2025.09.09: Engineering Our Own Demise

I believe there's one thing

at the root of harmful conflict.

Hey!

iPhone and recording the podcast.

Guys!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

burning somewhere!

Fortunately, Turkey, 2045,

my name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

Spent all night with her adult pacifier.

It's Ashley Burns, I had Ashley.

My teeth may be moving out of place, but boy, do I feel peaceful.

You'll have to listen to yesterday's podcast in order to understand that.

Unfortunately, you'll have to go back in the backlog of 23 hours to get that one.

I did read a funny post where someone is saying,

it was great.

It was a little bit of a rage bait post.

They said,

I've stopped listening to the podcast because of something that Bernie and Ashley said.

And then the image was just a picture of the dungeon crawler Carl books.

Yeah.

Been there, buddy.

Been there.

They've been deep deep in the audiobooks.

Like I'm coming, I'll come back to the podcast, but right now my time is consumed with this.

We get it.

We get it.

Get it.

Been there multiple times.

In fact,

I'm having a bit of a problem as a result of the excellency of Dungeon Crawler Carl and its audiobooks.

Specifically, I started listening to Bobbiverse.

How is that?

How are you doing?

It's okay.

And here's the thing, is I would probably like it a lot more if I hadn't just finished re-listening to the entire Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

That's a mouthful, isn't it?

It is, it is, I, I, but I, and I feel like I should shorten it to like DCC, but then I feel like I'm being like a little bit pretentious.

Like everyone should just know what DCC stuff is.

You know what you mean?

Uh

Finn calls it.

He calls it the Carl and Carl and Donut.

Carl and Donut books.

Listen to Carl and Donut.

He has this cat in the series that just like, it's a cat, but it just ends up having a lot of personality.

So he likes the cat.

The cat's great.

But

so I finished listening to that audiobook and I was like, I need now something to fill the void.

And so I've started listening to Bobbaverse.

And as you, you, your recommendation was on point, by the way, when you're like, it's got a lot of this sort of like Ready Player One, very overt, very specific pop culture references.

And there's quite a lot of that.

I was like, okay, well, we'll see.

Cause I did enjoy when I was listening to Ready Player One or reading Ready Player One.

I was like, I was fine with the references.

But right now, I'm like, I should have given it more space.

I might need to do a palette cleanser of like some real, like, nice, trashy romanticy to completely just make a clean break.

Bobaverse is like, it's not quite Project Hail Mary.

It's not quite Carl and Donut, and it's not quite Ready Player One.

But although it's like, I'd say it's closest in terms of like just overall reception, like a Ready Player One, I would say.

I like the concept.

I like the concept of it.

I think I'm just right now

a little bit spoiled.

And I may also be shifting some emotional load onto the Bobaverse series for not being more Dungeon Crawler.

Emotional load.

I got you.

I'm shifting my emotional load, Bernie.

It can be tough, though.

Like when

you get a binge on a piece of media and then you caught up, and now you're like, I got to wait a year.

And there's an angst to it, right?

But I'm glad to see that you're reading Bobaverse or listening to it, listening to it.

Listening to it.

I think it's

someone told me to listen to

Expeditionary Force, and I remember that book in particular, that series of books, because I bought what I thought was the first one and I bought like book 12 or something.

I was like, book 12?

Oh, no.

That is the thing they need to do a better job with, I think, for all franchises.

Like, I get it in the first couple installments.

You don't know you're going to get up to like 10 or whatever.

But after a while, you're like, which book is this?

Which one?

What number in the series?

They do need to do a better job of calling that out.

As a fan of the Dresden Files, buddy, I hear you.

What are they at?

How many are there?

18 right now.

There's a lot.

There's so many that I don't know how many there are.

Does the Phantom Conundrum come before the Ubiquitil?

No?

It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Just put a number on these fucking things so I know which book to read in what order, for God's sake.

Yeah, it's, and I know that if you dig in, you can go ahead and find the full series and find the order and all that.

But like, if you're just going, oh, yeah, that was recommended to me by your...

Easy mistake to make.

I know, but it's somebody who watched something out of order and I won't say what it was, but they thought they were caught up on a series and we were like, oh my God, did you see what did you think when this happened they go i must have missed that what are you talking about they hadn't watched an entire season oh really

so but for me it's like reading books out of order you get that first chapter you're like when did the main character die

that happened off screen between books what's going on here speaking of which uh there was a thing yesterday for uh something that's uh

uh in my history uh long time listener of the howard stern program especially when i was a young man in the 90s a lot of my friends listen to howard stern uh he did this thing yesterday where he was just in this contract dispute.

