2025.09.10: Pimps Learn Mandarin

Oh my god, what should we do?

Well, if we try to reason with him.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Guys!

Good!

Morning to you!

Wherever you are, because

it is Morning Somewhere!

For September 10th, 2020, by my name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

Glad to have Finn back on Morning Somewhere.

Shout out.

It's actually shout out.

Look, I'm biased.

I will always be biased.

No one does the shout that cute.

I like when routine gets so routine that you can just go, bar, break, shut, bar, for a bit.

Barbara, for turf, for my favorite.

One of my favorite productions all time we did at Rooster Teeth was The Gauntlet Specifically Season 2.

Season 2 of The Narrow.

How's it going, everybody?

It's Wednesday.

You're halfway through the week.

You made it.

If you've made it, you've made it.

Well done.

How many times have we said you made it?

On this podcast?

You have to take the little victories where you can.

Like this morning, Bernie, you were happy about the organization of some cups in the cupboard, right?

And sometimes

that's enough.

Sometimes you just get, you take the little wins.

You be happy about your cups.

The littlest win of all.

The cups were organized.

Hopefully you can take that as inspiration for your day, everyone, that our cups were organized.

And now you can look over your own cups in shame.

I don't even want to explain what that means.

It was just sometimes things are very satisfying, right?

They're organized in a satisfying way.

And you just look at at it and you go, yeah, that's nice.

And you get that little feeling, that little like

kindling ember of happiness deep in your soul.

And you just have to take it because that's what you've got.

Speaking of kindling happiness deep in our soul, yesterday was

Apple's awe-dropping event.

Did it drop your awe, Bernie?

You gave you Santa Ford.

I don't think it missed what you think it missed.

We got some new phones.

Honestly, the biggest thing that I saw yesterday, I don't know if you saw it, Ashley, the AirPods 3 look pretty cool.

Yes.

So the AirPods Pro 3, right?

Specifically, because I think they've got the regular

AirPods line, and then they got the AirPods Pro that coming like the fat case instead of the tall case.

I don't know.

But it did, that one, okay, that one was interesting.

And after yesterday being like, man, I just want to turn all the AI off.

This one's like, we'll do real-time translation of different languages.

I was like, all right, fine, sign me up.

Yeah, the real-time translation.

It could be like the the video phone, right?

Something I've always wanted to have a real-time translation of conversations, and then I'm never going to use it.

Like, I demand it, but then don't want it.

Well, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to go, like,

next time I'm in the U.S., I'm going to go make a nail appointment, and I'm going to see if they're talking about it.

Oh, I never thought about that.

So, you're going to be a sneaky.

I'm going to be sneaky.

Wow, look at you.

I love seeing tasty type.

I love back in action.

I love seeing all the videos of like girls in salons who you know, the ladies are talking amongst themselves, not realizing that the, you know, the girl whose nails there doing whatever speaks the language and that they're talking about her.

There's a guy who has that whole channel

where he learns every goddamn language and then goes and impresses people.

Like he speaks in perfect Mandarin or something like that.

Look, that's impressive.

Having done CD one of Pim Slur Mandarin, being able to speak Mandarin is very impressive, I know, because I only got through the first CD.

C D of Pimslurin.

Oh, yeah, that's Pimslur Mandarin.

That was like, you know, like the audio tape language learning in ye olden times before Duolingo.

By the way, took over everything.

Like Rosetta Stone, everything took over that entire industry with Duolingo.

Which, and also everyone you ask about Duolingo, they're like, does this teach people to speak your language?

Well, and they're like, oh, no, no, not at all.

But you know what?

It's one, I think it's good.

exercise for your brain, right?

Any practice of other languages is supposed to be really good at rewiring your brain.

It's not, you know what it's not doing?

It's not hurting.

No, it doesn't hurt.

It doesn't hurt.

And you might pick up like a couple little things.

So Evie, believe it or not, got me into watching K-dramas on Netflix.

Okay.

I think this is the K-pop demon hunters straight into like, I'm going to be at the K-pop concerts with those light sticks pipeline is she, she pointed at a video on Netflix and I was like, yeah, I'll put that on.

