2025.09.16: The Plight of the Click Farmers

Now I've seen everything.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gut up!

Good!

Morning to you, wherever you are, because

it is

morning somewhere for September 16, 2025.

My aim is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

She has not seen everything.

It's Ashley Burns.

I had Ashley, everybody.

There's so much still to see.

I'll put a bounty on that one.

If anyone can tell me what that drop is from, I will I'll send you a free t-shirt.

I'll give you a code so you can go purchase a free t-shirt.

First person who can do that.

It's impossible to see everything.

As we've made clear over time, backlogs are ever expanding, including the diplomat.

Hey,

yeah, before we talk about that, really quickly, I got to do a little bit of housekeeping from yesterday.

I did not say thank you to Logan Dean, who did yesterday's Morning Somewhere shout.

When I was editing the podcast, I realized that and I thought, oh, I'll fix that.

I'll put it in the description.

I also didn't put it in the description.

So thank you, Logan Dean, for yesterday's Morning Somewhere shout.

If you want to add a shout, you can go to shouts at Morning Somewhere.

What do you think the chances are shouts at Rushdeet.com?

What do you think the chances are that Logan Dean is Gen X?

Why, Logan Dean?

Forever forgotten.

Oh, I see what you say.

Gen X.

Left off of all the lists.

I thought you're making a Wolverine reference or something, Logan.

Yeah.

I knew a kid named one of my good friends from high school named their kid Logan, but I don't think they were a comic book fan, but I thought that was kind of interesting.

Yeah.

I also had a friend who named their kid Lestat.

Yeah, okay, that's a choice.

That's a choice.

I feel like

what is a nominative determinism, right?

That kid has no choice but to grow up weird.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Like manifesting, but on a lifetime scale?

Yes.

Yeah, kind of like when you're driving in the car with, say, someone, like, for instance, your wife, and they just say out of the clear blue sky for no reason whatsoever, it's been a long time since we had a hard drive fail.

Why did you say that in the car today?

I was thinking about it because I was thinking about how

we trust things to the cloud, right?

For example, we've got a lot of archives of things in the cloud.

And I was thinking about this in relation to our digitization of physical media project where we're trying to build our own digital library of stuff, right?

Because we want to protect the stuff.

But then we're so used to trusting things to the cloud

because there's like an emotional

warm safety blanket to the idea that the cloud can keep it safe.

Interesting.

Right.

If I put it in the cloud, it will be safe because Amazon is probably going to take better care of their hard drives or something than me, right?

And just wait till the hard drive fails or something.

And I thought to myself, actually, it's been a long time since we've had a hard drive failure.

And you're right, that part came out loud, but it was, it was at the end of a mental journey.

We were outside where God could hear you.

It was not a good plan to say that.

Interesting, though.

What you just said is interesting to me that you think of the cloud very positively and protecting your data.

That's interesting because I always think about when I sleep, when things happen when I sleep, like even when I'm asleep, my data, if it's in the cloud, is exposed to the rest of the world while I'm just sitting there slumbering.

That was one of the early things from Rooster Teeth when turned on like the financial engines of doing the pre-orders for DVDs and doing the sponsor program, turning that up, is I went to Gus and Jeff and I would give them the report of how much money the company made overnight.

While you were sleeping, this is how much money the company made.

And we had jobs, you know what I mean, where we worked by the hour, we had salaries.

Right.

Like you were, but here's what you like.

While you were snoozing, getting your REM cycles in,

you know, getting a nice little rest, maybe drooling on your pillow a little bit.

Here's how much money the company made.

Right.

It doesn't have to be very much to be very impressive, right?

Because you're like, I can make, wow, like while I was sleeping, it's amazing.

That money came in.

That's cool.

That was a, I like, you know, I like my weird little indicators or knock-on effects.

I would say like one of my greatest financial goals of all time, probably that I remember more than anything else, was when I got to zero.

What do you mean got to zero?

When I got up to zero after college and I didn't have debt.

Oh, you paid all that off and you go.

I remember that day.

Well, so does Matt Hullum.

What is that feeling like, right?

You go, what, I, it's, it's, it's all up now.

Yeah.

We go up.

Yeah, it's like into a positive.

I literally owe no one anything at this point in time.

You know what I mean?

I'm going to buy a house.

