2025.08.01: Episode Title Reveal

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is MORNING SOWER!

For August 1st, 2025, my name is Bernie Burns sitting right over there.

She is enjoying the best summer of her life.

It's Ashley Bertza had actually.

I am.

I am.

I forgot it's a new month.

You know what that means?

It means new fitness goals.

Yeah, it's August 1st.

New fitness goals.

What's your fitness goal for?

I've got to look it up now.

It's the kind of thing that hits at midnight.

So I'm like sleeping and snoring away.

And it goes, you have a new goal.

Mine is I have to work out nine times in a month.

So I like it.

That's not so bad.

Mine last month was almost patronizing.

It was like work out four times.

You know, it's based on your activity, right?

Okay.

I know, but I'm like, wow, you expect so little of me.

But I also have the opposite thing.

I cannot be pleased because if I'm,

you know, working to better myself and I'm working out a lot, then in the back of my mind is always like, this is going to ruin my goal for the next month.

And my goal for this month is now 55 exercise minutes per day, 14 times.

Usually over promising or under promising and over delivering is a good strategy.

I don't know with health and fitness, if that's the way to go with it.

I don't know.

Look, I'm working.

I'm trying to get ready for summer, Brittany.

I know that we're like several months into it already, but I'm doing my best to get my bikini body.

Two-thirds of the way through the summer that you're getting ready for.

I like that.

We will, we do talk about how nice this summer is.

Actually, I think not to jinx the rest of the summer, but I think this is going to be one of those years that we talk about years from now.

Like, do you remember the summer of 2025 and how nice it was, and the sun was always shining?

This is going to be a year that we measure other summers against.

Absolutely.

For sure.

And it's easy.

Like, we've had these heat waves and we complain about the heat waves while we're in the middle of them.

Like, oh, God, it's so hot.

It's like 76 degrees.

And, you know, we're, of course, we're just like jerks about it while we're in the middle of the heat wave.

But then the nice thing about the ones that we've been getting is they last for maybe a week and then they fuck off.

Well, we can complain about the sun when it's a heat wave.

The sun's there.

But the alternative is when there's clouds here and the sun goes away for like three weeks and you're talking to the kids.

You're like, children.

Let me tell you about the sun.

Let me tell you of the days when the sun blessed this earth.

Well, and this has been a great summer for us as well.

Last year was a terrible summer, comparatively.

And I

can compare this because of garden produce, right?

What we're getting out of the garden.

Last year, we could not grow a zucchini to save our lives.

We got no zucchinis.

We got no squashes.

We couldn't grow a pumpkin in time for Halloween.

Like there just wasn't enough sun for anything in our garden to really thrive.

There are zucchinis in our kitchen right now that are the size of my torso.

Right now, if a car slows down enough while it's going past the house, I'm going to do my best to just toss a couple zucchinis through the open window and just send them away.

We have to get rid of them somehow.

We have so many.

Have you, and they're gigantic.

Have you talked about like maybe submitting some of these for an award or something?

These are gigantic zucchinis.

I don't know.

I feel like to be considered for an award, they have to be like suggestively shaped or something.

You know, I mean, so I don't know about that, but we've been getting so many.

I'm looking up recipes.

We've got zucchini bread and muffins just on every counter in the kitchen.

We're making oodles of soup for the winter to freeze.

Our zucchinis are so big, Pamela Anderson texted me

just to say, Hey, what's up?

I'm just thinking about you guys.

How's it going?

You up?

So it's been a really,

it's been a very thriving summer.

There's a thing.

This is going to be the very rural part of our podcast.

We know these zucchinis weren't.

No, we drive past this pasture that we talk about every time we drive past it.

Normally in this pasture, they grow potatoes.

I believe they grow potatoes.

This is like how nosy.

This is what passes for entertainment now, where we're very like nosy about what the different fields are growing.

And we notice that this field that normally grow potatoes, they're not growing potatoes this year.

What have they got going on?

And we are not professional agriculturalists.

Speak for yourself.

But we do know somebody who has studied agriculturalism.

And we asked her, we said, so what is that?