You might remember we talked about this before.

And I said,

I don't believe it.

I've listened to him and every time he's got a contract renewal coming up, it's an entire year of talking about Howard Stern's contract renewal.

It's like, I've never seen someone get so much material.

out of the same thing that happens like once every three years essentially yeah because this was what a few was a few weeks back he basically announced that he's retiring that he's not gonna return to his show and serious was firing him and and he was canceled not going to be on the radio yeah and at the time you were like there's no way or other people reporting this well apparently he responded to people reporting that by he quit his show yesterday only he didn't like 15 minutes in uh the the host that had taken over for for him they went to a commercial break or whatever they came back and howard was back on the air and it was a prank like on the listeners so yeah it's uh a lot of publicity going on surrounding that so you're saying I'm not buying it is what you're saying.

No, I mean, I think that proves it's like, I don't know, if you're getting fired, you're not doing silly stuff like that in my opinion right you're well you're at that point are you like maliciously compliant it's right you're like i

i am going on a show but i refuse to make it entertaining there are some people who and we see this time and time again who are more than happy to negotiate their salary and their contract in the public space.

Like that's a thing that some people do.

And it's effective when they do it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like leverage the fan base on their behalf.

It's the you know, don't you know who I am?

Like of airline travel, but on like a professional level kind of thing.

Well, speaking of negotiations in the public space, Bernie, a few weeks ago, we also talked about a group of authors who had put together a class action lawsuit against Anthropic, one of the AI development companies

for downloading, for basically like pirating their books and then training their clawed chat AI using their material.

And Anthropic has now settled with

the authors in that class action for $1.5 billion.

That's a hell of a precedent to set, man.

It is.

It is.

And what it amounts to is apparently they're paying out $3,000 per title that they pirated.

Per book.

$3,000 per title that they pirated.

For the 500,000 books.

500,000 books.

Okay, because they paid out a billion.

So a billion is a thousand million, and it's a million thousands.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's how I do percentages, right?

Yeah, I was going to say, you lost me somewhere along that, but I'm going to nod along.

Yeah, it's just weird because it's like you talk about a million dollars, like it's a lot, but a million is a thousand thousands.

Like a thousand dollars seems like something you can wrap your mind around.

Right, but a thousand thousands.

But but it's also like a million dollars.

Well, at least when I was a kid, a million dollars was a lot of money.

Now you hear about it all the time, I feel like.

And how much is a billion dollars?

But you can make a thousand dollars.

If you make a thousand dollars a thousand times, you have a million dollars, right?

And all you have to have is unlimited time.

I was just doing this math because to follow up on the Powerball thing, which by the way, got up to 1.8 billion before those two people split it.

It's a lot of money.

It's a lot of money.

It's a lot of money.

But after taxes, no.

So one of the things I went and looked at was I was curious because One of the winning tickets was sold in Fredericksburg, Texas.

I wanted to know how much do they make?

They did an interview with the people.

The store had just opened.

It's been open less than a year.

What?

Yeah, and they sold that ticket.

And so I've always heard that if you sell a winning ticket, that you get some money from it.

And apparently, yes, that's true.

It depends on the lottery.

And it also depends, of course, because it's the United States of America, depends on the state.

Right.

So basically, they make between 1% to 2% of whatever the winning ticket makes

capped at a certain amount.

Florida, the cap is $25,000.

From what I could find, Texas is, it's reported in different ways, $500,000 is the cap.

That's a significant increase from Florida.

And then California, they can make up to $1 million cap.

And you're like, oh, that's pretty cool.

Until you do my thousand thousand thing,

if you have $2 billion,

1% of that is $20 million.

Oh, so that point is.

2% of that is $40 million.

Come on, cap.

Yeah, knowing that that cap hit, that's worse than the after-taxes for the lot of people.

But they also do make a share of all the sales as well.

So how does that work?

So I will admit, I don't follow lottery stuff almost intentionally.

And so I'm aware of like scratch-offs, right?

Where you like scratch off and you can be like, oh, you won the thing.

Right.

But if you sell the winning ticket, when you go in and buy, do you just pick the numbers?

And then that's part of the sale.

