2025.07.25: Chuck E Cheater

I was having lunch with some colleagues and I mentioned the research I've been doing on Shame.

We're recording the book.

I love TED Talks.

Got up!

Good!

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

For July 25th, 2025, my name is Bernie Burns sitting right over there.

She's my main test subject for Shame.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley.

Got it.

If you're not innovating, you're stagnating.

Can I tell you something?

We're going to talk about Hulk Hogan like right out of the gate, but

when you are front and center in a slow news cycle like the Cold Play couple was

at the beginning of this week, how grateful are you when celebrities start dying?

Because it takes away all that attention.

Right.

Like suddenly people have something else to focus on and you're not the main headline absolutely everywhere.

Resignations flying left and right at your company that does, I don't know, something.

Out of all the things in that story, the thing that upsets me the most is that they named the company Astronomer.

And it has nothing to do with space.

I don't understand some of these tech companies like when you look at them and you try to figure out what the hell they do and you cannot figure it out.

First of all, it's virtually impossible to just Google Astronomer.

Like what does Astronomer Company do?

It's very, very hard.

This is the closest I've gotten.

Astronomer is a data infrastructure startup specializing in in workflow orchestration, primarily using its proprietary platform, Astro, built on Apache Airflow.

Do you have, based on that, do you have any idea what they do?

I understand like why there's more mattress firms on every corner in America, the mattress stores, than I understand what that company does.

And why would you name that company Astronomer if it does that word salad of tech garbage?

No clue.

Wouldn't as a company, you would have to call them and go, we want to do business with you.

And then I would have to understand what the fuck the business is.

There are so many like B2B companies, like even me saying B2B, business to business companies, the businesses that serve other businesses, that if the average person reads about them, I'm like, I don't understand what you're doing.

Yeah, like you do what now?

Like we're an SAP company that can help you run your CMS and achieve your KPIs and ROI.

It's like,

what does any of that mean in any way whatsoever?

I feel like a lot of, like if you have a conversation with someone who speaks in nothing but the jargon, they, they basically, have at some point people have to market themselves using that right like i understand

these things you need me to work for you to understand these things right like i i'm like all right you're hired i don't want to under i don't want to hear another one of those things i talk to me in words these are the jobs that ai should take these ones these

anything that you can't explain to a toddler what it is that that should go to ai then like we keep all the other stuff you know right let's let's keep the thinking stuff stuff that just makes goddamn sense like i feel you cornered somebody at the company, go, what do y'all do here at Astronomer?

It's like, does it have anything to do with astronomy?

Like, no, no, no, no, we get that all the time.

Yeah, no, it doesn't have anything to do with astronomy.

It's like, okay, so what do you do?

Like, you know, logistics.

Well, you're

astronomer apparently wasn't even their first name.

The company was originally

under

name user cycle.

User cycle.

Okay.

All right.

Great.

Well, and news that we can all understand a little bit better.

Hulk Hogan passed away.

I believe he was 71 years old.

He was.

So that's the big news.

Earlier, a few days ago, Ozzie Osborne passed away.

Now we've got Hulk Hogan.

And Malcolm Jamal Warner.

And Malcolm James.

So we're getting a bit of a run.

It happens.

It happens.

I'm not sure why it happens.

I'll never forget was the year that, like, I think was, did David Bowie and Robin Williams die in the same year?

That was a bad year.

Well, that, no,

in hindsight, not such a bad year.

Cause I remember when we were in that year and everyone's like, man, get us out of this year.

We're so tired of all these celebrities that we love dying.

And that was like 2015, which is the last good year that ever happened to us.

Well, technically, David Bowie was 2016.

He was like, it was January 2016, but that was like, that was a whole bunch.

I remember it was right before.

the big election and it was like everyone was talking about what a horrible year it was.

And I thought, man, looking back on that year and how badly everyone wanted to get out of it just seems so silly in hindsight.

Well, that was, though.