What are they growing in that field?

And she said, that was something they take a season, they grow this, whatever this plant was.

She told us what the name was.

They grow that and then mulch it back in to replenish the nutrients in the soil.

But that seems kind of weird to me because don't the plants that grow in the field get the nutrients from the soil?

So, how where are the nutrients come from?

It feels like a perpetual motion machine.

I mean, I think this is going to be something like carbon reclamation, right?

I mean, you know, you maybe it's the kind of plants that don't require a lot of vitamins and minerals to grow.

You know, the kind of like almost weeds, right?

The thing that could grow anywhere in like the most barren of soils, but it grows and it's like this big, healthy plant.

So, it could be something like that that then, I don't know, it builds itself out of sun and air.

I mean, that's what trees do, right?

It's like there's not a giant pit underneath every tree that sucked up every nutrient that ever existed in that space.

It's like they're mostly made of sun and air, right?

The trees make themselves.

I can just feel somebody writing a five-paragraph subreddit post right now explaining all this.

I look forward to it.

Let me believe in the magic of the air, okay?

I should say now they're hopefully they'll post it on the open beta for the delta.rushatith.com hits.

That's right.

Website.

Yeah, visit the

new beta forums.

Hey, while we're talking about temperatures and summers, it's been a good summer, I think, in Austin, too, because our friends back in Austin have said it's been great.

It's getting a little hotter now, but I think it was the

first July in a long time.

or first June, excuse me, where they didn't have

a day over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's saying something.

That seems crazy to me having lived there as long as we did.

But I read another thing that'll eventually become a future trivia question, I think.

So if you go to like Pub Night trivia, pay attention because I read this headline and read the whole article that Buffalo, New York, Ashley, Buffalo, New York

is the last

major city in the lower 48 states of the United States.

Waiting for this.

It's a lot of qualifications.

It is the last city

to not hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit ever.

Oh, they've never been over 100 degrees, and they're the last city, last major city, whatever.

So, this is the last city standing.

So, now we know where all the climate refugees are going to go, right?

Well, you should also go to Buffalo, New York, because Buffalo, New York has all hydroelectric power as well.

Does it?

Yeah, so in the event of an apocalypse, go to Buffalo, New York.

Because you'll still have power.

Yeah, you'll still have power.

All right.

So, you'll have power and a temperate climate.

What more could you ask?

As long as the water is still flowing.

That's going to be the marketing brochures for Buffalo.

Right.

That and the wings.

That's what you get there.

But as long as water is still flowing in upstate New York, you'll be okay.

And it won't evaporate because it never gets over 100 degrees.

So you'll be fine.

It's the dream.

Yeah.

But it reminded me of this article that I read about Buffalo, New York.

I say they read the article.

I didn't read the article because I could see the headline.

And then I went to go read the article to give you all the juicy facts about it.

And they wanted like 10 bucks a month.

Oh, yeah.

They're like, it's subscribers only.

You want the information.

I wish you could just pay like a dollar.

Right.

And just like, I just want this one.

You know, it's funny you say that because the age verification thing is like now making its way all over the internet.

It's ending up on every single site.

It's ending up in countries where they don't have requirements for that.

Like for instance, YouTube just announced this thing that's got people upset where they're going to use some kind of AI algorithm to determine who is underage and who is not on YouTube.

Yeah, Yeah, I heard about that.

And I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work.

I mean, YouTube has never been exactly transparent about their algorithms.

But yeah, that's it.

For good reason.

Yes, for good reason, because if they tell you, then you game the system.

But if you figure out like what it takes to promote a video on YouTube and get it in the algorithm where it'll show it to people for suggested videos or just to increase the monetization for it, if they told people how that works, everyone's going to do it.

Everyone would just game the system.

And then by gaming the system, if everyone games it, it breaks it again so uh you know they've never been really transparent about that but yeah they said that based on your viewing habits they will determine if they think you're over 18 or not and if they think that you might not be 18 then they will uh have you verify your age which i that's as confusing as it sounds it yeah so i mean i guess we'll see how it actually shakes out.

