie in a movie theater.

JD's been bugging me.

I shouldn't say bugging me.

He's begged me to go see the latest Final Destination Next Generation movie or whatever.

He keeps saying, he's like, this was surprisingly a good movie.

No, I don't need more things to think about all the time, right?

The one for me, the one that stuck with us was the log truck.

The log truck, though, was they just capitalized on something.

I know, they maybe did, but I know.

But every time I follow a log truck, I think, I don't need to be thinking anymore about all the ways I can die.

My intrusive thoughts do that enough.

I don't need the help.

It's funny you say that when you think about stuff, because weapons in particular, by the way, I should point out that I pause every time I say the title of the movie, Weapons, because every time I go to say it, as I have for the last two weeks when I've been asking her to go see this movie with me, I've called it Monsters every single time.

Every single time I go, you mean weapons?

We've had this conversation like 10 times.

But

back in the day, I don't know much about this.

I do know that it still has, oh my God, this is crazy.

How is this that the Barbenheimer for this year?

It's got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Terrifying.

So what's the perfect double feature with the 100% on Rotten Tomatoes?

War of the Worlds.

War of the Worlds.

How are we not doing that?

That's not a Barbenheimer, though, because those are both really good movies.

Yeah, no, but it's a Barbenheimer.

Yeah, how can you, we got to watch what is the 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and then what's 100% on Rotten Tomatoes?

That's the perfect double feature for this weekend.

But there's got to be a way.

We got to come up with a title for this by the end of this podcast.

All right.

Maybe we can crowdsource this one, okay?

Crowdsource it.

Well, yeah, somebody come up with a title for that.

Oh my God, we got to do that, right?

How did we not do that?

Okay.

Anyway, we're talking about it.

Busy weekend.

What was it talking about?

You were talking about how you keep calling it monsters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no.

So I always think about like how something sticks in your head.

Back a billion years ago, we played a Happy Gilmore drop yesterday, and people have been resurfacing since Happy Gilmore to that interview that I did with him.

That show that I was on was a show that I made in college called Sneak Peek, and it was a movie review show where we would go watch movies and we would review them on the college television station TSTV.

The reason why I started the show was to get why it was a way I figured out we could could get free tickets to advanced screening.

Maybe that's why I started making game websites: free tickets to E3.

Oh, yeah.

And then we, I mean, drunk gamers started so we could get free games.

We got one game in like

three years of working on that gun.

Yeah, you start to do like the sort of efficiency analysis, and you realize like how many hours you spent doing the thing so you could get the free thing instead of just buying the thing.

And you start to go, this didn't quite work out in my favor, did it?

If there was ever a Rooster Teeth like trivia bowl, like one of the deepest cuts ever is, what what is the free game that we got on drunkgamers.com.

And what was it?

I don't want to tell you.

I'll see if people remember it or if

you can even dig that up through somehow through the like the archive.org or whatever.

All right, sleuths, get to work.

But

I loved the cast that we had on that show, the main cast, there was a lot of people who came in and out.

There's a guy named Clay Liford who would come in and out sometimes.

He's gone on to be a director himself.

Kathy Russell was one of my main co-hosts.

And then a guy named J.

Knox Griffin, who was this really interesting, like Robin Williams-esque character, like even in university, had like a

personality that he would put on a ton.

He's amazing.

But Kathy Russell was like,

she was like a certain personality type.

She was like the stoner big sister of your best friend.

Like she had like this vibe to her where she didn't give a shit about anything.

And this movie Weapons, it reminds me of a movie that we reviewed at the time called Village of the Damned.

I don't know much about weapons, so I'm probably going to get something wrong here, but it reminds me of that movie.

And actually, the premise of that movie is that there is some kind of event in this town where suddenly everyone feels woozy and then faints and goes unconscious.

And then when they wake up, they discover weeks later that all of the women in the town are now pregnant, every single one of them.

And then nine months later, they all have these kids.

And then years later, the kids are like toddlers and they're all super freaky and weird.

