2025.07.07: First Time Caller

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is Morning Somewhere for July 7th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns.

Calling from a payphone boot.

Sit right over there.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

It's Ashley.

I'm sitting way over there.

What?

Yes.

So I said you're sitting way over there because you're about, what, 5,000 miles away right now?

Yeah, I mean, I guess way over there isn't a specific measurement, so that would definitely qualify.

I am over there.

It is several thousand miles away.

But, you know, we do what we can.

Yeah, so we were testing some stuff with the patrons on Patreon this weekend.

As you can probably tell, I'm assuming you can probably tell, we are testing a new recording setup that we don't expect to be as nice as our home studio.

We are testing a remote setup because I am on the road on the road.

And in the past when we've done this, I have hauled this toll gigantic setup with me, but it was only going to be one day for this.

And so we thought we would try like the typical, let's just do a laptop podcast recording.

And we did a test this weekend with the patrons.

and we said, What do you think about this?

And they were universally like, It doesn't sound right,

but we're going with it anyway.

The thing is, though, this is

two things, though.

It's an experiment of necessity because you are on the road and you didn't want to take an entire extra suitcase full of recording equipment for this one day.

But this is also a good experiment for

the new types of recording technology to enable

us to maybe do more remote projects.

Remote's always been a tricky subject with us, and I know it's a sticking point with you as well.

But if we can find a way to do some things without being in the same room, that could open up a lot of possibilities.

Yeah, and sometimes it can seem like a little stubborn sometimes with quality and things like that.

But after about like two or three minutes, the patrons were saying, yeah, you know, it was at first it was different, but then my brain quickly adjusted to the new,

audio quality format.

And to me, it's like once you start to introduce more variables in, then you get into that Uncanny Valley stuff.

There was a year on the RT podcast.

It was an entire year where they switched from using microphones in front of our faces to we would wear those lapel mics, those little tiny little.

Yeah, you clip them, the lavalier mics that you clip to your shirt.

And every single time I was like, I cannot stand the audio quality of this versus having the mics in front of our faces.

And everyone was like, I don't know what you're talking about.

And it was one of those things where Gus left town one day.

And the day he left, and he wasn't going to be on the podcast, I said, let's get mics out and put them in front of our faces.

And then we just ended up going back to those.

And in my opinion, in my opinion, when you go back and listen to that era of the Rishi Keep podcast, it stands out like a sore thumb.

But not everyone feels that way.

You know, some people are just just like, yeah, it's a podcast, and I can hear the people.

That's good enough for me.

Right.

Bernie, it's all about the quality of what you're saying, okay?

The quality.

Not to say that, actually, you and I have never recorded remote.

We've done that time to time.

But we do it with a little bit different setup, but you can never control anyone else's setup.

Like most people, I feel like Ashley would be a guest, would have a setup like this where we're working basically from laptops and just normal available microphones.

Yeah, so I guess the short version of this is, hey, listeners, lower your standards.

Yeah, exactly.

But it will, you know,

it will open up things we could do for like more interviews and remotes and things like that.

Well, and it allows you to do cool stuff like travel.

Like you're in Tucson right now.

I am in Tucson, Arizona.

You sent me a picture of cactuses.

And can I tell you, you sent me this picture of your view.

Out your window, and it's this desert with cactuses.

And it took me a minute to process what it was because at first I thought it must be a screenshot from a movie or something, because cactuses aren't real.

That's like I'm so far away from cactuses right now that they may as well be on Mars.

Well, these are like classic, like, Roadrunner Wiley coyote cactuses, like the tall ones with the arms.

We're not talking like a little one you have in a pot, you know, or something like that.

And they're cool because it's like I was talking with the guy I'm staying with, and it's just like anywhere else.