But like, what does that mean?

How do you watch YouTube like a 17-year-old versus like a 20-year-old?

I I know exactly what you mean.

If the only data they have on you, your behavior, is what you're watching, right?

But that's also what they're trying to protect.

So like if, say, you have a 14-year-old who's watching all mature content, that's exactly the kind of person that you want to age gate, but they would look like someone older because they're watching all mature content.

Yeah, so I don't know how that's going to work exactly yet.

And it may be the kind of thing that they refine over time when they go, we think this person is watching stuff like an underage person.

And then they verify and they're like, oh, no, they were in fact overage.

So now we're tweaking things a little bit.

Maybe they'll hone in on it eventually, but it's still a really, it's interesting the different types of approaches that we're seeing to this age verification.

So it's interesting because that's what led me to think about this was this article where they had a pay gain on it.

Newgrounds, you know the site Newgrounds?

I do.

So if you're not familiar with the site Newgrounds, it's basically a place where where you can host animation, flash animations, and things like that.

It does a billion other things, but that's how people know it.

Do you know how old Newgrounds is?

I mean, it's one of the like old guard of the internet, so old.

If I told you it was 30 years old, it was founded in July of 1995.

Oh my God.

That seems right, and yet somehow it's still shocking to me that it's a 30-year-old way.

It is weird.

It's like, it seems right.

And yet, oh.

Oh, that's weird.

So they have a really interesting approach to it, which is

they posted this.

They said, one, if your account is more than 10 years old, we're going to assume you're currently over 18.

Two, if your account ever bought a subscription with a credit card, we can confirm that you are over 18 because you need to be over 18 to have a credit card in the UK.

There's a third one that they've had to kind of retract about debit cards because they found out more information.

And then the fourth one was, if none of the applies, you will have the opportunity.

to pay a small one-time fee via credit card as confirmation of your age.

There was another one that a Redditor suggested, which is, if you know what Newgrounds is, you're old.

Yeah.

I think that's right.

I think that's probably the best verification.

Is even knowing what it is.

I mean, I agree.

And the thing is, Newgrounds is old guard of the internet, but still, when it comes to it, a small site, right?

And it's not like a highly monetized user base.

And all of these third-party verification platforms, right, they're all, you have to pay for like every user that gets verified.

So for these small sites especially they've got to find some other way to be in compliance right and i agree with you that the credit card angle seems like a solid thing like if you you know put like a dollar charge on the credit card i i feel that way with like mobile ads right when i put get a mobile game on my iPhone and it has a like an ad every 30 goddamn seconds like a full takeover it's so annoying and it's like $2.99 and I can just get rid of those it's worth it by like the fifth ad ad.

You know what I mean?

I will not slap my credit card down faster for anything than that purchase.

It's crazy how fast I'll do that.

Although, speaking of mobile games, there is actually another verification method that could work that maybe we'll see gain popularity.

So we found a new mobile game for Finn

and it...

lets him practice his math.

But it's in the guise of a little RPG game.

It's really cute.

But there's a parental section where if you want to go

buy stuff, uh but it's sort of age-gated but it's age-gated via quiz right to prove that you're the parent and you showed me the question that we saw on it uh which was what does the vcr do right why would any five-year-old in 2025 know what a vcr does right so you have that quiz and it's i think what was that um there was a series of games in I want to say like the 80s

and it was like some some hopeless dude who's always getting into situations with hot women.

Um Leisure Suit Larry.

Yes.

Yes, thank you.

So leisure suit Larry.

Um that that one had a quiz

because it was like a you know a quote-unquote adult game.

So in order to play it, you had to pass this quiz that only 18-year-olds, you know, you know, only adults would like know the answers to these questions.

It was questions about like current events from the 60s and stuff, right?

So maybe we'll see that make a comeback.

Did you do that?

Do you remember trying to pass that quiz?

No, but I remember that being a whole thing and people would like memorize the answers and like write them down and then share the answers around.

But imagine that you go to log on to a website, and it goes, here's a picture of a cassette tape and a pencil.

What's the relationship between these two things?