And it turns out it's about a lady who travels back in time in Korea.

She's a chef and now she has to cook for like the king or something.

Anyway,

and I now know I can say yay mama, which means like, yes, your grace.

So is it all in Korean?

Yes, but I'm watching the subtitles.

No, no, I like that though, because Eevee's hearing Korean.

I like that a lot.

Yeah, so she got me into K-dramas.

I think it's a great idea.

Learn a language for a country that's going to drop in population by 90% in her lifetime.

That'll be very valuable.

Look, she could be one of the people keeping the Korean language alive then.

Who knows?

That's what we want.

We want her to keep a dead language alive as all the population dwindles into nothing.

Look, Latin has managed to remain very relevant in spite of not being spoken by like anybody.

Because all of our languages are derived from Latin.

Are there any like Korean derivatives?

Not yet, but Bernie, you don't know the future.

Do North Koreans speak a different Korean than South Koreans?

Or is it pretty

solid?

I think so.

I think it's still Korean.

Probably a lot of, it's one of those probably like divergent ones where they may not use all the same words for the same things or the slang has changed very much, but like the language exists.

Kind of like how French Canadians and French people technically both speak French.

Going back, winding all this stuff back up.

Back to the Apple event, actually.

We went down to

the hole.

There's a rabbit hole and then there's like the lemming cliff where all we just like, all of a sudden we get on this free form, like one topic into another.

And it's like, I got to follow the lemming off the cliff right in front of you.

Which, by the way, did you not know is not real?

No, they chased the lemmings off a cliff.

Yeah, it was a classic Disney thing where they were just like, hey, we need this shot.

They're misrepresenting the Grimms fairy tales and the lemmings.

That's pretty funny, and it wasn't disproven for.

Will the disrespect ever cease?

All the lemmings fell off the cliff and landed on a bronosaurus carcass.

Yeah, but so the Apple event, I mean, the phones, they look cool.

The interesting thing to me about the Apple phones or the iPhones is that the new ones, there's no black.

It's white, blue, and orange.

They have different names, but it's white, blue, and orange, basically.

What it's going to come down to is the same thing for me.

It always comes down to.

It's going in a case.

Yeah, it is going to go in a case, but I don't know.

It's like, I just feel it's like an interesting choice to make for their high-end stuff.

For them to try to move away from that, it does seem like they go through swings, right?

There'll be a swing where things are a lot of colors, and then there will be a swing where they're like, this one comes in black, graphite, and sand.

Yeah, the black, graphite are basically like flip sides of the same color, basically.

The white one is actually silver.

I think the cool thing about this is they have gone back from titanium to aluminium.

Can I get it in grape?

Which will dissipate the heat.

I have noticed my phone gets hot, and mine's titanium, and it does get hot.

Yeah, so they're going more for heat dissipation, but they are keeping a bit of glass on the back to maintain the charging, right?

Because you can't do

the, what is it, inductive charging without glass.

Is that right?

You're talking about the mag safe, right?

Yes, the mag safe.

That's what it's called.

Thank you.

Yeah, the mag safe doesn't work unless you've got a unless you've got a glass back.

Apparently, apparently.

I didn't know that until the leaks came out about this new phone.

It's thinner as predicted,

but it's, you know, I don't know if it's worth the upgrade.

The AirPods 3 look pretty compelling to me because we even left one of the, what I think is the most compelling feature of it is that it's got a heart rate sensor in it.

So you can now use it to track your fitness stuff and not have to have your watch on.

Okay.

Follow-up question.

Is anyone who's going to be using the AirPods Pro 3 not also using an Apple Watch?

Sure.

I'm sure there's lots of people who don't have an Apple Watch.

It's got to be like their lowest penetration product, right?

Yeah, is it?

Is it their lowest penetration project?

These are just words, Ashley.

These are all derivatives of Latin throw-off over there.

Thought you made it through an entire CD of Korean.

It is very cool, though, that it will be able to track your heartbeat through your ears.