Like, that was a bad month.

Alan Rickman also died January 2016.

Did he really?

Yeah, that was a rough month for me and all of my young crushes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I get it.

I get it.

But Hulk Hogan dying at 71, it does feel young, but it also doesn't feel that young to me for somebody who was...

a professional athlete.

I would call them a professional athlete, right?

Absolutely.

We've seen like the stuff that those guys do, they're putting their body on the line on the regular.

What do you think is the closest like uh athletic pursuit to wrestling what would you classify it as football i would say acrobatics i guess so i mean it is it is professional uh like acrobatics right like you're having to do a lot of like there's stunts and you have to like make sure you're landing right on stuff and you're hitting people correctly to minimize damage uh and that's all incredibly difficult while you're also performing and putting on a show and getting hit with chairs and is it fair to say too that it does feel like there's a certain level of fitness that then starts to work the opposite in terms of longevity?

You mean like there's a, everyone says like, you know, make sure that you're active to live longer and so on, but you pass a threshold where

if you're overactive or something, the life starts to go down.

You start to drop off, right?

Like you're too active.

You're wearing yourself out.

I think that also depends probably on the type of activity that you're doing.

If you are hitting each other with chairs, that is going to take a physical toll.

Also, your approach to how did you achieve this level of physical fitness can also be answered.

And let's also note that he was like the wrestler in the 80s, right?

And with not a lot of safety protocols that are probably in place now happening in the 80s.

Yeah, and it's hard for people to understand who didn't grow up in that era just how big a deal Hulk Hogan was.

Like, I used to watch wrestling as a kid in the early 80s, and we would watch it on UHF channels, which weren't even the main networks.

They were like your small independent.

Are there UHF channels even left?

Don't even know.

Are they all affiliated with some of the major networks?

But imagine an independent television station.

What's that?

Astronomer is running all of them.

They're helping them actualize in 2025.

But it was like these small, like I went to some wrestling events in person in the audience at the Sam Houston Coliseum, which is like the week before was where they were showing cattle at an auction or something.

Yeah, there was all these dirt floors.

And then like Hulk Hogan comes along mid-80s, late 80s, and they were doing stuff on network television in Madison Square Garden.

It was a major, major change

for the WWF, which now is the WWE.

Do you remember that whole

changeover?

I remember him from the nanny.

The nanny.

Yeah, he popularized the genre of film in which like a strong, buff, hyper-masculine dude takes care of little kids.

Oh, I thought you'd have like the Fran Dresher show.

No, there was a movie in the early 90s, The Nanny, and I remember it because on the cover, he's in like a pink leotard with a tutu and stuff taking care of these little kids.

And it was, I thought it was hilarious for me.

I was

like 10 at the time.

Height of humor.

Like the best movie that could come out.

I think there's been another one since then.

Like Vin Diesel did one, like that kind of movie where you get like, it's fun.

I like those.

And that's what I think of.

But did I ever tell you I met Hulk Hogan?

You did?

Very briefly, but it was just at the beginning of the frag doll days.

And we were doing like a tour at this like radio

sort of conference.

And he was there with his daughter who's promoting her singing career.

Brooke Hogan?

Yes.

So we met him just briefly and I was like,

it's Hulk Hogan.

Did he hit you with a chair or anything like that?

Tragically, no.

I was waiting for it, but never.

Was it in person, big dude?

Big dude.

Yeah, because you never tell when everyone's like relative to each other.

You know what's a good history, honestly, of

like the rise of wrestling in general is if you go read the biography for Andre the Giant on his Wikipedia page, it's actually kind of sad.

He was there in the early days and going through all these different federations in multiple countries as well.

And like they wanted him because of his stature and his appearance to be a villain all the time.

And he didn't want to be a villain.

It is kind of sad.

It is kind of sad.

But it's like, that's what I'm talking about with an example of that's a guy who's like well outside the norm of the normal physical appearance.