I paid off my credit card debt.

And I did some dumb stuff too.

Like I financed my last year of college on a credit card.

And then I think I've told the story a bunch of times how I was like, had six credit cards and I was transferring the balance to get 0% interest, which I didn't know.

You like, if you pay it off every month, you get no interest.

Right.

And they were.

And you just like move it to the next card.

Yeah.

And the credit card companies called me and they said, you know, we can, it was, I remember the credit card company, they said, we can just block you from transferring your balance.

Like you've transferred it four times in the last year.

I'm assuming you have other accounts that you're transferring it to because it comes in higher.

And I was like, go ahead.

And it's called a process called kiting your balance.

I didn't know that was a thing.

I'm not even sure technically if it's illegal, but it's frowned upon.

And there's illegal.

And then there's the company saying, well, we're just not going to work with you.

Well, did you ever, did you ever have a conversation with someone who works in like a very professional business

and occasionally they have that like moment of clarity where the humanity comes through and they say something like they tell it like it is basically.

And I remember this person doing because I was pretty young at the time.

I was like 23, 24.

And she said, just so you know, this is called kiting your balance.

And technically, what you're doing is not illegal, but neither is what the credit card companies can do to you for doing it.

Whoa.

And I was like, wow, that's interesting.

coming from someone who works at a credit card company.

And was like at the at that moment, were you hearing a knock on your doors?

Like some guys with pipes were outside your apartment door waiting to bust your kneecaps?

That was the spice and then the sugar was.

She goes, but tell you what we'll do.

We'll raise your limit.

If you want to cancel these other accounts and we'll give you an attractive interest rate for the next year to put this and to move this over here.

If you just stop the kiting.

Which is what I did.

And then it's like, in Matt Hullum's words, I got my job, which was at the call center.

And I was a manager at the call center.

And I just like didn't spent no money for like 14 months and just like paid down all of my debt.

He said, it was insane to watch me do it.

And I got down where I hit zero.

Just lock yourself down.

Yeah, when you're at that age, you know what I mean?

It's possible to do that stuff, but it's like, you know, just eat the ramen,

salty crackers, you know, and it's like, yeah, I do remember though, it's an interesting financial milestone to be, I'm at zero.

Yay.

Yeah.

And well, and then you go and you go, hmm, how much debt can I put myself in?

Which is usually the next step, right?

Which is like, I'm going to buy my first house.

Right, right.

And then you're in debt forever at that point in time.

You know, the,

it's interesting, though, because

if, if I do have a flaw is that I just, because of the way I grew up, debt is evil and bad and I just avoid debt.

Like one of the reasons why we bought

636,

the studio where we were, which everyone remembers, like the little room that Achievement Hunter was stuck in, that studio.

I owned that building.

And I owned it with a couple of other people that that we went in together and did a real estate investment.

And it just made sense to do it because Rooster Teeth at that point and me as a knock-on effect, I didn't have any debt at that point in time.

And just like we're facing now, that was post-2008 and there was all this talk about hyperinflation that because of quantitative easing, they were just printing a bunch of money and the dollar is just going to mean nothing, you know, all this doom and gloom shit you always hear, but the dollar is going to mean nothing in the next two or three years.

And talking about what we talked about, I think like last week, not not having debt is suddenly, it's like, oh, if I have debt now and I can pay it back with, you know, dollars that are worth pennies literally on the dollar,

then that makes more sense.

So there's people who leverage debt in a much better way, and especially like the hyper-rich, they do amazing things with debt.

That's crazy.

They're kiting the dollar.

Like they don't, you know, they just get a line of credit for against their wealth, and then they're basically taking out a loan that's their salary.

And that's why they don't pay any taxes, like that kind of thing.

One of the best ways you can start to discover stuff like that or explore that is actually through a Jared Leto Ann Hathaway series called We Crashed.

It's based on the WeWork.

It's an Apple.

Yeah, that's the WeWork is the, that's the co-working space, right?

Where you could just like go and you could like, what, like rent a desk by the hour or something.