They're like alien demon things i'm not it's i think it was a remake of a of a earlier movie from the 50s or something but really weird and odd and uh we had to do a summary of movies right and so the thing i always think about is kathy just like she didn't give a she's a dj now she's got like reverend russell or something is her name yeah it's awesome and uh she i i said kathy can you handle the the summary for this one she goes yeah okay man

let me go i throw to her i go i go so we we went and saw Village of the Damned this weekend.

Kathy, tell us what Village of the Damned is about.

And I just did this big, long explanation.

Here's how she did it.

She goes, man, there's like this small town.

Everybody gets knocked out.

Everybody gets knocked up.

I think about that all the time.

It was like the easiest, most efficient way to summarize that movie.

And it's something I would never have come up with, homie.

She could come up with the double feature name for War of the Worlds.

and weapons.

All right, well, we'll get Reverend DJ on it.

See, like War of the Weapons, it doesn't work.

It sounds like a Barbenheimer.

It's got to be

the wordplay we were talking about.

We'll find it.

We'll find it.

We just need to massage it a little bit more.

That show, by the way, is still running.

Really?

TSTV.

To this day, that show is still running.

I have these weird things that I start and they run for long periods of time.

And even if they decide to die on their own, I'm like, you can't do that.

You don't get to die.

You're not finished yet.

But yeah, every now and then they'll invite me back for the 20th anniversary of Sneak Peak, the 30th anniversary of Sneak Peak.

So it's just still going.

I just did an interview recently at TSTB.

I don't know what happened to that.

I'll talk to them.

You know what?

My flavor of Scary.

So we're going to go see Weapons, which is the premise of weapons is that

this at 2.17 a.m.

in this little town in Pennsylvania, 17 kids all leave their home with no explanation and all run away.

Wait, wait, wait.

Are you telling me about the movie?

I'm telling you the premise.

So why?

Why do you do this right before we see movies?

I told you I wasn't moving.

I wasn't telling you the movie.

This is like, this is like what happens in the opening credits.

This is what kicks off the movie.

I'm saying this is why you could compare it to Village of the Damned as it involves like something creepy happened with kids.

Here's what's going to happen though.

You're going to get to the end of the summer.

You're just going to be reading before you're processing in your mind.

Don't you know this is in the unbreakable?

Exactly.

Or and then vampires show up in the middle of the movie.

Don't tell me stuff right before we see a movie.

In both of those cases, I didn't know they were spoilers because they were like in the marketing.

That's my point because you're reading the marketing right now and you're going to read me something that you don't know is a spoiler.

That's what I'm telling you.

Third time.

Third time.

And then shenanigans happen.

And then shenanigans happen.

Scary shenanigans.

And then the lady somehow gets turned into a silver person with a surfboard.

Because it's, it's, I can't remember her name.

What's her name?

Julie Garner.

There's too many Gardners.

There's Jennifer Garner.

There's Heidi Gardner on Start Live.

And then now there's Julia.

Julie Garner.

Julie Garner as well.

Yeah.

Julia.

Julia Garner.

She's the, if you want to stop me, you're going to have to fucking kill me.

Kill me.

Yeah, she's that.

We all know her.

We all know her.

That is one of, is that one of the most iconic lines in like modern television?

I think we talked about it before, and I do think about this too with that line.

It's like the director must have called Cut.

And I know everyone in the room went, What the fuck did we just see?

Right.

It's like everyone, everyone, well, everyone probably had that delay, right?

There's like the two to three seconds to make sure everything is like powered down, and then went, holy shit.

Okay, here is Julia Gardner, third of her name from Ozark.

If you want to stop me, you're going to have to fucking kill me.

And the thing is, you'll see, like, that's a lot in like still frames and stuff, too.

And you can still hear it.

You can hear it.

Yeah, it's a picture you can hear.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

You know what my flavor of scary movie to go see is?

Reading marketing materials to people who just want to enjoy a movie.

And then, no, it's Wednesday.

All right.

Wednesday season two just came out and I'm like, this is the appropriate amount of spooky for me.

I heard

that

the main person in that, whose name I definitely know.

Jenna Ortega.