And so you don't expect that person to live as long.

I think Hulk Hogan lived into 71 is it's incredible.

Yeah, I think he for everything that he did with his life, he had a solid rock.

Let me ask you a quick question about Ozzy Osborne because we didn't bring this up when we were talking about Ozzie Osborne passing away.

I grew up in Houston.

As you know, I went to the Sam Houston Coliseum to watch wrestling events.

When I talk about Ozzy Osborne, I'm going to give you a word pairing here.

See if this is.

Word association, my favorite.

Ozzy Osbourne and the Alamo.

Music video.

Music video.

You think he made a music video with the Alamo?

You're close.

He urinated on the Alamo.

It was a wrestler film.

How is that close?

Don't know.

I'm trying to make correlation trying to help you out.

Trying to help you realize your KPIs here, actually.

So that was growing up in Houston.

This is before we had the global shaming network, right?

But there was very intense local shaming networks

in that era.

We've been doing a lot of research on shame.

We were told by our parents, my group of friends, were like, you're not allowed to like this Ozzy Osbourne because he peed on the Alamo.

And that was like a thing.

Oh my God, do you hear that Ozzy Osborne peed on the Alamo?

I'm not even sure if anyone really thinks of the Alamo as a war memorial or what, but it was a very big deal that he had done this.

Do you know the other thing that he's associated with?

Like, if I say, let me give you another word pairing here, actually.

Ozzy Osbourne and a bat.

Emoji.

Oh, right, because I told you that when I typed in Ozzy Osborne today, it was suggesting a bat emoji.

Yes.

And I don't know why.

That must be an update that somebody put in there.

That's actually pretty fucking funny.

I thought that was funny when that happened.

But Ozzy Osborne is known for biting the head off a bat and eating 40 raby shots.

You know, now that you mentioned that, I think I do remember seeing that come up sort of at the time, however many years ago, that he bit the head off a bat.

That's pretty hardcore.

Yeah, and it's, it's, I'm telling these stories like a little kid because that's how they were passed to me.

It's like, he peed on the alamo.

He needed 40 raby shots in his stomach.

Shame, shame.

Yeah.

And yeah, so we were, it's weird the things you associate with certain people when you grow up.

But I would imagine if people listening to this grew up in San Antonio, like Ozzy Osborne might not be a popular dude in San Antonio.

He's not even allowed in the city limits.

That's where the Alamo is, by the way.

You would know that if you watched Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

And there is no basement.

So speaking of people getting arrested for doing silly things, what's this story about Chuck E.

Cheese getting arrested in the future?

Oh, God.

Yeah.

So the Chuck E.

Cheese mascot has been arrested for credit card fraud, and he got arrested in front of a bunch of kids.

So the, I know, I know.

So this, this mom had her kids' like birthday party at a Chuck E.

Cheese and then afterwards noticed that it was, that a bunch of fraudulent charges had been racked up.

They ended up tracing it back to this Chuck E.

Cheese location.

And the specific employee, I guess, when she was there, he was like the ticket taker,

but now was in the mascot costume.

So the cops roll up and they're going to ask this mascot to please step outside and talk a little bit.

But he starts getting all tense and jumpy.

And so they decide that they just need to cuff him right there in the Chuck E.

Cheese in front of, I don't know, however many dozen kids are there, and arrest the Chuck E.

Cheese mascot

in front of everyone.

Give him a chance to undress.

Like, if you can't outrun a perp in a mascot costume, I don't know.

Is he really gonna get away?

I look, have you seen some of the mascots?

First of all, like the ones that are doing like the push-ups where they like push themselves up onto a next level of tables up, and so there are some, first of all, very athletic mascots.

Also, have you seen some of the police chases on foot?

Yes, I have.

And how those tend to go?

Yes, I have.

You know, they're not all necessarily required max athletics, and they're probably not expecting it if they're trying to arrest a mascot.

Also, by the way, what a missed opportunity here to cuff him, right?