And that way you could.

work and you could do your own business or you know your side hustle or whatever uh and you use these co-working spaces was that right it's a really interesting and at one point i think they owned more real estate in manhattan than any other company without the company really being worth anything it was pretty fucking wild it's weird yeah and it's it's a really cool story because it's just that they play really compelling characters and jared lettuce like disappears into that character he was one of these visionaries you know that goes on these like right like like a tech visionary sure very much like a 2010 like era dude right and uh he uh it's a really compelling story but the undercurrent through the whole thing even more so than like

Big Short, like that movie that people love that teaches you all about tranches and stocks and things, or tries to.

Synthetic indexes or something.

Yeah, this We Crashed, this series has this incredible undercurrent where you learn so much about valuation and about the way that the ultra-rich can like leverage the wealth to do things.

It's really compelling to watch it.

I would recommend it just for the educational factor.

And we loved it.

I thought it was a great series.

Well, and

speaking of visionary tech dudes, I recently saw that Sam Altman, the open AI guy, has been talking about the dead internet theory, which I always find fascinating because as an AI guy, that's something he's actively contributing to.

But he sounded kind of surprised by how dead the internet is, like by the high percentage of bots that are using internet traffic.

Was he wearing a hot dog costume and saying, we're all looking for the guy who did this

at the same time?

I mean,

all that stuff predates Sam Altman.

That's the weird thing is, like, I feel like AI gets slapped on everything.

We've always had automated bots, even if it was just a group of people at a farm somewhere in either China or India doing this.

Like 500 engineers in a trench coat.

And now those are like the first jobs that we really eliminated were the farm jobs, you know, for farming likes or whatever or posting horrible things as part of some Russian propaganda program.

It's like we've always had those things.

So it's not him, but this is now at a different scale.

It is.

It is.

And I think specifically what he said was, I've had the strangest experience reading this.

I assume it's all like, I assume what I'm reading is all fake or bots, even though in this case, I know codex growth is really strong.

The trend is real.

So he's saying like growth is real, but he just has to assume that there's so much.

fakeness that nothing is real anymore.

You were telling me, I think, that like half of all internet traffic now is fake.

So there's been like a trend not fake but bots like it's not not people that's fake well everybody's fake we're all fake we do our our highlight reels on social media but uh

there's been i think like a trend and uptick i've noticed in articles about social media dying or the internet dying and it's one of those things i don't know if they're if it's an effort being made to like push this or if it's just a trend that everyone is noticing and engaging with but like popular mechanics put out one the internet will be uh more dead than alive within three year three years, trend show.

Then there was another article that was written by a company called Noima.

I've never heard of it before.

This article, The Last Days of Social Media.

And then Slashdot just put up an article that says, what happens after the death of social media?

Everyone seems to be focusing on the social media aspect of it in these articles, but I've noticed this incredible uptick in, or maybe the algorithm has just figured out that I hate social media and launch media.

And that's what it's showing you.

I think a lot of it is probably because social media is a thing that people interact with.

So that's something they can see, right?

They're not directly experiencing like crawler bots indexing

like web pages, right?

They're not directly experiencing,

I don't know, all the

smart camera, like the ring camera footage being uploaded to servers.

They're not directly experiencing those things or they don't think of them directly.

What they can think of is, I saw this post on social media and all the responses were the same words over and over and over.

And it's clearly just a bunch of like bots responding to this post, right?

That's a thing that I can see because social media is where my attention is and that's what I'm engaging with.

And so I see it happening.

Yeah, but we've been hearing about it, you know, for the last two presidential elections.

That goes back 10 years almost at this point, you know, about how there's all these bot farms that are going out and swinging the election one way or the other.

And I feel it.

Don't you feel it when you go out there?

Like you, if you go to any famous person's Twitter account and you click on it, it just looks like a bunch of fake people that are easily identified.

Right.

Like you look at the responses and it's just like, that's not real people.

No, that's not all.

It's all not real people or enough of a caricature that it hopefully is not a real person,

to be honest with you.

But it is, it's this weird erosion that one of the reasons, I mean, I've been sort of off social media in general

for a while now, like enough that I finally like kind of made the emotional break to the point where like, I can't go back and post on social media anymore because it's, it's just draining to me.

Like the idea of spending the, a lot of like the under the hood energy of my brain thinking of clever things to post or something happening and going, oh, I should post about that.

Like having shed that layer of just, I guess, emotional energy maintenance for social media, I can't go back to it.

I can't spin it up again.

I can't make it work.

That hard drive died.