Last time I remember playing the lottery, This is probably 20 years old.

You could do the Texas lotto, which was six numbers, and you had a little Scantron sheet.

Is that a thing still?

Scantrons, where you have a pencil and a number of people.

Is that you have to have the number two pencil and you circle the dots?

Or you have to like fill in the bubble?

You know, the number two consortium that runs the pencil cartel probably

made a lot of money by getting their number two to be the standard.

Come on, big pencil.

What does that refer to?

Is that I think it's something

yeah, it's something about like the actual

like the graphite in it is like there's specific, I think, hardnesses or something.

Hold on, I'm going to look this up.

What makes a number two pencil?

Can you imagine, though, the day they signed that deal and they threw open the doors to the conference room and they came out saying, who's number two now?

Not us.

The hardness of the graphite core is often marked on the pencil.

So you look for a number.

The higher the number, the harder the writing core and the lighter the mark left on the paper.

Yeah.

So the higher the number, the harder it is.

And so the less will scratch off onto the paper.

So a number one is like what, like a paintbrush of a pencil, basically?

Yeah, that one's just going to leave everything on.

So I guess

have you ever seen any pencil besides a number two pencil?

I don't think so.

No, they really cornered the market with that deal.

It's good.

It's one of those knock-on effects that happens.

So, you fill it out and you pick six numbers, or there's one thing you could fill out at the top, which just randomly gives you numbers, right?

And then you can even, for people who are like really superstitious, you can keep your Scantron and just show up with it every week.

At least you could, and just go, I'm playing my numbers.

I'm playing those numbers again?

Yeah, and just run it through again.

And then it prints the tickets and you get it.

That's that's what I know.

Now, Powerball, there's like,

and I think when I did it, it was like one of 47 per number that you could choose.

Now, I think it might go to like, every time they add another number into the pool, it goes up astronomically, which then raises the pools as well.

Which the reason they're able to raise the pools, it just shows nobody's winning, right?

Because it carries over week to week.

So that's how it works.

Speaking of no one winning on numbers, Bernie, there's a thing happening in Australia right now that I think we should probably all be paying attention to,

and that is the sunscreen scandal.

Yeah.

And specifically, there's a bunch of sunscreens that were just found in Australia to not be as effective as they claim to be.

Like the number, they're like, it's SPF 50.

And they're like, yeah, it's SPF4, like effectively.

And this is one of the things that's one of the stories in this article that's on the BBC, which we'll put in the link dump, is like this lady, she has worn sunscreen every day.

She's done the hat thing, the slip, slop, slap that everyone does in Australia.

And, you know, to keep yourself safe from the sun, doing everything she's supposed to do and found skin cancer.

Go ahead, Brittany, with your hand up.

So I've learned a lot about this sunscreen culture from you when you lived in Australia, and I learned about slip, slap, slop, which is a thing they tell kids.

Slip on a hat.

Let's see, hold on.

Slap on a shirt.

Slip on, hold on.

Slip on a shirt.

Slap on a hat and slop on the sunscreen.

Right.

There was also a thing called no hat, no play.

I learned this from this article.

The kids just aren't allowed to go out and play at recess.

They can't go outside if they don't have a hat.

All this leading to this is a big deal.

You hear that, like, there's a sunscreen scandal in Australia.

It might sound a little silly if you live outside of that culture.

It's a big fucking deal.

Well, let's recall that as a result of the 80s and all of the hairspray that kept the lady's hair super big, we ended up with a hole in the ozone over Australia.

It was other things, yes, as well.

No, it was specifically 80s.

I think shoulder pads were also involved in

solely Aquanet.

That was it.

But so the sun has been a big deal there for many decades, and they've taken it as a result much more seriously.

And they are very careful about sunscreen

and making sure to keep yourself as safe as possible from skin cancer.

And so when people like this lady found that they were getting, I think it was just like a, she, it was like a low-grade skin cancer with this one on her face, but she was like, how did this happen?

I've done everything I'm supposed to.

Just a little light cancer for you.

Right.

But it turns out that, like, the sunscreen that she'd been using that was like SPF 50 wasn't SPF 50 at all.

And they've done some retesting on a lot of sunscreens and discovered that I think like half of them were not what they claimed to be.

Yeah, that's not, that's not great.

There's been other big scandals like this.

Like, do you remember the baby formula scandal in China?

And it really affected consumer habits for a very long period of time for good reason.

