2025.09.18: Served Cold

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

For September 18th, 2025, my name is Bertie Burns.

Sitting right over there, she's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

I set my alarms early this morning.

It's my mom's birthday.

Can't miss it.

Gotta wish her happy birthday.

I was just thinking about a way to work your mom's birthday in, but we didn't talk about it before.

Happy birthday, Peggy.

It's her birthday.

I feel like I'm channeling your mom these days because your mom has the massive Blu-ray collection.

Now I'm

morphing into that.

She does.

It's like her Blu-rays and DVDs have their own bedroom, and now so do yours.

Does she have

any Jimmy Kimmel Blu-rays, which are about to become a huge collector's mother?

You're going to want to get those on eBay if you haven't got them already.

So this is pretty.

There's no words, no adjectives anymore.

I'm out of adjectives to describe what...

Hey, maybe we should move to we only one day a week and we specify a day of the week where we talk about what I guess most people would call politics, but to me politics is

politicians, right?

And voting.

And elections and

measures that are being passed.

But it seems like that's not really the case with the way people are living their lives now.

Lettuce on a hamburger is political and everything else.

I mean, this leans a little bit more to it.

We're talking about Jimmy Kimmel getting indefinitely suspended by ABC, who is owned by Disney.

And I think everyone, well, I shouldn't say everyone.

Everyone I've talked to has pretty much had the same reaction, which is like, holy shit, I got to go hear what Jimmy Kimmel said about Charlie Kirk.

I got to go hear this to see what got him fired from one of the most popular talk shows in America.

And then go listen to the comments.

I'm one of those people because I just heard about this before we sat down recording because this morning I was busy as every morning running around getting kids ready for school, making snacks and being like, you have your bike helmet and doing all that stuff and then getting the kid to school.

I get home and the first headline I read is that Jimmy Kimmel's been suspended.

And I was like, These must be some wild comments, but I haven't actually looked it up yet.

Oh, you haven't?

Here you go.

You want to hear it?

Here is what Jimmy Jimmy Kimmel said about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

But he will have them instead.

At least it's somebody we can trust, though, right?

We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from him.

And in between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.

On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism.

But on a human level, you can see how hard the president is taking this.

My condulations on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk.

May I ask, sir, personally, how are you holding up over the last day and a half, sir?

I think very good.

And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks.

They've just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years.

And it's going to be a beauty.

Okay.

Yes.

He's at the fourth stage of grief, construction.

I'm still waiting to hear, like, okay, so what's the party got suspended for?

That's it.

I I think everyone says, what is this thing you said that got him fired from ABC?

And then you go listen to the clip and you go, what is the thing you said that got him fired from ABC?

I mean, look, don't get me wrong.

He's feeling a little spicy about the president, right?

But that's not new.

I mean, at this point, is like SNL going, yee

over here.

Like,

how happy are they that they're on break right now?

I would actually, I'd be curious to hear from the conservative members of our audience.

Probably better to go to the Rushi website to do it rather than on Reddit because you'll just get downvoted to fucking hell.

I would love to know what it is about this in particular that's worthy of being fired.

He goes on, he does talk about it more.

Like, I feel compelled.

That's the place where everyone stops when they play the clip at the risk of this being a rebroadcast of the whole show.

Here's what he went on to say after that.

Demolition,

construction.

This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend.

This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay?

And it didn't just happen once.

When I heard it, I was in the midst of, you know, building a great for 150 years, they've wanted a ballroom at the White House, right?

They don't have a ballroom.

They have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over.

If it rains, it's a wipeout.

And so I was with the architects that would design, it's going to be incredible.

And they came and they said,

Charlie Kirk is dead.

I didn't know what they meant.

I said, what are you dead?

Charlie Kirk was shot.

And they thought he was dead because it was so horrific.

And I said, dead.

And then we installed the most beautiful chandelier.

Sponsors, you wouldn't believe.

There's something wrong with him.

There really is.

I mean,

who thinks like that?

And why are we building a $200 million ballroom?

Is it possible that he's doing it intentionally so we could be bad about that instead of the Epstein list?

And then he went on to talk about some other things that were not related at all to Kirk.

Okay, it's critical, but is it spicy enough for an indefinite suspension?

It definitely seems like if you listen to that monologue, it's just something that's more critical of Trump than anything else.