I asked him, him when you move or when you build a house do you have to protect the cactuses and he said absolutely you know because that cactus you're looking at right there is 150 years old wow really i didn't know that uh i didn't know cactuses went by turtle years yeah no they get uh they don't get the arm you know the arm that comes out the side they don't get that until at least a hundred years that's the guideline so if it has a couple arms it's well over a hundred years so the other thing too is uh it got to be here like 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's disgusting.

I know, I know.

I was trying to think: like, what's the hottest you've ever been in?

Because I know that with me, we were both in India and it got up to 125 degrees.

But do you think the hottest you've ever been might have been in UAE when we were on the amazing race and they didn't allow us to have anything that could provide any data?

We don't even know how hot it was that day.

If I had to guess, like, when was the hottest I've ever been?

It was probably mid-20s.

That

That was your bonny.

So you're in Tucson right now.

That means you didn't get any of the insane rainstorms that are happening in Texas, right?

That have just caused Texas, especially the area near Austin, which is why I'm hearing about it so much, to just completely flood, right?

You're not seeing any of that?

Well, no, no, no, no.

Not seeing any of that.

In fact, I've been talking to JD and Teddy about it, you know, like how much of this is hitting austin right now because jd's back in austin at the moment and it's uh it's all most of the people i'm with right now are from austin as well so we're all making calls back home and to see how things are and the other thing too is like when we normally when i go on the road to on the travel day sometimes we'll pre-record you know like 12 hours earlier which is kind of crazy to call that pre-recording But in this case, we knew on Friday that I was going to be gone on the coming Monday, but pre-recording over the entire weekend.

This is a great example of it.

So many things happened this weekend with the

big tax bill passing the House and ending up on the president's desk and then being signed this weekend.

And then this weather event, which is making so many headlines because of the fact that there was almost no warning.

that this thing was coming.

Yeah, and

that's being blamed a lot on what cuts to the National Weather Service.

Like they're just not able to operate with the, to the full degree that they have been able to in the past.

Because this, although this flood, this is one of those, and we keep saying this, there's a lot of these happening, one of those once in a lifetime sort of events where I read that the banks of the Guadalupe River rose by 20 feet in the course of 45 minutes.

It is absolutely insane to watch some of the time-lapse footage of how quickly the riverbanks are rising.

And then you actually look at the time frame of the time-lapse, and that's even

more unbelievable because it's just over the course of a few hours.

It just rises, and it's it is one of those things where everything has definitely become political, and there's people saying, Hey guys, we've had flash floods since the beginning of time, but it's an incredible coincidence that the moment we start to cut funding, suddenly we have a massive, unpredicted, completely by surprise weather event that has killed so many people.

And you take for granted, I think that's one of the things that when these cuts like this happen, it just exposes how much you take for granted the things that exist and having something as simple as a prediction of what the weather is going to be by people who do that for a living.

And it can be so, so, so easy to take that for granted.

And now that it's gone, it's like we might be having these on a regular basis, you know, where it just comes out of nowhere.

It is true.

We take a lot of the weather stuff for granted.

I,

in particular, I'm guilty of looking at the forecast and then complaining that it hasn't gone 100% to plan.

Like, oh, we were predicted to get all this rain and it dried up.

What happened?

This is ridiculous.

But,

you know, it's one of those things that it's so...

important

that we pay so much attention to it.

And then we do take it for granted.

Yeah, and it's like sometimes you don't realize just how much you rely on a thing until it's gone.

So we'll see.

It's just, it's what an incredible coincidence that we had one of these so quickly after we started making these cuts.

And also, got to point out, actually,

what's going on in Austin?

Because I was there for 30 years in Austin.

And this wasn't necessarily in Austin, but it was in Kerrville, which is, Kerville is a town we would always pass through when we would go to like Fredericksburg for Oktoberfest or something like that.

Beautiful area of Texas.

It's like right before when you're heading west in Texas, you get to the 500 miles of nothing between central Texas and New Mexico.

There's literally it's a part of the world where they say get gas now because you're not going to see a gas station for another 200 miles.

Why do they have to put signs up basically warning you that you're entering the wasteland?