Yeah, go ahead.

She that she doesn't appear enough in it.

That's a complaint I've heard about it.

Yeah, it's hard to say if it's a complaint.

It depends, I guess, on what you want out of it.

Probably, given that the series is called Wednesday, you would expect her to be front and center, but

there's a much greater focus this season on sort of the rest of the Kookie Adams family and what they're getting up to as well.

So it is more Adams family, less specifically Wednesday.

So if you wanted specifically Wednesday, that's a downside.

If you love Adams family because it's a crazy family, then that's an upside.

Yeah.

You know what I'm starting to think?

I'm not a Barbenheimer tear here.

It is easier for me as I get older if we just combine groups into like a one big group name.

Like all the Garners can go together and I can just refer to them and you know which one's in context.

Okay, yeah, Garner III is in this film.

Sure.

Like this, Ortega and then Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, I feel like, I don't know why.

You could put them all in the same group.

I don't know why.

Because I feel like I'm reading about them all in the same places.

Weird.

I don't have what?

They go together.

No, they don't.

Sure.

Yeah, they absolutely do.

100% do.

Okay.

All right.

Whatever, boomer.

Somebody come out.

While we're talking about the incredible longevity of the Bernie Burns projects, Ashley, one of the things I love.

about being a podcaster now for 20 years

is that I'm always wrong in the moment, always, 100%.

And over time, I'm so fucking right.

Some people are starting to realize this too.

There was a thread I just read recently where it was like, all the things we got right over time, and some stuff we probably got credit for that we didn't deserve.

For instance, years ago, I talked about how

NASA every six months wants to announce that they discovered water on Mars for the 100th time.

Hey, Bernie, I've got great news for you.

Dude, I got called anti-science.

People are like, shut the fuck up, Berns.

You don't know what you're talking about.

And now the best part is every, like you things you think about all the time, every time that gets announced every six months, the person who told me to shut the fuck up is like, God damn it,

because I put it in their head.

Yeah, this new discovery of frost in volcanoes on Mars has everyone frothing.

And all I can think of, yeah, that looks like milk coming out of the nipple.

Is that what you're thinking?

Look at this thing and tell me that doesn't look like someone's like Mars has a nipple leaking.

It's a volcano on Mars that has water in it.

Yeah, they're they're what they're finding is that I guess wind, there's enough air on Mars for to have wind, I suppose.

Yeah, they have those huge dust storms.

And so it

more or less blows cold air up the mountains.

And then

like at just the right times, when it's cold enough, it settles in the bowl of the volcano.

And they happen to find or get shots of these frosty volcano tops on the equator, which they're, they're really excited excited about the fact that it's the equator, but it's not something they were expecting to get a photo of.

So maybe they're as surprised and excited as apparently all of us are.

But you know what I take away from this, Bernie?

What did you take away from this?

Hell has frozen over.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Doom.

Yeah.

Anytime we talk about Mars now, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, it's because that's hell.

It's funny too, because they're

moving forward with this DCU.

And it's funny how there's like a dude who's just from Mars is part of the Justice League.

I never knew the character, Martian Manhunter.

I'm assuming based on his name that he's supposed to be from Mars.

Maybe they retconned that at some point.

But I do love the idea when we knew so little about Mars, we could just like make characters that came from Mars and we were just supposed to exist.

And it's easy peasy, right?

Yeah.

And it's just, it doesn't have like quite the same mystique, mystery around it that it did before.

That being said, somebody did a maybe he came from the frosty volcanoes.

We've talked about that Ryan Reynolds movie.

We talked about that Ryan Reynolds movie,

life that's like a mars thing that that thing came from mars if i recall correctly i believe we've also spoken about the martian what's that

right right

now we got to export people to mars in order to tell stories that's the way the martian and then re-import them hopefully dude i'm so excited teddy is here teddy is reading uh project hail mary in the next room he started reading it i'm so

excited for him.

You know how you get excited for someone when they're doing something you like and you don't want to just stand there and look over their shoulder.