The only thing I could think is criticizing the way someone mourns, or maybe specifically the phrase MAGA gang, trying to point fingers.

I did watch some other talking to break this down.

I guess, although when then the FCC, was it the FCC threatened basically ABC, who have now suspended Kimmel.

That does sound like a little bit strong-arming, right?

So is it inaccurate at that point?

Well, and I listened to some other talking heads like on MSNBC saying, well, you know, as a news program here, if we had said something that indicated that the political affiliations of the shooter were different than what they were, we would have to make a retraction and things like that.

And they were trying to figure out, like, based on their own set of standards, how it affected.

I don't think any of that applies to a talk show host, do you?

No.

Late night.

Not usually.

I mean, they're generally not considered news, they're considered entertainment, right?

Isn't that the whole reason that, like, the Fox News has always branded itself as an entertainment product and defended itself that way in court?

Is the standards are different for entertainment and news?

It seems like every day there's something new to talk about with whatever's going on in America with this incredible polarized extremism.

I tell you, there is, buddy, but like TikTok found a new home.

Where is it?

Oh, did they announce the buyer?

They did.

They announced a new buyer.

So it's an Oracle Silverlake consortium, and they're going to take an 80% stake in TikTok.

Here's what's weird about it is it is going to require people to download a new app,

but they get TikTok, but they don't get TikTok, if that makes sense.

They get, let me think about this.

They get TikTok, but they don't get TikTok.

Like they're now going to be a company operating TikTok, but people are going to have to download a new app.

No one's using that.

No one's using that.

Immediately.

No one's doing that.

I mean, look.

I will say during, was it the great TikTok outage of January 2025 when it was down for like a day uh a bunch of people went and downloaded what was it something called like rednote right or like some other like version of that so it's not there are people that will absolutely download that but i thought the idea was to get all the people that are on tick tock now using tick tock like it's part of their everyday and get them on that when you tell them okay you can do that but you have to go download a new app I mean, how many people are just going to like be like, I'm going to go on Instagram.

I know they get everything two weeks late, but I already have that one.

or threads or blue sky or whatever and get that and this is a growing thing i've been seeing lately is that as these decentralization doesn't seem necessarily like a bad thing but with like kimmel getting indefinitely suspended i've seen people starting to call out the fact that we're now moving away from a shared reality which is kind of an interesting way to look at it if we don't have center points that everyone engages with or a lot of people engage with if we just go to our small little tiny platforms, there is a problem that we can end up little pockets and we don't share reality together at all.

Right.

Where like we're just not even seeing any of the same things.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called, she's in Congress, called for a peaceful divorce in the U.S.

And it's like, is there another word for that?

Yeah.

I feel there might be.

I feel like there's another word for a divorce of the U.S.

from itself.

You're thinking, you're probably saying a word that people don't want to say.

Nobody wants to be the first person to say civil war, even though somebody made a movie about that.

By the way, Ellison is Oracle, right?

Yeah.

Ellison's kids are also big media people, too.

And are also the ones now,

like, it sounds like, likely to bid for Warner Brothers.

Yes, right.

They're the people behind the bid to bring Paramount and Warner Brothers all together under one big roof with TikTok as well, or the new app formerly known as TikTok.

We should literally call it that.

The app formerly known as TikTok.

It's just going to be a symbol.

I just wonder about this.

It's like,

we're going through this right now where we're looking at firing the Rooster Teeth apps back up because so many people use apps.

And the process of going through of transferring the old app to us is a big debate that we're having now.

Because in my mind, it's less relevant for us because I feel like a lot of people probably uninstalled the app.

And it would be cool to just go through and push an update and then people have it.

But then also, we've got all of that.

Right, they just magically see like the icon update and then boom, guess what?

Your baby's back.

Yeah.

And then, but we also had a meeting too where somebody was talking through it

like a video conference and was saying like, yeah, well, if we get the old accounts and the old entries in the app stores, then we also get all of like the legacy reviews and downloads and do we want that?

Like it was a question like, is that even a good thing to have?

Right.

On the one hand, it comes with theoretically some kind of install base, right?

I've still got the Rooster Teeth app installed.

I never uninstalled it.

I can never bring myself to do it.

Do you?

I do.

I feel like it should.