Yeah, but Kerbal's like right before that or on the way out to that.

It's in the hill country.

It's a gorgeous part of the world, but it is essentially, I mean, it's close to Austin, but it's not exactly Austin, but close enough to compare like a weather event to.

Austin has had, suddenly in the last few years,

every year or two, an incredible like polar vortex, hard freeze, trees coming down.

Just actually, it was like a month ago that Austin had a downburst, which is something I don't even know what it is.

I just use the term because I heard it said so much, where the sky just opened up and dumped like a foot and a half of hail.

Like there were, there were foot, there's footage of people from a month ago with shovels in Texas in the late spring, shoveling mounds of hail.

I've never seen that.

You're right.

Yeah, and until you mentioned that, I forgot that we had had another weather event that extreme in Austin that recently.

You're right.

We saw pictures from friends who the hail was breaking through the windows in their houses.

It was so heavy.

Yeah, which is, you know, aside from all the things that we're doing on a short-term basis, like making these incredible cuts, there's the long-term aspect of humans where, you know, we're starting to see these climate things.

So of all the times we've been making these cuts, we're starting to see the, you know, human-induced climate change.

We're starting to see the effects of it, I feel.

But it's so hard because

you evaluate these things on a day-to-day basis, but they're these massive, massive variables that take place in an incredibly large matrix over the world.

It's easy to get lost in the anecdotes, but that's where we live.

We live in the anecdotes, you know what I mean?

We live in these little once-in-a-lifetime events that we experience every six goddamn months.

Yeah, speaking of anecdotes, there was, did you see that recently

there, like a, I think it was over the weekend, a bunch of Japanese airlines canceled flights because

there was this, it was an old, old, old manga that was, I guess, kind of presented presented as a dream journal that had predicted a bunch of disasters, and it predicted some kind of disaster for the 5th of July.

And so a bunch of airlines in Japan canceled flights just in case.

I mean, that's insane to me.

You know,

I saw some people, some,

like Raina Scully was posting.

from where she lives in Japan.

She was posting about this, and I had no idea it was based on a piece of fiction.

I thought it was just some prediction that had been made by some philosopher or something like that.

Yeah, so this,

it was an artist and author, Ryo Tatsuki, who in like the 90s published this dream journal.

And then it predicted, let me see, I have got an article here.

It says one of the dreams

predicted an earthquake.

in 1995 and then there was a 6.9 magnitude earthquake

the area.

And then another one that predicted a disaster in March of 2011, which was another earthquake.

That was the Great East Japan earthquake.

So

there was enough that actually happened from this Dream Journal that they saw this prediction for the 5th of July and went, maybe we don't take as many flights, you know, just in case.

You know, and it's one of those things where culturally you can look at that and say, say, oh, you know,

that's silly or that's not something we would do.

Do you know that because a bunch of people got together here this weekend, my friends, one of the things that came up was everyone talking about booking flights and how a lot of us tried to get the seat 11A and noticed that the seat 11A was already gone when we went to go book the flights.

I knew it would be.

That seat, they're going to start charging so much more for seat 11A uh after that that air disaster and that was the india flight right that was the india flight yeah where the guy survived yeah that's gonna be forever now 11a is gonna be the most expensive seat on the plane i don't care about first class whatever give me 11a you know and i was thinking too that we were doing the testing the setup for this it's funny how like there are cultural touchstones that you kind of don't notice or once again you take for granted like i see so many tick tocks and instagram reels and things like that, where it's,

there's not even a word for it.

But you're going to know exactly what I'm talking about when I start to describe it.

It is someone who is recording a vlog or a very short form piece of media from their car.

And I even have this thing where when I'm watching it, because they're recording on a selfie cam usually, and you're not sure if

it's being mirrored or not.

Like, I can't figure out what side of the car that they're sitting on.

Are they in the driver's seat or are they in the passenger seat?

But they're usually sitting in some parking lot somewhere.