Stop it.

Don't manifest.

So this Noemo article that I was talking about, the last days of social media, what do you call like the small headline below the big headline?

Subhead.

The subhead.

Subheader.

It says, social media promise connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.

I think exhaustion is a great word.

Everyone's got it.

Like even look at even the

discussion around social media becomes exhausting.

How many times are we going to talk about this goddamn TikTok ban in the U.S., which by the way, still hasn't happened?

They're still threatening to ban it if China doesn't get in line.

You know what I mean?

It's or make a deal.

Was it January that it was supposed to be shut down?

Yeah.

Okay.

Also, let me ask you a question.

If TikTok is so bad for us and it's so bad for our kids, what kind of deal can China make to make that okay?

Like, what are we talking about there?

Right.

Is like you're going to change it to show them smart stuff.

But what's the deal?

Like, is it a, do you get the feeling it's a deal with TikTok or is it a deal with something else that'll say, okay, now you can have the shitty thing that poisons our kids.

Specifically, it's like

you don't care if it's shitty for kids, right?

It's all about who is owning the data of the kids or, you know, like who's getting the user data for that.

Like, it's, it's couched very much as a privacy thing.

I think the idea that like TikTok is not good for our brains, that's that ship sailed.

We know it's not.

And guess what?

We're not giving it up anyway.

It is a weird thing because

I kind of put it in the same category as like the whole idea of the anonymous internet, that everyone is anonymous on the internet.

There's been a lot of talk about that this week because a lot of people have lost their jobs over social media posts.

Everyone's like, don't put your goddamn real name on the internet.

The promise of both, I think, social media and the anonymous internet was that it was going to enable people who didn't have a voice to have a voice, like especially people who were in countries where they were being oppressed.

And we had to be anonymous so that they could post things and forward the ideals of democracy.

I don't think the anonymous social media internet has forwarded the ideals of democracy on a macro level.

I don't think we're in a better place than when we started with this stuff.

Yeah, I think that a lot of it is just, I mean, what we use it for is not generally forwarding democracy.

It's like, I'm going to tweet about my sandwich.

Like, we use it.

The noise floor is so high with so much bullshit.

And probably also, like, you know, the fake posts that now everyone is noticing and just like the general

nothingness of it, that the idea of using it to forward democracy is like,

it's a beautiful thought, but I don't think it's what most of us use it for.

It does feel like, you know, the democratization and even accountability, the end result on a broad level is that it whipped at least some countries, the US being the best example, into incredibly polar extremism.

And in the meanwhile, God, I read this post that really, I mean, it hit me right in the heart.

I don't remember what the Reddit thread was.

It was, or a subreddit, it was like a roast me or something like that.

It's where somebody posts a picture and they try to get comments from people.

And it was this pretty young girl, looks so sweet, 17 or 18 years old.

And she's got this photo where she's smiling.

And the caption is, Can you guys just tell me how to smile so I won't seem weird to other people?

I, other people seem to know how to smile and I don't know how to do it.

And the top comment was

moment of clarity for Reddit was like, holy shit, the internet really fucked up our kids, didn't it?

You know, and I felt, I felt the exact same way of reading it.

It's like, here's a super sweet girl.

And it's like, you look beautiful in your photo and you're smiling.

You're doing it.

You're doing it.

And everyone is encouraging.

And the internet does have those moments where they have that like moment of clarity where they're like, what are we doing here?

And then it's right back to it.

Can I tell you a secret?

Yeah.

We're going to fuck ourselves up regardless, right?

Like before the internet was the internet,

we had the what, the late 90s and the early aughts era of, was it

like that

cocaine chic or whatever it was called, where like everyone had to be incredibly rail thin.

And if you were a pound over rail thin, every magazine would be talking about how you had a pudgy belly or how you looked terrible in a swimsuit.

Like do you remember the incredible body shaming of the early 80s?

We talked about it in the articles where it said Brittany is fat on vacation.

And now, by our standards today, it's like, she looks incredibly fit.

She looks absolutely fit.

And it's like, it's the, so, and that was no internet required, right?

The magazines did all the work.

Uh, you know, you look at the, the, like, early, like the 50s magazine articles about how to like stay fit so that your husband doesn't think you're gross.