I uninstalled that.

But

a lot of people will have uninstalled it.

So even if there is a previous user base, it's not going to like auto-reinstall on their phone and go, wake up, bitches, we're back.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's not something you're going to look for.

Also.

If there were issues with this old app that was built on a completely different framework, the old reviews would still be part of it.

Correct.

That's what it says.

Even though it's now for a completely different app, essentially.

So it's like, is it worth having the big install base to get all the baggage to?

Yeah, good or bad.

Is that the right thing to do, right?

So that's the question we're doing.

And also, you could have the old Rooster Teeth app sitting right next to the new Rooster Teeth app.

Also, what if we can't name it the same way?

Okay.

That's a problem.

Here's my proposal: what if we indefinitely suspend the old app and just make a new app?

I like this.

This is good verbiage we can use.

We can indefinitely suspend the old app and logo and everything like that.

It's indefinitely suspended.

And then we're going to launch it next to the app formerly known as TikTok.

Well, what do we do?

I mean, I guess we just like,

Tuesday seems like a good day to talk about this stuff.

I don't want to talk about this stuff every day.

I really don't.

I really don't.

Like you were, the quiet part out loud you were not saying was the word civil war, right?

Was that what you were getting towards?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's concerning when you have members of Congress, they, again,

say the word, but they're saying it.

But I think we're in, like, we're, everyone's got that word in the back of their minds, but the word that should be at the forefront now is Cold War.

We're in a second Cold War.

I guess it's a war.

What do we call it?

Cultural War or whatever.

There's a Cold War going on because there's no, well, up until recently of guns being fired officially, you know, and it's like this, you can feel it going.

It's like, and how does a congressman feel about saying, like, what are you going to get in that divorce?

Do you want to lose access?

to the entire West Coast, essentially.

And then how are you going to get to the Pacific Ocean?

You're going to go through Mexico or Canada?

Womp, womp, right?

I mean, what are you going gonna do at this point wait till the tariffs kick in baby i know right it's uh it's just insane and i i you know you you every day i hope

that there will be some

something that'll happen that'll bring people more towards one another

I don't want to use any other word there because every other word is a dirty word, like towards the middle or towards the center or whatever, but it just keeps not happening and we're just moving farther away from each other, from each other.

I'm just going to put this out there as a possibility, right?

so um the the colbert show right has been has been canceled now we've got uh kimmel on indefinite hiatus what happens when jay leno pops out and goes it was all marketing stuff

i'm back

now

you got jay leno after four decades

he's come back i need my money for to my car hey speaking of coming back because i was just thinking like we've got fallon basically is like that's what's left to represent the views of america and uh keep everyone on their toes apparently if people are getting their news from late late-night talk shows, which I guess is what we think is happening.

What are the movie studios going to do when there's no late-night talk shows to send all of their actors on to promote their new movie?

What are they going to do?

We also, talking about this stuff sucks so bad because how do we segue away from it, right?

Like talking about Jimmy Fallon holding back, you know, the tide essentially on behalf of everyone else, it's a good segue to talking about you and I.

our different reactions to the Witcher trailer or clip that came out.

Yeah, yeah.

So there's a...

a, but it feels like a weird segue.

I want to, I want to acknowledge that out loud.

It feels like a weird segue.

Okay, do you, do you want a segue that's going to be like, what the fuck?

I'll give you a what the fuck segue, and then we'll talk about the witcher at the end.

This is a headline from AP News:

A meth burn by the FBI smokes out a Montana animal shelter.

See, this is the America I love.

Where did you go, America, where there's a meth burn?

So, so it's this, this, um, this town in

in billings montana uh where there's an animal shelter and they have an incinerator normally it's used for uh incinerating uh the remains of animals uh that have been euthanized for whatever reason but occasionally apparently they use it to burn drugs and um the fbi brought in two pounds of meth to burn in the incinerator.

All good so far, right?

Great.

That's what chimneys are for.

You go, it goes up the chimney and out what?

Into town, town, but it's burnt, so it's fine now.

But there was like negative pressure.

We've encountered this with our own fireplaces here in the house, where sometimes, especially if it's cold outside, whatever, there's this negative pressure and the smoke just comes back down the chimney and out into the room.

And then we're swearing and looking for the fan to try to blow the air up the chimney, right?