But you're like, you're like biting your nails in anticipation of getting to like talk with them about it and for them to like have the experience and the excitement and like just the fun journey that you had with that thing i gotta say too the

you know credit to the people making the movie and everything they've shown so far but also to the people who were like diehard fans of the source material everyone is very excited for everyone else to read it.

You know what I mean?

There is a little bit of like ownership, but there's not like this whole thing of like, oh, it's going to get popular and then it won't be cool and stuff like that.

Right.

It's all this is almost like anti-gatekeeping.

It's like it's like proselytizing.

Please, please read this thing.

Although we're kind of guilty of that because I got mad about the cover changing on our, on my audible and I'm like Kindle.

We're allowed to be upset about that kind of thing because one, that wasn't the cover when we bought it.

Right.

Like, I would hope that it would remain static to when I bought the thing.

And also, if it's part of like a larger series, like what happened to me with Murderbot, now there's one cover that doesn't match all the other covers.

Would you accept that on your bookshelf sir no i would try not to i would try not to but i get it also be careful what we wish for because

they i could see a world in which they go oh would you like to reskin your book with the original cover that'll only be a dollar yeah an extra dollar buying custom skin

no but i i will say i did i did actually try to go into my like amazon library and see if there was a way i could decide which cover my kindle book had There's not, by the way.

There's not?

You can't, you can't.

No, no.

And so I started looking it up in search engines and people are talking about how you can like sideload like a non-Kindle version into the Kindle if you want a different cover and all that.

It's like, man, that's too much work.

I bought a fitness app just recently.

This is like a pro tip that I've discovered.

The fitness app, it's a kettlebell app.

I'm trying kettlebells.

Blaine looked down his nose at me when I told him I was like getting super into kettlebells.

And he's like, bro, no, don't do it.

But no, you love the idea idea of kettlebells, and I like the idea of kettlebells for you.

I like the idea of a gym you can fit in your pocket.

Well, that's well, not pocket, exactly.

You know, you know, but it's less than like a whole like rack of weights.

And there's a lot of stuff that you can do with kettlebells that's really like very functional, kinetic fitness and weightlifting.

And I'm, you know, so it's great.

So I, I love that every now and again, I'll just walk into a room and you're just like lifting a kettlebell for a couple minutes while you think about something.

Yeah.

It's right there.

It's right there.

So this app that I had, it looked like some person, one developer made the app and it came with an option to like unlock some features like saving your records and stuff like that.

You know what I mean?

Like some advanced features.

And I could pay like a buck 99 for a month or 5.99 for a year.

Or I could pay 10 bucks, 9.99 to just permanently unlock it.

And I did that so fast because I've had so many apps.

This soundboard app is one of them where it's like that fee was at one point 30 bucks.

And it's like, oh, you know, 30 bucks to unlock this thing?

That's kind of crazy forever.

And then now I think to unlock this one, I want to say it's like 250 bucks

to unlock it forever.

Just keep all these things just keep going up and up and up.

And if there's an app that you think you're going to be using and you get it, get in it early, man, fucking unlock the lifetime thing on that.

Right.

I mean, and there's also, there's an element of commitment to that as well.

Cause you're saying, I'm going to use this for two years.

I'm going to get my 10 bucks or whatever out of it, right?

Like, I'm going to get my money's worth.

But speaking of things that work, Bernie, I want to talk about something.

And that is that when

you got back from the U.S., I got you something to try because it's always harder coming from the U.S.

to Scotland for jet lag, for like getting your sleep schedule back in order.

A little bit.

And this has been, you know, kind of a recurring theme.

Every time you come back, it takes a week or two for you to get your sleep schedule back.

And you have these horrible wake windows and you're always tired.

It makes you grumpy.

It makes me grumpy.

We all have a bad time.

So this time I decided I'm going to tackle this head on.

And I bought you magnesium oil spray for your feet.

And you looked at me like I was an absolute crazy person.

You looked at me like I was a hippie talking to you about your chakra.

You told me, here's what you need to do in order to sleep more soundly.

Take this magnesium oil.

Rub it on the bottoms of your feet.

Feet, the bottom of your feet, and then put on socks and go to bed.