That's neat.

Makes sense.

The new

Pro Watch, the Ultra 2 and the Ultra 3, have a blood pressure software on them so they can detect your blood pressure.

It was like overall trends of hypertension, essentially.

Did they announce if that's going to be one of those things that's like only available outside the U.S.?

Remember, they had that patent dispute that was going on with

blood glucose monitoring?

I wonder if some of these features are going to be regional.

I just, that's not real to me.

At this point, we've been talking about that phantom feature for like three years at this point.

And every time, oh, they were saving it for like the 10th iteration of it.

You know, they were saving it for this anniversary.

There was a patent dispute about it.

If this is, if it's not in the watch by now, it's not happening.

And then if it happens, it'll be a nice surprise.

But I'm not going to put off waiting for this glucose meter.

Would be cool to have that on your wrist, but blood pressure is probably actually a little bit more important to most people, I would say.

Probably.

Would you say that's got higher penetration?

It's just a word, actually.

It's just a word.

I did notice, though, in their presentation when they talked about the Apple Watch, they focused on it saving people's lives.

Like in falls, car accidents, guy had a stroke while doing jump rope in his driveway.

And it has, like, I was in a car accident when I had my Apple Watch, and it knew it immediately.

Did it call 911 for you?

Yeah.

Also, because I have toddlers, it's constantly asking me, did you just take a tremendous fall?

It's like, no, a five-year-old just jumped on me with both knees.

That's what happened.

But thanks for your concern.

I have had to tell it many times I did not just hurt myself at a fall or something like that.

But so I don't know.

Personally, I might look at the AirPods 3,

the Pro 3, whatever it's called.

I had the last iteration of those.

And one of the things I was really excited about with those headphones was that finally they had a thing where if you lost your headphones case, you could use your phone to detect it.

Turns out the best tool for finding your headphones is to pay $300 for them and then you never lose them ever.

You're constantly paying attention to where they are.

No, I'm actually, I use that feature all the time.

I'm always using Find My because I, a lot of times, especially if I'm listening to an audiobook or something, I have one headphone in, right?

So I want to be able to hear the world around me, but I also want to listen to my stories.

And so I'll have just one in, and then I either lose the one headphone or I forget where I put the case.

And so I use the like the Find My for both the individual AirPods and the case a lot.

My watch, are you the same way?

My watch essentially has two functions.

I don't know if I get the full value out of this thing.

It's A, a step counter, like a Fitbit or something like that.

And then B, 50% of the time I'm using it is to find where the hell I left my phone.

Right?

Yeah, it's that.

Or I also use it.

I go, that's how I get reminders and know to go check my phone for something.

It's like when you use Google as a spell checker, you know, it's like Google's like, that's not what I'm here for.

Please.

I'm way more advanced.

Like, okay, yes, I can do this, but this is really not why I was built.

It's funny, too, because how many times is like you, if you saw your entire life search history, and then it's just one word like embarrassed, epitome or something.

And that's it, you know?

Did you mean to spell epitome?

Well, the good news, I guess, for the for the guys who just won the what, like $8.

billion dollar lotto is that they'll be able to afford all of the fun new Apple toys.

Yeah, I mean, instead of having to pick and choose.

I was doing some, it was $1.8 billion.

And they had to split it.

And then I even was looking at if they were going to take it,

the lump sum payment, I think it was something like $400 million was what they were going to be offered for the lump sum or something.

Oh, as opposed to if you take it over, what, like 30 years?

So I did some math on it, though, because I'm a little obsessed about one aspect of the lottery.

So I wanted to wait until the smoke cleared a little bit and they announced some of this stuff.

So in the Powerball lottery that everyone knows about, that was won by two people for $1.8 billion.

The winning numbers in the September 6th Powerball drawing were white balls 11, 23, 44, 61, 62.

And then the red Powerball, which is where I guess it gets its name, 17.

Second place, second place.

There were 232 tickets sold.

They matched four numbers.

They matched the Powerball.

They got $50,000.

232 people matched all but one number.

They even matched the Powerball.