And you're like, there's, and people are going to find a medium for body shaming and making themselves feel weird and feel feel like they're doing it wrong regardless.

We like the internet, that makes it very convenient and it makes it very easy, but we would have found a way anyway.

You ever see those old like newspaper articles back from Depression era when they were hawking some kind of meal supplement like a shake you could use that was just had a ton of calories in it.

And the article is all or the pitch for the product is, men don't like a skinny woman here fatten up with our product because it was depression, right?

So there's always something and the standards change, but it does seem like the only way they push that stuff is with negativity.

Where are we going with all this, by the way?

I don't know.

I have no idea.

We were going to talk about the diplomat and we ended up talking about how the internet is just helping us ruin ourselves.

I just don't know what it is.

It's like,

I think we're all reaching this point with social media.

Like you said,

we're in a position where you should be using this.

We have an obligation to be using social media.

I can't make myself do it.

I can't make myself do it either.

And I did it for so long, right?

And then once we stepped away from it, we had a little dose of it when we stepped away for the amazing race for 22 days, right?

Kind of missed it for the first day, not having that smartphone for the first day.

And then it was like, oh, this is actually really nice.

But then we got it back, right?

And it was like, I don't even want this thing.

And then it was.

And then within two days, within two days, it was back to business as usual because we just couldn't help ourselves.

Checking it every, must be every 10 seconds looking at the screen.

Yeah, but I feel like I must have at some point burned myself out.

And that, I've never recovered from that burnout.

Yeah.

You know,

after that experience.

Yeah, I was finally like, I'm good not doing this.

It's when we moved here.

I think it's when we moved here.

Maybe that's it.

Did we go and touch grass and we're like, huh, disgruntled.

We went dark.

We went fully dark, actually.

And when we had like shitty internet or what I called wonderfully mediocre internet.

That was just kind.

It was not mediocre.

It was horrific.

And it was a relief to not have that in a weird way.

And I really, I'm with you.

We do do a podcast every day, but it's you and me talking to each other.

You know what I mean?

Going to post something on social media to even promote this thing, we just, I mean, if you look at it, we're really shitty at it.

We really, I know, I've, every now and again, I'll go through a phase of like, we really should do more to help promote the podcast and get the word out there and stuff.

And I'll like, you know, post episodes on Instagram or something for like maybe, maybe a stretch of a week.

And then I'm like, I can't, I can't do this.

I can't do it.

We've had people who work at these platforms tell us stuff point blank, like your podcast is not going to be surfaced because you don't have ads on your podcast.

Once again, one of these moments where someone in the industry tells you like it is, right?

Like we're not going to serve your podcast if we don't make any money.

Because why would we do that?

That doesn't make any sense for us.

It does not make any sense.

And at the same time, we're just like, well, we don't want to.

Right, but we don't want to, right?

And it's like, to me, a lot of times it's, that's a business thing.

So it's a little bit different.

Honestly, we're being stupid by not doing it.

I realize that, but we're going to be stupid.

We're in a position where we can do that.

But there is like a constant like bending of the knee that I see to the algorithm.

We talked about before how like somebody in a back room can flip a switch and suddenly everybody starts making different kinds of content.

The thing that drives me absolutely bat shit bonkers when I see it now is when people make videos about stuff and they censor themselves, you know, when they say something and then they put like a little bump in or they cross through text in a Instagram post, you know, so that it doesn't get caught by the algorithm.

Like, you think the algorithm hasn't thought of that yet?

Or it's just like they're bending their knee to the computer nanny.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

Stop doing that stuff.

It's, it's, it's impossible to escape.

I can't do it.

I can't do it.

We're looking at, right now, the podcast auto-distributes itself to YouTube.

And I'm thinking about shutting that off because there's a weird thing with YouTube specifically where sometimes it just unpublishes the episode.

So you have to keep an eye on it to then republish it because it unpublished for some reason.

We don't know why it's doing that.

And so we have to keep an eye on it.

And even that is like, it's too much.

It's too much.

So I'm like, maybe we just, maybe we don't publish it on YouTube.

You know, it's, that's not really where the listeners are anyway.

It's just there to like tick a box and it's too much energy.

And I really, I feel like I reached a phase for a long time.

I had a thing where I would delete more tweets than I posted.

Now it's like, I just, that's got to be maybe one in a hundred.