If you can answer that, we know you're an adult.

Well, and I, I, that kind of thing is actually, it seems kind of analog, but it would work, right?

And then, of course, everyone can just look it up and do it.

I'll be honest with you.

If you give me a choice, and this is really what

this act is in practice, it is the Child Safety act, but really if they called it the everyone provide their government ID to website act, no one would be doing this.

Like everyone would be screaming about this, but that's what it is in practice.

And if you give me the choice of like, do you want to take a photo of your ID or of your own face and provide it to us?

Or do you want to pay a buck fifty via credit card?

I will take that latter choice.

all day long because I don't know about you guys, but most of my credit card stuff, when I do it digitally it provides a virtual credit card number and everything like that so there is a level of anonymity in there as well which it's not perfect no but it does stay kind of in one channel as opposed to just like throwing this crap everywhere on the internet like to the t-app or something right it's something you know what though is uh would you if you had the opportunity uh verify your id with like apple like put it in your apple wallet or something and have that authenticate you to the rest of the internet Yeah, but once Apple knows that they can charge a buck per site and take their little rake off of that as well, I think they'll be very slow to make that one.

Yeah, right, especially if people are doing the little credit card thing here or there, you know.

But like a $1 charge, like an age verification fee to use a website, it would get annoying across every website on the internet.

But at the same time, it's like it's better than sending my government ID to everybody.

Well, Bernie, speaking of like proving that you're old, there is something going on down in London that is is, there are two pubs that are fighting it out to decide which is the oldest.

And I want to be clear about this.

They're not, they're, they're not fighting to decide which is the oldest pub in London.

They're fighting to decide which is the oldest riverside pub in London.

So this is beside a river.

Yeah, but that's like, that has to be qualifications.

The one that's like right next to the river.

And so there's these two, there's these two pubs that are fighting.

They're trying to be like, which one of us is older?

Because they're both, what are they, what are they both claiming to be the oldest riverside pub in london like is that determined where you drink how can like how would you even possibly figure that out

what does it say in the article like what year it goes back to well so here's um i'm guessing 500 years one is called the mayflower is named after the pilgrim mayflower ship um and it says that it has some of the ship's original timbers in its structure the ship that left their country with refugees they named a pub after that all right good call You know, there's just,

I don't understand.

Does it have a year at all, like how old either one of these things is?

Let's see.

Challenging times for the pub industry.

That is funny because that is one of the things you think would be in the first paragraph.

And

of course, it's not.

This, trust me, this was nowhere near the age gate.

Neither one of the pubs wanted to provide their government ID.

But they've had a Newgrounds account since day one.

So they're both pretty fucking old.

So let's see.

We have the prospect, which claims it was established in 1520.

1520, everybody same year as the great fire of London

by the way I fucking nailed it with the 500 years that's almost exactly 500 years look it's it's incredible we always say this right is that like for us as Americans things being a hundred years old is like wow that's really really old and then you have you drive across here we're driving across a bridge on a regular basis that's I don't know it could be a thousand years old who knows have you changed by the way like every now and then I hear like the oldest pub in London is 500 years old and I go that's it?

Where's your pub from like 900 AD, motherfuckers?

I know.

I'm like, isn't there some stew in like in Japan that's been going that long?

Come on.

Everybody with their 4,000-year-old buildings in other parts of the world is like, good, good job, London.

Wow, 500 years.

Well done.

Well, I mean, I guess everything else burned down in the Great Fire.

But yeah, so there's these pubs that are trying to decide, like, I'm older.

You were talking about

the back in the 80s and leisure suit Larry.

There's another another thing from the 80s that's going around right now.

I got it here.

Let me, I sent you a link.

Okay.

Click on the link in the chat.

Okay, hold on.

And I want you to watch this because I read this.

I saw in the movie subreddit, I saw this headline, and it was

the Masters of the Universe title reveal.

And I thought, oh, what is this?

I want to see this before I watch it.

No, makes it so excited.

What's going to be called?

Ashley's watching the video with the dramatic music.

It's very dramatic.

It's very shiny.