I don't sleep in socks.

Well, the socks is just so that you don't get the sheets.

Oh, no, I get it, but I got to sleep with socks on, right?

Because it's got to keep the oil on my feet and not on the sheets or whatever.

And I was like, How long did that sit in the bathroom?

Two weeks?

Maybe two or three weeks.

Yeah, it was just there.

It was just, and I was like, get the hell out of here.

Tried it.

I got the

best sleep of my

life

last night.

I slept like a rock.

I have to also point something out, though, too, if I may.

You may.

About this.

Okay, go ahead.

Just finished a massive project yesterday.

Thank you to everyone for your support.

We turned the rusherteeth.com website back live.

Thank you to everyone who has been supporting that.

We've gotten so many nice messages through every possible avenue.

I didn't even know people could send messages through.

the merch shop.

Yeah, through the store.

And we got loads of lovely messages when people are ordering stuff.

Yeah, super nice, like how they met their husband and their best friend or whatever through rushy.com.

And they're so happy to see you back.

It's just really cool, all the messages we've gotten.

But yesterday was the day I said, like, this is done, it's out.

And it is such an incredible relief to have worked on something so long and hit that button because it's like, like you said, you can just like noodle on a little bit more and whatever.

And you have that moment.

You're like, no, let's make this live and we're going.

Here we go.

And there's still stuff we have to fix.

And I appreciate people who are putting up with that.

But it is

just an incredible feeling of completion and accomplishment.

It's honestly, it's what I would imagine, it's on par with childbirth, probably.

Let me say it's the first time ever.

I regret so much that this is not a video podcast.

If you could see the look that she just gave me.

You know what it is?

It's on par with with

childbirth when you and your entire town have been knocked out and woke up knocked up and you didn't get any of the fun part, but you get all the childbirth part.

You gave me a look.

The look in your eyes was like that's what the myth of medusa must be based on whatever that look was

you were laughing but your face was not happy

at all no i'm just i'm laughing i'm happy because i'm contemplating murder that's

that was uh sorry a little bit of rage bait there but uh uh yeah no but it was really it was a huge relief to get that done yesterday and so that and the and the magnesium oil i have to give it credit i i slept like my little chart on my apple watch sleep algorithm.

There's like no, I keep having these wake windows of like an hour or two in the middle of the night.

Ain't none of that last night, man.

I was out.

There's like

maybe like

coming up to the surface once or twice and then immediately dipping back into sleep.

No, that's good.

Does it ever annoy you when something stupid like that works?

It annoys me when something

like you know, when people are like, oh, yeah, just rub magnesium on your feet before bed, or

or, you know, I mean, take magnesium, or like drink turmeric to reduce inflammation, or have this, um, have this lemon ginger drink in the morning to reduce cortisol and make you a better person and all these things.

And I'm like, every time one of these sort of snake oil sounding things works great, it makes me mad.

Yeah, because you wonder, what are you missing out on?

Yeah, I'm like, what else?

Like, what's the other thing?

What's the thing that I'm not doing?

Fuck, our chakra is real.

Yeah, right.

Maybe I should be doing cold plunges or whatever.

And maybe I would be super duper happy if I did that.

But like, oh.

Maybe I should get sunshine on my butthole in the first 15 minutes after waking up.

Maybe 9-11 wasn't in sunshine.

Come on.

That was too far.

Maybe that was too far.

All right.

Well, so that we can go check out Love Island, I want to say a big thank you to our sponsors for today's episode, Noah and Evan.

Thank you so much for sponsoring our show at patreon.com slash morning somewhere.

I would also like to give a shout out, if I may, you may, to Teddy, who showed up here.

And after being on a plane or a train or something for 24 hours straight to get here, I immediately put him to work like rewiring a lamp.

And it was so cool

where that lamp lit up again and that we could finally use that lamp again.

So thank you, Teddy, for doing that.

I've got like 14,000 other jobs now that he is a trained electrician that he's going to be doing around here.

All right, well, that does it for us this week ending August 8th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you on Monday.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.

Thanks, everybody.