And continues to, like, even if that scandal has been quote unquote resolved a lot of people aren't going to trust the numbers again because why would you take the chance and I think that one too like China was becoming this huge manufacturing powerhouse globally and I think it was one of the things that whether or not you know about the baby formula scandal it's one of those things that kept it in your head that China just makes bad and unhealthy products for you like they're gonna make something that's specifically not good for you right they're gonna cut corners because it happened at this time right this is lost I want to talk a little bit about yesterday when I, when I tried to find this baseball video, this is all related.

There was a video of a guy who caught a foul ball or picked it up off the ground and then his girlfriend covered her face with the hoodie.

I refused to not find that video.

You found that for the linked up and I'm so glad because I swear I've watched, I watched more fans pick up fair balls as I was looking for this one clip and I just, I didn't know where to start even.

Like, how do you like dig down?

You go fan catch fair ball.

there's a lot of that in the world I even got to the point I knew so much about this clip so many specifics about it just trying to find the clip because I got a compilation where I saw the guy but they cut in the compilation before the girlfriend reacted so I knew by the score

by the number of the player that hit the ball I knew all the players involved I knew the teams involved the diamondbacks the giants and then I finally figured out what year it was 2016 and I had all this information and I could not find this video one of the things that really slowed it down was kind of an insidification thing because it's all associated with

search engine optimization was apparently there's been another Diamondbacks giants fan interference like within the last month that caused some controversy.

No matter what I did, I couldn't get past that layer where everyone was trying to push a current event.

Everyone's pushing the newest thing.

Right.

And I've even noticed too in our search for like looking for data for this podcast that sometimes they just update articles and make them newer for older things because they just put a new date on it.

So you can't find the original date of the original thing.

Like this story was updated in 2025, and that becomes the new date for the byline, essentially.

So I drilled through and got all that stuff.

I finally found the clip because Jimmy Kimmel had covered it.

I still never found the original clips of when it was a current event.

That was the only one I could find, and that's what went up.

Well, I'm glad that you found as much as you did because it was very funny.

Imagine it was so funny.

Imagine catching a ball and ending up on a late night show.

Yeah.

And it just goes to show like how much it was part of the zeitgeist at the time and how ridiculous it is that I couldn't find it.

I mean, I was searching by the guy's name, by the date, by the players, by the game, and I could not find this clip.

You know what ended up finally ringing a bell for me with that one is I remember vaguely when it happened, not because I am in any way educated about the sport, but because a lot of people got upset with her for covering her face because they said she wasn't standing by her man good call lady that's smart thinking cover your face

and then figure it out let the event blow by and then you can always uncover your face later no you're smart lady people wanted her face out so they could be mad at her dude you know what's funny about it which brings her on to a current event too not to spend too much time on these baseball things Jimmy Kimmel referenced in his intro to it that a lot of people thought she covered her face because the two of them weren't supposed to be together and they were caught on camera.

And he said, That's not at all the case here.

Totally, baby.

Yeah, like that was almost 10 years ago.

And that was even a thing back then.

That's weird.

But to bring this all back around,

there's an article.

I'm not even going to try to find this one because I know I'm not going to be able to find it.

But I remember going back to the baby formula and the sunscreen thing.

There was a water bottle company that was a steel water bottle company that got a huge reputation for being super safe and everybody loved it because it was BPA free when bpa was a big deal there was you know influencers and mommy circles who were like pushing you got to have this water bottle right this is the only way you can keep your kids safe i feel like it was like the stanley cup of the time right like it was that big of a deal to people and then somebody said hey I find that found out they use BPA to make this stainless steel product or some like forever chemical or whatever it was.

They use it.

They use PFAS.

And then they wrote the company and the company responded going, we never said it wasn't.

You guys said it wasn't.

We just didn't correct you.

Basically, that was their answer.

And it was like, what the hell?

You're getting all this like ancillary marketing for this.

And I'm not going to look it up, but I know that happened.

But at the same time, you know, as like marketing, you're like, what do we do?

Say, hey, no, wait, don't say our thing's healthy for you?

What is the mechanism by which you correct people that our thing actually sucks?

Yeah, that doesn't exist in a lot of companies, right?

Yeah, but I feel bad about this.