All the kids are there watching this happen, and then they pull the mask off, and then the guy could have said, and I would have gotten away

with you.

Wasn't for you meddling kids.

You know, that cop's been waiting his whole life for that opportunity.

She got the guy busted.

Let's see who it really is.

It's the credit card fraud.

This is the one who stole from your mom.

Only one of the kids had like an emotional support dog there that day.

That would have been perfect, man.

It would have been the perfect story.

But

I got to admit, though, it's like

the credit card fraud thing sucks.

I'm at the point now where if someone takes my card physically from me, which was a totally normal thing in America forever, now when it happens, I'm like, give me that back.

Like, why are you taking my card?

You know, like, why doesn't you're tapped to pay work in 2025?

Right.

It's all gotten, it's, it's gotten very, we've gotten accustomed to keeping control of our stuff or not even having this stuff.

I barely carry cards around because they're all in my my phone.

You're not taking my phone anywhere.

I have that moment in like line sometimes.

It's like it had it in H-E-B when I was in Austin this last couple of weeks where I was like about to go through with my card.

Everything's on the belt.

And then I said, Do you have tap to pay?

Because if they didn't, sometimes HEB doesn't.

And I thought, if they didn't have tap to pay, I'm, I've created a horrible situation right here.

I have no way to pay for this stuff, you know?

And it's like, luckily they did.

So

time to suit up as a mascot,

steal some credit cards, and pay for the groceries.

That all feels like an extended commercial for astronomer services.

Can't pay.

Does your company not have tap to pay?

Sounds like you need to optimize your workflow.

And in comes Chuck E.

Cheese.

And we would have gotten away with it.

But I'm convinced everybody, if they can lay their eyes on my card, they're stealing all my information at this point.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I have to say, nothing happened, but that happened at that airport little lounge that I went into.

I had to pay for it.

And the guy said, oh, yeah, our internet's slow here.

I'll just take your card.

I was like, what does that mean?

Like, you're going to write down my card number and punch it in later?

You know, it's one of those carbon machines where it just like

takes an imprint of the whole thing on pink paper.

So I'm watching my statement.

I went to this thing the other day.

And the internet slow brings up another story, too, but I went through this thing the other night.

I was talking about where my credit card got declined.

I was so annoyed by it because it put me through all the machinations of security.

Like I made the charge.

It said, hey, we're going to send a one-time code to your phone.

I got it.

I entered in the code.

It was correct.

And then it declined it.

It's like, don't make me go through all the stuff.

I passed your test.

I did all your stuff.

It's like, what else do you want?

I got to upload a selfie that proves I'm over 18 or whatever.

Have you seen in our subreddit, they were talking about how now people have just started to provide resources where people can just go get a selfie of someone.

Sure.

Like a repository of an old person selfie.

Imagine selling your age to people.

Here's my old selfie.

I'm charging $5 per duck face.

Yeah, here's my, here's, yeah, exactly.

Here's my suggestion to anyone under the age of 18 if you want to get a selfie.

Just pose with a fish and some like those like rainbow glasses, then you're going to be great.

The best part is you've already got the socks halfway up to your knees, right?

That's like, that's come back around.

So now they're going to be like, I don't know, are you 16 or are you 60?

Yeah, if you have a pair of sunglasses on like a lanyard around your neck, then you're set.

You're clearly over 18.

Like, this guy looks a lot like Hulk Hogan.

But we were part of something that I have to say this before we start talking about this.

This is an exceptionally rare thing, but we were part of a global Starlink outage that took place last night.

And it came at a really weird time for us because it was bedtime for us.

I guess it was the middle of the day for people.

A lot of people.

But it was Finn was downstairs and right before bed he's allowed to have 30 minutes where he can watch something and he we were transitioning from downstairs to upstairs and he had 10 minutes left in his thing and we were going to watch the remaining 10 minutes upstairs and when we got upstairs the internet had died at that point in time and i worked on it for like 30 minutes and said i'm just going to give up on this i know because i know he was helping you i've never seen such a diligently troubleshooting five-year-old we're going back to board games right he he just he didn't have a concept of what was internet and what isn't internet because everything's internet internet.