I think about these people all the time.

When you get that check, is that like, I mean, okay, sure, you're, yeah, you're $50,000 up, but is that almost worse?

100%.

Like, do you spend the rest of your life every single day for the rest of your life thinking about your almost?

So two people won everything.

232 people won $50,000

by missing one number.

I think about those people all the time.

You are 100 times more likely to be one of those people.

Imagine, like you said, getting that $50,000 check.

It's like, congratulations, go grocery shopping like twice with that.

But you would think about that all the time.

For the rest of your life, you were one number away from a billion dollars.

Well, let's look at how we can maximize, though,

our newfound $50,000.

Can I take it in like euros?

Right?

Just like

predictively, can I just say, like, I think that a long-term investment, I just want this in Euros.

Well, it's interesting because I want to get to this in a second.

There's an article about a Russian advisor who has said what he thinks the U.S.

plan is to use cryptocurrency to devalue the dollar.

We'll talk about it in a second.

But there's another thing.

We were talking about how you can either take the lump sum or you can take it over many years.

Yeah.

There was a dude in Oregon who won a publisher's clearinghouse sweepstakes.

Are those the guys that would like drive around in the van with the big check?

Remember Ed McMahon used to like, yeah, and they would show up at your house with a giant check and they would award it like during halftime at the Super Bowl and stuff like that.

This guy won a specific contest where he won $5,000 a week forever, and he won it in 2012.

Not bad.

I mean, look, he did better than matching four of the Powerballs, am I right?

Called quarter million a year forever.

He gets it forever.

I'm just assuming he can't pass it to his heirs.

That's great.

He won it in 2012.

Here's the problem.

Publishers Clean House went out of business and they declared bankruptcy.

Oh, so now he no longer gets it.

And the story is he's about to lose his house because he didn't save any of the money.

Because he was getting $5,000 a week for the rest of his life.

He was just spending all of the money.

Right.

He set up his lifestyle to require $5,000 a week.

So it's one of those things you never think about.

It's like, I'm sure he was probably offered a lump sum.

That always seems like an option because they're basically handing the math over to you.

Right, but the lump sum is like, what, like two-thirds?

No, it's whatever it is today.

Like it's the principal of the investment that they do.

He received an annual check for $260,000 every January.

The money let him retire and buy a house on six acres in Washington.

But this year, the check suddenly stopped.

A few months later, he learned why.

Publishers Clearing House had filed bankruptcy without warning him or other winners.

Oh,

the dried up.

Yeah.

So then it's just gone.

So then he did the lifetime thing and still didn't get the lifetime out of it.

No, no.

Well,

so once, once again, it is a lifetime prize, just not his.

Just not your lifetime.

Just not your lifetime.

So it's one of those things where a lot of the lotteries, I'm assuming, Powerball is tied to the state government or a consortium of states.

And you think, well, at least the state will never declare bankruptcy, but not so fast, my friend, because

I was reading this article about this Russian advisor who has now said publicly that he thinks the plan for the U.S.

government to get out of this $35 trillion of debt.

It's a lot of debt.

It's a lot of debt.

Is that the plan is to move that debt to cryptocurrency in the form of United States dollars stable coins and then devalue those dramatically.

So they basically move it into a currency that they can then devalue and that will reduce the debt.

Like this crisis that America is just like heading like a train straight into.

Did you read myself?

There's now this federal judge who might rule that the tariffs are illegal in the U.S.

And that means the U.S.

might have to refund $1 trillion

worth of tariffs.

I'm not saying the judge is wrong.

I'm saying that the impacts of that might make his rightness or wrongness irrelevant.

Right, because it's going to be messy.

Because the other thing, too, is haven't prices also gone up for consumers?

Would the consumers get a refund?

I doubt the consumers

make its way back to the consumers who paid those prices.

It's just they're going to refund the people who had to pay the tariffs, not the people who paid the tariffs and then pass that along to consumers.

Well, that's messy.

I'm going to assume that's the case.

Also, the U.S.

having another trillion dollars, by the way, that they just owe to lots of random people, that could be a fucking nightmare at this point.