This, the sunscreen thing

hits very close to home because I'm, you know, at the age where it's like you make sure you wear sunscreen every single day no exceptions and all that and it's like you just you're doing the best you can you're trying to do everything that you can and then someone somewhere is fucking you yeah it seems like it yeah somebody somewhere is fucking you for like no good reason just make it sunscreen make the sunscreen even the water bottle thing we're excusing them by saying there's no mechanism to correct people and tell them your thing sucks At the end of the day, it is like the corporate equivalent of, well, you didn't ask.

You know what I mean?

Like that kind of thing.

I mean they didn't probably put it in their marketing material So what is their responsibility to correct people for a chemical that's approved to use and things like that But people are specifically touting it as not having that right right it sucks and yeah I get what you mean You're just trying your best, you know what I mean?

You're just enjoying a baseball game and then your boyfriend picks up a ball

Get the Get me the fuck out of here.

All right, some things to look forward to today Coming up, there is an Apple event today.

I have no predictions for this other than the fact that I'm probably gonna buy a phone because I'm two years in and it's it's like, I now have like this whole like hand-me-down cycle below me with the kids, you know, the adult kids, and they're happy to take my phone.

Teddy's phone is like eight years old at this point.

I'm really impressed by how long he's like stretched that one out.

He definitely keeps phones the longest out of all of us.

I remember

years and years and years ago, I got a Google Pixel phone from like a YouTube event and I was like, I don't know what to do with this.

Teddy, do you want this?

It turned out he used that phone for like six or seven years.

It might be the the phone he still has, actually.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I think we made him an upgrade at one point just for security reasons.

But

I can't really tell what this is about from the logo.

It almost looks like a

drop it.

You know what it's going to be?

This is going to be all probably my prediction, AI, right?

We're at the point with phone hardware where...

The hardware is more iterative than revolutionary.

And so they're looking for like all the other stuff that they can do to get people to buy in more than like a, well, it's been two or three years and I guess I need an upgrade kind of way.

They're trying to figure out what to do to get people excited.

And it seems like right now, AI is the buzzword.

So I assume that we're going to hear a lot about AI.

I don't care about AI.

I will go in and I will find the settings and I will turn off as much of that as I can as quickly as I can.

But I predict that AI is going to be the main thing.

Or it could be just all the leaks we've already seen, like thin air, bezel, and all the giant camera bump that's on the thing.

We'll see, but it'll be, we'll find out.

It's at 10 a.m.

Pacific time.

We're not going to figure out what time that is for you because we don't even know what time it is for us.

Like 9.30 at night.

No, you know what, what announcement, Bernie, I'm looking forward to.

What are you looking forward to?

Later this month is Fat Bear Week, baby.

Oh, Fat Bear Week is coming up.

I'm super excited.

So normally Fat Bear Week is in October.

They're doing Fat Bear Week a little bit early this year.

I'm not entirely sure why, but I guess that's coming up now in a couple of weeks, and I'm super excited, especially after the drama last year of Fat Bear Week.

Do you remember all that?

Yeah, Hot Girl Summer is over.

Get ready for Fat Bear Fall, everybody.

The Fat Bear Fall last year.

I've been working on my Fat Bear form.

Last year was, if I remember correctly,

the Fat Bear was a revenge story.

This is going to get dark fast, everybody.

I don't know if I want to end on this, but go ahead.

Where

there was a bear and she had cubs, and then

another bear killed her cub.

Yes.

And then she went on to win Fat Bear Week.

So she was.

They were the two finalists.

The The finalists were Chunk, if I recall correctly.

And then Grazer.

And Grazer's cub had been killed by Chunk.

And I think Chunk is like a longtime champion, right?

And then, but then Grazer, I guess not having a cub to take care of, did her fattening and ended up winning Fat Bear Week last year.

All this is this Fat Bear contest is even more cutthroat than like the Toddler Tiara ones.

Girl beauty pet.

So that's what I'm excited about.

That's what I'm going to be looking forward to: the announcements of Fat Bear Week and the voting for that.

Let's see if we get any really compelling drama this year.

Hopefully not as compelling as last year, but still dramatic nonetheless.

Let's try to keep our drama murder free.

Ashley, who are our normal-sized bears that we have to thank for sponsorship today?

Big thank you to Henry A.

Nickerson and probably a pigeon for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

And thank you to Grant Johnson for submitting today's shout.

You can submit yours at shouts at roosterteeth.com.

All right, that does it for us today, September 9th, 2025.

We will be back to talk tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.