Like I think, oh, that'd be a, my brain still does it.

Oh, that would be a funny social media post.

And then I just don't do it.

I like try to move that into something else.

I can't remember the last time I posted on social media.

It's the social media version of like getting fit, right?

Where if you, um, if you're like looking on Instagram or something and you see someone do like a fitness routine and you're like, that would be great for me.

I should do that.

I'm going to like this post so I can come back to it.

And now by liking the post, you're basically fit yourself, right?

You, you got the dopamine hit

of liking the thing and intending to do the thing, and now you've already moved on.

That is the thing is you could make a post about a topic that you're very passionate about.

You could get a

billion upvotes on Reddit and set the record for the most ever likes on Instagram, and it will mean nothing.

It doesn't mean a goddamn thing.

And in a week, you're going to be chasing that forever and will never be happy, but it didn't get you anything.

And it has, the internet has, I feel like, killed actual activism.

It feels like activism.

It feels like action, but it's just not.

And

I think everybody feels this way, but maybe I'm wrong.

But if the general consensus when I get out there and read, or maybe that's being shaped and given to me as well, is that people are sick of this stuff and they don't want to do it.

They just don't know how to stop it.

But we also don't want anyone else to tell us that we have to stop it and they're going to take it away from us, right?

So

I don't know.

We're 100% problems today and 0% solutions.

I mean, we do have, we do, we're doing the thing where we have rooster teeth.

I really do genuinely feel that these massive sites are going to get overrun with bots and people are not going to want them and they're going to want smaller communities.

Talked about trying to limit the Reddit to the subreddit at 20,000 people.

Reddit didn't allow us to do that.

And

we tried.

We did.

The platform said, no.

And, you know, I do feel fortunate that at this point, we're small enough as a community that it feels like it's real people.

Yeah.

But I don't know how to keep that.

Well, I don't know.

Well, I guess we'll, I guess we'll figure it out as we go.

You know what I mean?

You can make a plan, but I get the feeling, like the famous quote goes, you got a plan to get punched in the face.

I feel like there's going to be a lot of punching in the face over the next five years on a technology level.

A little metaphor there.

Okay, so

like I was saying, the diplomat

is that the longest, Is that the longest tangible?

So, back to the top of the show.

Yeah, as we were saying about the diplomat, yeah, I found out from

comments yesterday that I glossed over the show, The Diplomat, which was nominated for best dramatic series in the Emmys.

It's a Kerry Russell show.

You're a huge fan of Kerry Russell.

It's Kerry Russell, who apparently is the newly appointed U.S.

diplomat.

to the United Kingdom.

This show could not be more tailor-made for me, and somehow I never discovered this thing.

You know what, though?

I'm going to, I got to say, Bernie, for a Kerry Russell fan, you're not a very good Kerry Russell.

I think I might have to take off the belt here, you know, and say I'm just not.

That sounded weird the way I said that.

I don't think I'm the best Carrie Russell fan in the world.

Clearly, I'm not.

You've lost the championship belt.

I'm going to turn in my card.

I think I have to because I haven't even seen the Americans.

I was going to say, isn't Kerry Russell also the Americans, which is a

critical darling of a series?

Everyone has great things to say about the Americans and about Kerry Russell in the Americans.

And you, the Kerry Russell fan, have not seen even the Americans, which that came out.

God,

when did the Americans come out?

It's been out a long time.

Yeah, let's not even talk about it.

I'm clearly, I have to turn to my card.

I'm not a Kerry Russell fan.

I can't claim it.

I am a fan, obviously.

Well, you like that.

I like Kerry Russell a lot.

The problem is, I'm a shitty fan.

How about that?

I'm a shitty fan.

Maybe you can take this

as a project for self-improvement, all right?

You're Kerry Russell fandom.

You're going to watch the Americans.

You're going to watch The Diplomat.

And then we can bring you back the belt.

Carrie Russell as the U.S.

diplomat to the United Kingdom.

How did I feel?

It is very relevant to you, isn't it?

The only way it could be more relevant, Ashley, is like her assistant.

It was a McDonald's double cheeseburger.

It would be like,

and had my name on it as the name of the show.

That's the only way they can make that more relevant to me.

I think I've seen a clip from this show, The Diplomats, and I think I saw it on Instagram or something, and I I didn't even realize what it was at the time.