It's already a nightmare.

It could be like another level of nightmare.

So now they're just going to change it over into a stable coin?

I'm sure there's some term in Latin that can describe.

That's his conjecture.

Is that the U.S.

going all in?

It borders on conspiracy, but I do think, I personally believe, personally, that there is an effort to devalue the dollar in general so that they can, like, for instance, there was a judge who just blocked Trump's firing of the Fed's governor.

Yeah, yeah, Lisa Cook, right?

Yeah, so he's trying to get hold of that.

The whole effort there is to reduce interest rates, which on the surface seems like it's going to spur a lot of growth and investment.

But the combination of where the dollar is and a suddenly reduced interest rate would then devalue the dollar even more.

But if you can pay back such an extraordinary debt with an incredibly devalued currency, it's like you're paying it back in pennies on the dollar, essentially.

Right.

Because the debt that you're repaying is not worth the debt that you incurred.

Exactly.

You always hear about adjusted for inflation.

Everyone's heard that before.

So if you can borrow money when it's worth a lot more and pay it back with money that's worth less.

If you're staying ahead of the interest rate, you can actually get more money that you borrowed than what you're paying back.

That does sound like a dangerous game, though.

It's an extraordinarily dangerous game to play when so much of the world economy is based on the U.S.

dollar and certainly the U.S.

economy is based on it.

Right.

And so here's, okay, I guess I have a question here.

So for if you're just like, uh, like a normal U.S.

consumer, right?

And you buy things in dollars, does the dollar being worth less affect you?

Or is that something that affects like the people that are trading curves?

Yes, that is inflation.

What you just described.

So as the dollar goes down in value, basically the way that an average person would see that is that they're paying more for things because the dollar buys less.

Got it.

Just across the board, you know, certainly products that come from outside of the U.S.

immediately are more expensive, but really the overall effect is everything becomes more expensive as the dollar devalues.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, Bernie, speaking of

playing very expensive, dangerous, high-risk games, did you hear about the doctor in the UK who

amputated his own legs?

as a like a fetish thing?

Is this real?

This is a real thing.

So this doctor, a surgeon in in the UK has just been jailed because he basically paralyzed his own legs so that they would require amputation because this was a fetish that he had.

And so he got his legs amputated and then claimed like 500,000 pounds in insurance claims and has now been like jailed over it for fraud.

Oh, because of the insurance scam.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot more to it than that as well, because the guy was also a surgeon and now he's got a lot of patients coming back going, hey,

did I need this surgery?

Or were you like doing it?

Cause you know you have a fetish.

Is that established?

Is that why he did it?

Can I just ask a question that I'm going to be sorry I asked as soon as I asked it?

Maybe.

What's the fetish?

What's the...

What's the sexual gratification?

It's, I guess, just some sort of amputation fetish.

I'm not really familiar with it, but he also,

as part of this,

the trial and everything, he also admitted three charges of possessing extreme pornographic images relating to videos from a website called the Eunuch Maker.

Listen, man.

So, this is just like, this isn't going anywhere positive, is what I'm saying.

For a Wednesday, I feel like usually you go up, it's hump day.

This is a valley.

Like, this is like, it's only up towards Friday from here, right?

All uphill from here.

They do call it hump day, right?

But when I think about a graph, like, if you're getting over the hump, you're heading down to Friday.

I guess it's down in terms of effort to get to Friday.

Yeah, like now you're, you done the hard part.

You're more than halfway.

Now you're like, you're past the halfway point.

Now it gets easier.

No, I'm like, Sunday is the worst.

Sunday night is the, right?

It's even, Sunday night is worse than Monday morning.

Do we agree with that?

You know, you're about to start the week.

You know your weekend's over.

Yeah, you know, like every hour that ticks by is like your weekend is just is fading right into the sunset.

Monday morning wakes up and you come to terms with it.

All right, Ashley, who do we have to thank for getting us over the hump this week?

Big thank you to John Spalison and Tom Armstrong.

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

All right, well, that does it for us today, September 10th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.