They were supposed to have a fan on hand in case that happened.

It happened.

They did not have a fan on hand.

So just all the meth smoke came back into the animal shelter and smoked out the whole shelter.

They had to evacuate.

The guy who didn't turn on the fan was quoted as saying,

oops.

And I like, what do you do?

Like, do you teach animals to line up in an orderly fashion?

Like, form a queue, and this is your nearest exit.

Follow the lighted signs to your nearest exit.

And then you're supposed to gather over on the playground.

That's what we did when we had like fire drills in elementary school, right?

No, those dogs, those animals are, they saw an inch of freedom and they're like, just make for this, make for the sun.

That's what always drives me crazy whenever I watch a video like online of like an animal in trouble, like an deer that's got its antlers stuck in it.

Some human risks their life to try to

help that animal.

Because, you know, if you get kicked by a deer, you're in big fucking trouble.

Right.

Like you're, you're definitely, or, you know, they got antlers.

If they can get those near you, they could poke some holes.

And when the animal finally gets free after all this effort of fighting the person who's trying to help them, because of course they think the human is trying to kill them in a moment.

Everything in the world is trying to kill them.

Because everything wants to eat everything else.

And then the moment it's set free, it just runs away.

And I know in its head, it's thinking, I got away.

And it's going to tell its friends, it's like, you would not believe the day I've had.

Right.

I was stuck.

And then this thing tried to murder me, but I got away and I escaped and I lived another day.

I got away with guile and wits, not just pure fucking panic.

Okay, so can we talk about the witcher?

Yeah, are we far enough away that we can actually go to the next one?

Okay, we're far enough away now to talk about the witcher.

So there's a teaser out for the new witcher.

And the reason this is notable is because the witcher is no longer played by Henry Cavill.

He's now being played by Liam Hemsworth, right?

And this was a very controversial recasting decision, right?

Henry Cavill walked away from the series.

He said he didn't like the deviations they were making from the source material.

Also, at the time, I think he had an offer to come back, maybe a Superman.

And so he had, you know, he had some other offers and was juggling some other options and decided to walk away from it.

Meanwhile, Netflix said, hey, we have a series that people watch on our hands.

We're not just going to shut it down.

So we'll just recast the lead, right?

The lead, who was the reason that a lot of people watched this show, let's be honest, right?

I mean, we go Henry Cavill, White Hair.

That's like the lead of every romantic book there is out there.

And so they recast him with Liam Hemsworth.

And we've seen...

We've been over this and we fine-tooth comb.

Every like behind the scenes, there's set photos of Lee from Liam Hemsworth on the sand.

We're seeing him with the wig for the first time.

We're judging it and and we're judging it.

And so now there's a teaser out, and you're actually able to see Liam Hemsworth in action with all the effects on the scene as he's fighting a Wraith and stuff.

And it looks fine.

Okay, so that's your take now is that he looks fine.

My take is he looks fine.

But here's here.

Because you didn't have a very positive reaction to that.

It's not possible.

It's fine.

That's the thing.

My reaction is it's fine.

Give him a shot.

It's not like, oh, yeah, or like, oh, wow, I didn't see this, but like now he's really sold me.

I'm like, it's fine.

You know what he's giving me?

It's giving me like Christopher Lambert as Raiden in the old Mortal Kombat.

That was, that was what I took away from that tease.

Is it, you mean, in terms of acting or in terms of the way he looks?

I think it's the way he looks.

I think it's the way he looks.

There were some, there's some stuff in it that I may be judging harshly, and I'm not sure if it was always that way.

And I gave it a pass because I really like Henry Cavill, or if this is new stuff that I'm now seeing.

Like

it's a fight scene against a Wraith, and there's what looks like some fairly obvious wire work flipping around and dragging and stuff, right?

And I'm like, I feel like I can see, I can't see the wires themselves, but I feel like I can see the work being done.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

One of the reasons that I think fans were concerned about the recasting was that Henry Cavill was also very heavily involved with the direction of the show and has a reputation of being a very nerdy dude who likes very fringe nerdy stuff, like fucking Warhammer, you fucking nerd and Witcher, like the Witcher books and things like that.

And that he was leaving because they were straying too much from the source material.

In this clip that they put out there, they I think they went out of their way to show mechanics that were very faithful.