Oftentimes they have a drink and they're doing some quick description of a social experience that they just had in a store or with a friend or something like that.

And I think as an American, I've always taken that for granted because I know what it's like to be just killing time sitting in a car in a parking lot.

But I wonder if people feel...

Well, also, I guess the U.S.

has one of the heaviest sort of car cultures in the world, right?

So, like, what would that look like somewhere else in the world?

Is it someone on a train narrating and they're like, you won't believe what happened?

And everyone else on the train is like, oh, my God, spill, girl.

I know exactly.

Exactly.

Or, like, I'm doing my eighth take and screaming, bothering everyone on the metro, right?

But I always took that for granted.

Someone in Amsterdam is on a bike narrating their day and then straight into a canal.

It's a uniquely American format, or at least I should say North American format, you know, because so many more people have cars.

I don't know that I've ever seen, like,

I'm trying to think of if I've ever seen like a UK or EU influencer who's doing recordings from a European car, because those look distinctly different than their interior.

I guess there would be probably the best example would be

going back to Vine, the I'm in my mom's car.

That's like the only one I can think of.

Roam, roam.

But there is, if everyone wants to get out of their car and record something, I have a recommendation, and that is that there's a British zoo where they've had to separate the birds, Bernie, because the birds keep swearing and working each other up, and it's becoming wildly offensive.

My God, I saw this headline, and I absolutely love it.

Did you read the article?

Do you know what they're swearing?

What are they saying to people?

Well, I mean, it's all things like, you know, go fuck yourself and fuck off and things like that.

But apparently the birds also respond to reactions.

So there's a bunch of these birds, these parrots, that have all learned dirty language.

And a lot of times, I guess, birds react to

two reactions, right?

It's kind of like a toddler.

You laugh once and then they're going to do the same thing 8,000 times.

And so the thing is, though, one of these birds will then react, and then the bird reacts back at them.

And so they're just working each other up.

They had to separate these five terribly language birds off into like different parts of the zoo just to keep them from offending all of the zoo visitors.

I love it.

And you know, people would just, of course, nobody's offended.

They're all going to try to get the birds to swear.

That's the first thing I do.

Of course they are.

But, you know,

but you know, there could be some parents covering their kids' ears if it gets too dirty.

But they're also, they're now crossing their fingers that by putting these birds in different colonies,

they'll learn some proper habits.

They're saying, I'm hoping they learn different words, but if they teach the others bad language and I end up with 250 swearing birds, I don't know what we'll do.

Can you imagine the TikToks

and the Instagram reels that would come out of a zoo of 250 swearing parrots?

We were talking last week about the new Jurassic Park movie and how they always try to come up with a new dinosaur they haven't had before.

I would love it if these five birds were the new dinosaur.

Just a bunch of snaring parrots

chasing Scarlett Johansson.

It's gonna be the next Jurassic World movie.

You gotta watch out.

They're already working on it.

Come here, you bitch.

I'll get the fuck out.

Speaking of which, though, so the new Jurassic World movie is out and apparently it's doing well enough in theaters, not necessarily in reviews.

It's not doing great in reviews, but it's doing well enough in the box office that Scarlett Johansson has just taken the lead spot in Hollywood's highest grossing list of lead actors.

She's now passed basically everyone else in the Marvelverse.

She passed Samuel L.

Jackson to take the number one spot.

Is she

being at the top of the list?

Is she the first ever actress, the first ever woman to be at the top of that list?

You know, I'm not sure about that.

I think Zoe Seldanya might have topped that list at one one point because

she had the Marvel movies and then she also had Avatar.

So I think she might have been top of the list at one point.

But to be honest, the list is mostly a mess of Marvel stars.

It's Scarlett Johansson, it's the number one spot.

Then Samuel L.

Jackson, Robert Denny Jr., Zoe Seldania, Chris Pratt, Tom Cruise, Chris Hemsworth, Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, and Chris Evans.