This is the title reveal for the Masters of the Universe movie.

And it's titled

Only in Theaters June 5th, 2020.

The title of the movie is Masters of the Universe.

So wait a minute.

They put out...

So this is, okay, this is a 20-second video that has been viewed 387,000 times.

With a marketing event.

It's called Masters of the Universe Title Reveal.

It's a VO of the logo in a bunch of languages.

That's it.

It's just the words Masters of the Universe on your screen.

That is all it is.

And we got a lot of friends who work in marketing.

I got to make fun of it for a second.

I know there's a lot of marketing people who are in a conference room going, oh my God, congratulations, everybody.

Like popping champagne like we got their marketing reveal.

We got our title reveal today.

I'll tell you what, they're tracking the metrics on this and like who's talking about it or whatever.

It's just, what are we doing now with movies, Ashley?

We had the thing with trailers where we had to watch the five-second clip before the trailer telling us we're about to watch a trailer.

And now we've got to to like have an announcement where here's the title of the movie.

But it's just the thing is we already knew the title.

It's you showing us the shiny logo treatment in every language.

I got to click on the title of the movie to learn the title of the movie.

That's in the link.

It's so dumb.

It's so dumb.

Don't get me wrong.

I am kind of excited about this because

I was reading up something about it because I guess Alison Bree is in this movie, which I'm very, very excited about.

Especially if it's got the kind of camp that I'm hoping for.

Because with Alison Bree doing glow and, you know, the very like campy, like crazy eyeshadow, like 80s villains, like her whole wrestling thing in glow just makes me very excited to see her in this movie.

She's playing a character named Evil Lynn.

So

Evil Lynn.

Do you think, Bernie, that's an antagonist, maybe?

I think she might be.

She might be fighting along Skeletor

and Beastman and Devil Bad Guy 1000.

But actually, I'm kind of excited because there's, I haven't been following this movie closely enough, clearly.

I didn't, I was looking for a title reveal.

But the cast is awesome.

So, in addition to Allison Bree, it's got Idris Elbe.

He's going to be man at arms.

I bet he's just like, is he just going to have like one of those 80s shirts that's like cuts off right at the shoulder?

And then is she just going to have his arms out?

I'm sure he will.

That's going to be the best.

He's like He-Man's right-hand man.

He actually in the cartoon looks more like Tom Selick.

Morena Bakeran is the sorceress.

Nice.

And Skeletor is Jared Leto.

Really?

Is that true?

It's true.

Jared Leto,

he makes some interesting choices, man.

He's a very controversial actor.

I will admit, I don't keep up on everybody's personal life.

I mean, he's like a cult leader.

Come on, lighten up, everybody.

What's a little light culting?

Come on.

Who hasn't started a cult every day?

No, but I guess I feel bad.

The lead guy, the guy who's playing He-Man, and Nicholas Galitzin, I don't, he's the person I know the least in the cast.

Well, that's a really specific casting choice, right?

To play He-Man.

It is.

It is.

Like, that's one that you have to spend a lot of time on.

It's a very, that one is, you're building the whole cast and everything else around it.

But everyone else around it sounds awesome.

So I think I'm on board.

I love to play.

But only if they get really, really ridiculous.

I love that he did a full transformation from Prince Adam.

Is that the alter ego?

Yeah.

Into He-Man.

And it's a cartoon, but they didn't change the character at all.

It's even worse than like Clark Kent.

He's got the same shitty Bob.

He goes through a magical transformation and nothing about the guy changes.

And they're like, who's this new guy who just showed up with his bandalier?

He got a loinclaw.

They got a loinclaw.

That's going to be an interesting

challenge, I think, for the wardrobe department in 2025 because even as a kids' show in the 80s.

It was weird.

I mean, even Skeletor has no shirt on.

Like, they were little loincloths, bare midriffs all across the board there.

Bernie, do you know what the baby oil budget for this film is?

I can't imagine what it is.

I can't imagine.

The production costs are going to go through the roof.

Like, I feel like if Dolph Lundgren was in a movie, they shouldn't remake it in 2025.