But I think the only bit I've seen of this show is basically someone telling her that she dresses shitty.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And I was like, I was like, oh, yeah, it does seem like a very European thing to say to an American.

Also, very relevant to me.

Well, I can relate to it.

But so while we're talking about stuff that gets served to you,

I'm curious at this, because this is something I keep seeing over and over and over again everywhere I go.

Are you getting served a lot of stuff about the death of Austin and the death of the Austin comedy scene?

Are you seeing that stuff?

I want to say yes, but not really.

I guess I've been seeing it since before I moved to Austin, right?

I moved to Austin in 2013.

And the entire time I was in Austin, it was people decrying the death of weird Austin, right?

Like Austin's getting too normal.

There's too many people moving to Austin.

And it's hard for me to comment about that because I was one of the people moving to Austin.

But at the time, I was like, I don't know.

I think Austin's a pretty cool place.

but I guess clearly I wasn't here when it was weird.

And so I have no basis for comparison.

But I do, it does seem like every single week, someone's saying that, like, Austin used to be cool and it stopped being cool.

And a lot of times that's coming from people who just moved to Austin.

So I'm not entirely sure what the perspective is on that.

Right.

It's interesting now because it does seem like if you're there for 10 years, 15 years, you're like, oh, it used to be so much better.

Now people are doing that after like 18 months.

It's like they're speed running.

It's like you got to give some time for you to be there, for you to say that, because otherwise you realize it's you.

Like, you're the people who moved here.

Why did Austin get way less cool right when I moved here?

They'll figure that out.

They'll move on to Nashville.

Nashville's the next target.

They'll go there.

I was just curious because I've seen that all over the place lately.

Yeah.

That's, that seems like the headline every single week, though.

It's like, Austin was weird.

Now it's less weird and we're all the poorer for it.

And I'm like, I don't know.

I guess I've never seen it weird then.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

One thing that shocks me about Austin is how did the weird little blue dot in the middle of Texas become like the right wing media mecca of the world?

How did that happen?

Gay frogs, baby.

How did that happen?

Gay frogs.

I get it.

I get it.

You know, he was there.

Alex, you're talking about Alex Jones.

Alex Jones was there the whole time, but he was, he was a fringe wackadoo, right?

But I'm serious, like, especially for young

right-wing, it does seem like Austin is dead center in the middle.

Austin, Texas.

I don't understand why the conservative guys would want to be in Austin because, I mean, then you're probably talking about they're talking about the death of Austin, like Austin sucks.

That's probably coming from a bunch of those guys being like, Austin is really weird.

Yeah, yeah.

Could you try and be less weird?

And Janice Joplin, Willie Nelson, Leslie.

You know, give me a fucking break.

Was it Leslie the one that ran for mayor?

Yeah, yeah, it's our homeless guy who ran for mayor.

And everybody would have photos with Leslie.

Even from Austin, I know he was a controversial figure.

I get it.

I know that.

He was part of the Austin weirdness.

Undeniably part of the weirdness.

Undeniably part of it.

You know who's getting a lot of props though?

Longtime Austin dude has a new movie coming out is Richard Linkletter, a guy like just as like the backbone, I feel like one of the backbones of the Austin entertainment industry.

And that guy can't get enough credit.

And he has just been like

moving ahead, head down, creating a body of work.

And it's just like over time has just proven proven what a stalwart guy that is.

Yeah.

And also, I think one of those great examples, too, of a non-Hollywood filmmaker in a lot of his stuff, you'd look at it and go, well, that's kind of weird.

I know when things get smaller, it seems like, oh, that's like a bad thing.

But when things are big and huge, like Austin is right now, you got to remember, it's like, nobody wants this.

Nobody seems to like this.

So when it gets small again, that's the time to like.

Get on board with it, you know?

Get on board.

Let's get small again.

A lot of that in our lives, actually.

A lot of that in our lives.

All right, who do we have to thank for keeping Austin weird, Ashley?

I want to say thank you to Ty and the Adean for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

Don't know what this episode was today.

No clue.

It was, you know what, this was a very rambly, rambly, thoughtful episode about a bunch of bullshit.

Sounds like one of our Patreon weekend chats.

Anyway, that does it for us today.

September 16th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.