But the good news is like we were actually okay with this because, and I never mentioned the cloud services we use.

And I do that intentionally just because it's like another layer of security.

And I, it's weird timing that I feel comfortable talking about that we use Starlink because it saved our ass out here, but we are currently transitioning away from it because we're on fiber now.

Yes.

We have fiber in our area.

And so it's like, I just wrote down some metrics here, Ash, just to give you a perspective of the different eras we had of internet here.

We're on our third era now, aren't we?

The first era, we were on a 4G hotspot, and like it was not a great one.

Yeah, it was like two bars.

Imagine that

so you can technically get connected, but don't plan on doing anything.

And like we told just recently the story about when I tried to download Forbidden West.

Yeah,

for it took like six days.

Six days to download the whole thing.

And so that era, we had,

I took a speed test the day before we got Starlink.

We were 0.7 megabits down and half a megabit per second up, 0.5 and 0.7.

Sounds like you need Astronomer.

Yeah,

the day we got Starlink, we went to 300 megabits down and about 20 to 30 megabits up.

We're now settled in.

We were like one of the first people on our cell.

I think we might have been the first on our cell.

We must have been because you fudged it to even get us activated.

I remember you drove the Starlink somewhere south to activate it because it wasn't far enough north for us yet.

But then then once you got to activate it, it worked.

I was in the parking lot at the beach and I was, because I figured I'd get the best clearance there.

And I drove about 150 miles south, activated it.

I remember when it like, because it moves, the actual dish moves around and I could see the moment it activated.

So then I brought it back up and sure enough, it worked in the garden, but we couldn't activate it while we were up here.

So I felt really proud of myself for doing that.

And it's great too, because the moment we had that, almost all of our internet troubles went away, right?

And it became normal, right?

Just being able to watch Netflix or something became normal.

We became normal for like on a consumption level, but our upload settled in at about 10 megabits per second.

And that has been, I know, vexing for you for streaming, which is something that you've wanted to do.

For me, it's like even just uploading this podcast.

The final product of the podcast is an MP3 that's about 35 or 40 megs.

That's it.

Not huge.

And I can tell you that I have to upload at three different places and I don't upload them all at the same time.

I do Spotify first or excuse me, Patreon first.

Then when that's done sequentially, then next I do Spotify, and then I have the thing that does the transcriptions as well.

So I do those all back to back, but never at the same time, because it's just long enough to be annoying.

And you don't want them to like get confused.

Yeah.

And that's like a 30-meg file, right?

35 megs.

In Austin, when I do it, it's on fiber there.

It's so fast that when I drag it into the box, it just goes to the next screen.

I'm like, did it work?

Are you assuming that it's broken?

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

We are a fringe case in needing a lot of upload.

Most people consume download is like the primary thing and upload is not as important.

But where we are trying to upload things, it has been, that's been our bottleneck.

So with fiber, that's going away, which is great.

Our fiber is 110 down and 140 up.

So we're faster on the up.

It's great.

It's fascinating.

It's really fascinating.

I was testing it for uploading the podcast.

It's great.

Although it's like, I...

I'll have to look into, is there a way you could have two services if we really wanted to maximize and have one do our download and then only one do our upload would be better.

But no, it's just worth it to be able to save it.

Like, we'll put the star link, we have the equipment, we'll put it in a box, and then if anything goes wrong, you can just activate it over its own network instantly.

So, it'll be great to have it out here just in case for future outages.

But this global outage that happened, it really is very rare.

It's been a very reliable service on a service level.

Of course, you have weather stuff that can affect something that's a satellite, and then the upload speed isn't fantastic just by the nature of the technology, but it really has been very reliable service.