I haven't read the books, but very faithful to the game.

Like they were fighting a Wraith, and he throws down a Yurdin sigil, which is a trap trap that gets laid that you have to use in order to fight race.

And I thought, okay, they're like, whether or not they're openly acknowledging it, they're trying to show people that like we're sticking to the source material.

But isn't what people care about also very much like the storylines?

So that, that remains to be seen.

However, this was a combat scene, not a story scene with a wraith.

I'd say Liam Hemsworth looks fine.

I think it's fine.

I'm going to

try it until it's not.

Right.

I'm going to check it out.

I, I, like, I've got this little chip on my shoulder, right?

Like, there's like a little part of me that wants it to be like,

because I really like Henry Cavill.

But I also, like, I want him to do well.

I want it.

I want the show to be good and do good things and be enjoyable for people, right?

That's a good thing.

Like, that's a net positive if it can do well.

You know, we were talking about this weird

connection between something else we were talking about the other day, which is the impact the casting of Mission Impossible movies has had over superhero movies.

You were just talking about the Henry Cavill and the the Superman thing with the mustache.

With the mustache, yeah, and which, which, let's be clear, I don't see the mustache.

I guess I don't have mustache vision.

Like, that's not a special effect.

Even with still shots, I'm like, okay, I guess his lip looks a little bit curled up.

Oh, I think if they didn't put that out there, then nobody would, yeah, I really don't think people would have called it out.

Honestly.

But yes, but it did have, for sure, an effect on the discourse.

We'll never know because we won't be able to remove the context from our heads.

People say, I absolutely would have seen it.

You don't know that because you don't live in a world where you didn't know what it was.

That's in Earth 659, okay?

But crazy enough,

probably even a bigger casting choice in the history of superhero movies, Hugh Jackman was not the original choice for Wolverine.

It was a guy named Doug Ray Scott who was not able to get out of his contract that he had for a movie called Mission Impossible 2, I believe it was.

Okay.

Oh, interesting.

So here's the thing, though, right?

Once again, like the hindsight of that is going to be 2020, right?

He, like, I wonder if this poor dude is like, fucking goddamn mission impossible.

Like, I would have had this career.

Like, I would have all these films behind me if this were the case.

But would it have been the case?

Or is it the specific casting of Hugh Jackman and the serendipity of how well he did in that role in spite of not being comic accurate, right?

Like he was a departure from the comic style Wolverine, but he was so great and so iconic in that role that it's hard to imagine anyone else in that role now.

And if it wasn't him doing it the way he did it specifically, would Wolverine have been a popular enough character to have the extensive filmography that he now has?

My personal belief is there's been a lot of decades of refining these characters.

These are beloved characters.

What's a bad casting choice for a superhero so far?

I I can't think of one.

Like, even going out and casting someone like Don Cheadle as Roadie, War Machine.

Okay, Carol.

What did you say next?

Exactly.

Very different from the character.

And Don Cheadle was like this guy playing like Miles Davis and stuff like that.

Beloved actor, but not someone I would think is being an action hero and cast as War Machine.

Fucking kills it.

He's great in it.

You know what I mean?

So I think, yeah, I think Wolverine's an exceptionally beloved character in the comics.

I don't know that they could could have done it wrong, honestly.

And once again, how do you know?

You can't take the context away once it's happened.

Or because it's such a beloved comic character, would it have been easier to miscast it?

Maybe, but give me an example of that.

Liam Hemsworth.

Yeah, you don't know that.

You don't know that yet.

I don't.

I feel like we're talking about iPhone 5s coming out.

Like,

what is a tremendously beloved...

Comic book character that was miscast.

Yeah, and then the thing is, you're right.

We will never know what the alternate is because, like, we, we don't live in the world where that happens.

So, now that the Mission Impossible franchise is done, Ashley.

We'll never have a miscast again.

Right.

Now, now superhero movies will finally have the chance to shine finally after all this time.

They're about to hit peak.

Just you wait.

Well, who are we casting in our comic book adaptation this week, Ashley?

Right.

Big shout out to the new Wolverines, Keith Hunt and Monkey Butlers.

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

And thoughts go out to everybody who has lost their job over at Jimmy Kim Live, Germo, or hiring if you're looking for a new gig.

All right, that does it for us today.

September 18th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.