So Tom Cruise is the top lead actor who has not been a Marvel star.

Also have to point out, this is like a weird list.

Like the first time I remember ever hearing about this list was when Harrison Ford was at the top of it because of Indiana Jones and Star Wars,

which to me is interesting, but then like Samuel L.

Jackson taking it over,

there's no real qualification for it.

Like him being in Star Wars, yeah, he's in Star Wars, but he's Mace Windu in Star Wars.

It's not like he's got a huge role in that.

Even Nick Fury, you could argue, is a secondary character in all the Marvel movies.

At what point,

you know, does that not count?

Like, if somebody has a walk-on role, like Brad Pitt, is he counted for Deadpool 2?

He's in it.

You know, does that count towards his total?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's tricky.

I think the qualification is supposed to be as a lead or

as an...

like a lead in an ensemble, right?

So that would have been them basically counting Samuel Jackson as a lead in the ensemble of Star Wars.

Would you consider Nick Fury to be a leading character in The Avengers?

I mean,

no, no, he put it together, so he's like, he's like the boss, but, you know,

I would classify him as a support character.

Right.

And then I would say that Scarlett Johansson in The Avengers Black Widow is definitely a leading character.

And she's absolutely a leading character in the Jurassic Park movie where she's fighting the sailor birds on leave.

You know, she's definitely leading that movie.

And

they're like, aye, birds!

Swearing it up.

You know, we talk about all this stuff culturally.

They could move those birds to a place where the expletives aren't offensive.

Like, move them to another place, and then nobody knows.

It's a little tougher, though, if they're doing, like, American slang, because I think that kind of has made its way all over the world.

But if they moved, like if they're British birds and they move them to the middle of America and the British birds are telling you to like slag off or something, no one's going to be offended there.

Oi wanker!

Everyone in the middle of Ohio is just like, what?

Or they hear the British accent and they go, wow, that bird sounds really smart.

You know, you know, that bird sounds like a villain in a space movie right exactly

that's the birds that they're gonna be in the next james bond movie with tom holland as well and here's the rumor he might he he might he might be the new bond tom holland i i heard that he's he's one of the actors they're looking at i can't take that too seriously i just can't

so i'm gonna wait until they make the announcements but that sounds i don't know i don't know maybe maybe it's just because he's got too much of like a baby face or something but i would have a really difficult time picturing him as like

Bond.

Yeah, also it's like James Bond more than any other character in all of movie history.

You constantly hear about who's going to play James Bond next.

I think like there's probably been about 40 actors at some point that have been named as rumored to be the next Bond.

And you don't really hear that with things like Captain America or Indiana Jones or something like that.

Bond, for some reason, the casting decisions are always a huge headline.

So we'll see.

It does feel like the potential casting is one of the biggest franchise draws for Bond.

It's like one of the things that keeps people interested in this Supreme Dry era of no Bond movies.

Also, it goes through the same cycle every single time where they announce the Bond.

Everyone immediately says, I don't see them as Bond.

They'll be a terrible Bond.

And then like...

Two movies later, everyone's like, they're the only James Bond, and I can't watch a James Bond movie.

It doesn't have them in it.

I was actually one of those people.

I was,

when they announced

the last Bond, I was like, no, it has to be Clive Owen.

If it's not Clive Owen, it's not my bond.

And then I came around and I was like, oh, he's, I was like, oh, he's fine.

Well, listen, he saved the word from a flock of swearing birds.

So, you know, you owe him your freedom.

And what is true heroism if not that?

Well, I want to say a big thank you to today's swearing birds, Tyler Webb and Josh Adams.

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

Yes, immediately go wash out your mouth with the soapy bird seed.

All right, well, that does it for us today on this phone call, July 7th, 2025.

Please let us know what you think about this.

We'll be back to our regular format and audio quality tomorrow, but we wanted to test this out.

So, thank you for putting up with us.

We will be back to talk tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.