And is there any word on what exactly happened?

I I read some speculation from somebody who said they were an engineer on Reddit, and they said that maybe there was something with the mesh network where the satellites all talked to each other, where they were pushing an update.

And he said a word that scared the hell out of me, which is they might have soft-bricked some of the satellites.

And the reason why it was coming up slowly over time is the satellites had to pass over a ground station to then push the update from the ground as opposed to the other satellites.

Okay, so for that, yeah, the only details we got from Starlink is the outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.

All right, fair enough.

Fair enough.

Which sounds like

I was going to say, it sounds like a press release from Astronomer.

Just write, oops.

That's it.

I mean, honestly, if they explained exactly what it was, we probably wouldn't understand that.

I'd still be like, stop with those fake words and just tell me normal.

Man, I remember how slow the first era of internet here was.

It's very educational because you learn what all of your devices do in the modern environment, like how they always want to check, even if you have a downloaded library.

You know, your Spotify and your Audible.

They're still going to try to check.

Yeah, like, hey, let's see if there's new cover art for this song.

And it's like, good Lord, you have to wait for shit to time out all the time.

And then even something as simple as like taking a bunch of pictures of the baby, the baby at the time.

Which we do constantly.

So if you have like 30 or 40 photos, new photos in your library in the background, your phone uploads that to your cloud archive.

If you have that kind of thing.

We were well aware of that because we would end up with a backlog of like 150 photos.

And when we go into town,

then we would upload all of them in a parking lot.

We would sit in a parking lot and watch a progress bar you've probably never seen on your phone, which is the, you know, the cloud backup of your photo gallery.

And we would sit there and go, oh shit, why did I need a five-minute video?

We'd be sitting there watching it slowly upload.

But we're going to get to erase that all from our memories because with Fiber, we're not going to think about it again, theoretically.

You know, there's no way to really tell, but I've often wondered, like, I think I've talked about this with my game library, the updates.

I've now gotten to the point where I just delete games that want to do a massive gigabyte update that I know I'm probably not going to play because it's like, yeah, I'm not paying attention.

That's got to cost something somewhere.

Like we always analyze, like, what does crypto cost or AI cost when you make a prompt?

Like, what does it cost us on an environmental level?

Right.

Like, we've got the water bottle scale for AI prompts, right?

But do we have one for game updates?

Like that at some point, there is data being transferred that you're never actually taking advantage of.

There is a whole layer now to our lives where there's constantly data being transferred back and forth between our devices, like when we take a photo, when it updates our apps, when it does everything, when it checks for cover art.

That whole layer has to be an enormous amount of resources being spent.

And we don't ever, ever analyze that in any way whatsoever or talk about that.

Like, what is the impact of having a connected life?

It's got to be something.

It can't be nothing, right?

That would be one,

one optimized workflow, Bernie.

Yeah, I'd be curious what that is.

And how come there's never like there's never any push to like make that greener in some way?

Like, I don't, you never associate green initiatives with, oh, our apps don't update, but once every, you know, four weeks, and that's it.

And it's greener.

You have to update it manually.

I had an email client that I swear to God updated once once a day for like four months and it was just it was insane it was insane and i guess they probably thought they were doing a service but once again when you have a 130 megabyte update not that bad but it takes you like 20 minutes to download that then you're you then you notice it and you're like waiting to get into your email because the thing has to update just like it's it's it was educational process in our lives actually to realize just how connected we are but how that connection relies on things that aren't necessarily ubiquitous well i would like to say a a big thank you, Bernie, to the people that we're connected to today.

That's Darwin Auditore and Hunter Comens.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

All right, if you're a member of the subreddit, go check out the subreddit this weekend for some updates on some things we're doing there.

And then the Patreon will have more information about the beta site.

And maybe you'll be seeing very soon some information about the open beta.

And by very soon, I mean very soon.

All right, well, that does it for us this week, ending July 25th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you on Monday.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.