That should be a qualification.

New ground should get off.

There are some things that you just can't duplicate.

Hey, while we're talking about Clark Kent and all that stuff, Superman apparently is going to digital.

So, like, two weeks from now, you'll be able to watch Superman at home.

That feels fast.

It feels fast.

I mean, kind of the way the world works now.

I know, I know.

I want to see it again.

So, I'm happy about that.

No, no, no.

It is, it's good for us, I guess.

But it is one of those things where that seems like they're once again continuing to train us, the consumer, that you can just wait.

But I wonder, too, too, if this is part of the greater new DCU strategy, this is them doing a horizon, although I guess we're maybe not because we're still yet to see a horizon, an American saga, chapter two, right?

But you know, the idea being that you want to like build the fan base, almost like they're treating it like building the fan base from scratch.

We want people to see this and get excited for the next one, right?

And build it and build it and build it.

Maybe they're doing that.

And speaking of Jared Leto, I have heard zero chatter

about who could could possibly pay play the joker in the dcu i've heard a lot about batman and i've heard a lot about wonder woman but i haven't heard anything about the joker yeah you're right i haven't but maybe we haven't heard about it because we while we are hearing speculation about batman they're still working on a the batman 2 or whatever which we we don't even know if that's tied in with dcu at this point right they have a joker in that if they continue to use the same person which they might not right you know who the joker in that is i do barry keegan yeah which it's That's an interesting choice.

Joker is always an interesting choice, and it either works or it doesn't.

And well, 90% of the time it works.

Every time the casting is announced, everyone's like, This is going to be terrible.

Usually it turns out well.

Sometimes, in a certain Jared Leto's case, not so great.

He's a bad clown.

I don't know why people get so obsessed with this character.

He's a bad clown.

How dare you, Bernie?

He's the clown prince of crime.

I know.

He's a bad clown.

He's built entirely on that pun.

Well, the Superman

release does put now a deadline for us.

Because now I think that's going to be when we have to choose what the hell is going to be our new home video service that we use.

I know.

We're buying it.

I'm sure it'll be a digital purchase first.

And then we'll go to Superman.

Yeah, we're staring down the barrel.

We got to find somewhere.

Do we go?

Amazon, do we do Amazon?

What do we do?

Who is going to be around for a long time?

By the way, this Masters of the Universe title reveal.

I hope this has not become a thing.

It might already be a thing, and this is the first time I've seen it.

I had heartbreak.

It upset me.

So, how long?

A 20-second clip?

20-second.

It upset me on like five different levels.

Even one of the things is it's released by Amazon MGM Studios.

And I refuse to include the Amazon in that.

It's MGM.

I just, God, I don't know why that bothers me so much.

It's like, Amazon, don't put your branding on every single goddamn thing, please.

Leave the lion alone.

All right.

Well, there's a couple people that I would like to say a big thank you to before we go for the week.

Ethan Warshow and the folks at jumperscape.com.

It's a crew of content creators working on a ton of Halo projects from podcasts to radio shows with segments like Catalog, Xbox Luminary, and Locked and Loaded.

Plus, they do audio dramas based on Halo Waypoint stories and a bunch of other stuff.

They've just finalized their 2026 Halo community calendar too.

So if you're a Halo fan, check it out.

I got some really nice messages from people who were accessing the open beta of the Rooster Teeth site, including somebody who said something really nice.

They were a member of the Patreon and they said, I feel like my Patreon subscription just went up 100 times in value overnight because we added 100 shows in to the back catalog.

And I want to turn that around because I appreciate that comment.

But everyone who has been supporting this podcast via the Patreon, thank you because it's been a big celebration with the open beta, a lot more people making their way in.

Delta.roosterteeth.com.

But I I hope they're sharing in that celebration because that was entirely made possible by you all and your support.

And that is not any kind of platitude in any way.

That is real support.

And you guys made that happen.

So thank you all very much.

All right.

Well, that does it for us this week ending August 1st, 2025.

We're going to be back to talk to you on Monday.

We hope you'll be here as well.

Bye, everybody.