2025.10.15: Whether You Should

Stop!

Welcome to John Macroissant!

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Get up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because

it is

for October 15th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there waiting for the drop.

Ben King.

How'd it been, everybody?

Hi, everybody.

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy, are my arms tired.

You know, probably the best example in my career of

young people hearing things for the first time and misattributing where it came from.

Like, we're all just like recycling material at this point.

Matt made that joke on the front page of Roosterteeth.com back in the day.

Like, he flew back from Denver, and boy, are my arms tired.

And one of the first comments with like tons of likes was, Way to steal a joke from South Park.

It's like, South Park?

That's, you know, that came like in the one millionth iteration of that joke.

I mean, there are no new original ideas, let's be honest.

No, there's really not.

Especially in the age of AI.

No.

Let's go into it straight away.

How do you feel about Sue?

Do you feel like we're on the cusp of something?

Gut reaction.

Is it going to just pop, flatten out, or are we going to go like a logarithmic step up?

Yeah, I think humanity is doomed.

Yeah, you do.

I think...

Like a kid born today is not going to know what's real and what's not.

And it's essentially we're just going to be living in the matrix.

So, you know, we had a good run.

I mean, we've had, we've we've seen some good stuff.

I feel like I'm the right age because I think I'm the last kid who remembered the pain of using dial-up internet.

And that was like, you know, it was a mission to get connected to the world.

I do think a lot of people, as they get older, think they were born at the right time.

Like, God, I was born at the right time.

They get nostalgic for their own childhood.

What I find interesting about all of us who are alive today

is we benchmark that on where we fell of when the internet was created.

Like millennials would typically say, are you comfortable saying what year you were born in?

92.

92.

Okay.

So like, I know some people that are like, you know, we worked with Barb and Gav who were about six years older than you, four or five years older than you at least.

And they're in that window where they had some childhood pre-internet, really before it came around.

When you say dial-up, what do you mean?

Do you mean you were dialing into an ISP or something like...

Didn't you run an internet ISP company?

Well, for some people, dial-up means AOL and CompuServe, like the pre-internet services that existed.

But I was going to go say AOL, but you didn't have to.

I had a lot of years.

No, yeah, that was an American thing.

Essentially, it would be is you, it would be like the internet, but you'd have to connect through your phone line and you'd charge you like five pounds a minute or something ridiculous.

And it would be, yeah, extremely, extremely slow.

Like to the kids these days, you don't know how slow.

That shit was like it was a to download an episode of Red vs.

Blue, I think it would take like over a day.

Yep.

My favorite story I would always ask people because I wanted to know how things propagated and how did people find out about it.

So it was like just like an icebreaker.

If someone was nervous at an event or something, talking to me, I would just say, so how'd you hear about it?

What was the first time?

How'd you hear about red versus blue?

All sorts of stories.

It's usually land party, sleepover.

Older brothers showed it to me.

We've lost the art of the sleepovers/slash/land party, I think.

I think the sleepovers are in the past.

I think Stranger Danger, the rise of Stranger Danger, got rid of sleepovers, unfortunately.

But the best one I ever heard was

a guy was at his local pool and he went to move his chair, like his beach chair at the pool.

And there was a CD underneath it, and it had six episodes of Red vs.

Blue burned on it.

And he went home, stuck the CD he found at the pool in his computer, and then watched Red vs.

Blue and was hooked to the point where he was then coming to live events and stuff like that.

That's crazy.

So now I just go scatter like CDs out the window.

That's how I market the shows.

I will say, because it is interesting you mentioned that, but I am extremely grateful to be born in a time with electricity.

You know, heating.

I think about that up here a lot.

Yeah.

We just got

yeah, we just got fiber internet here.

And I was last time you were here, what we have like 100 megabit Starlink.

I'm using the Starlink, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Before that, we had 0.7 megabit, but now we've got 950 megabits.

And more importantly for us, we've got like 130 going up, which is great.

It's always a thing, too.

We just got it.

So it's the latest and greatest.

And we suffered so long without it.

But then the people who got it first have like 300 megabit.

And they're like, why do you have 950 megabits up in the middle of nowhere in Scotland?

It's like, yeah, but we just got it.

You guys got the early stuff.

Now we got the refined stuff.

I know.

I remember when I first got gigabit internet in London and I was like, there's no way I can actually max this out.

It got to the point where you'd be like downloading stuff and it's like, actually, the bottleneck at that point is the actual connection to the data center that website is hosted in.

It's going to be.

You can't go any higher than that.

Right.

When your bottleneck is the internet itself.

Yeah, it's a strange situation to be in, yeah.

You're yelling out the window for people to make YouTube videos faster.

They're the bottleneck in production.

AI will fix that, though, too.

Now people can just type in whatever they want and get it.

It is very funny.

I was actually watching lately the House of Guinness on Netflix, which is about the Guinness family, and it's set in the, oh, Christ, I'm not going to say, was it 1800s?

Uh-huh.

1900s.

Something.

You know, olden times, Victorian times.

When they did worry about electricity.

And like, when are they going to invent electricity around here?

Yeah, you know, the lighting candles and stuff.

Like, that seems like a real faff you know

but you know like i say i think it is i am i am conscious of that and i do think like you know when people moan about their first world problems and such and like well you know you could have been you know they're at least 2 000 years before us in which you could have been born that would have been difficult right i don't think my my privileged you know lifestyle would i wouldn't been able to survive

in in texas the equivalent of that is like guys who was like man i would have loved to live back during the old west during the Wild West days.

Like, first of all, you would be dead in about a week from being shot by somebody who was meaner than you.

But my, my old boss, my business mentor, he had an uncle who was like the first ever, I believe, Mexican Texas Ranger.

And if you've ever seen the movie True Grit, there's a big deal about like, some people are U.S.

Marshals, some people are Texas Rangers.

Matt Damon's character plays a Texas Ranger, and it's a big distinction.

Like, they're very proud of themselves, and it's a very prestigious organization.

I don't want to take anything away from it.

My old boss told a story about from his uncle's memoirs.

He got to the edge of a town after riding on horseback, and there was a sign saying, Don't come into town.

There's a cholera outbreak.

But he said, screw it.

I got to go in anyway.

Because he was so covered in lice head to toe that he had to get into town.

to take a bath, which I'm pretty sure choleras spread via water, like contaminated water.

So he goes into the cholera town because it's like I'd rather die he's got the time

It's just like that's not in any of the movies, you know, they don't show Kevin Coster like kicking lice off of himself or anything like that, but I do wonder too

We talk about kids, you know growing up and saying being wistful for their own childhood, but then the people who came after us like Gen Z they grew up with this stuff They never knew a world without it and they kind of don't care like they don't care about going to the mall They don't care about like getting on their bikes and stuff like that and like riding around the neighborhood because they didn't do it.

I worried are P, the kids who grow up after us, are they, we're going to talk to them about, you don't know what's real and what's not.

They're like, I don't care.

Like, what difference does it make to me?

It's so foreign to us to even think about that, but it could happen.

I think, well, it is interesting because, you know, especially, you know, in the marketing industry, they'll try to get into the brain of these crazy kids with their skibbity's and their

brain rot and such.

And their disposable income.

Yeah.

But, you know, there are some things that are surprising.

For example, like there's a big kind of not blowback, but there are a lot of them switching to like old analog devices.

Don't you seen people are buying like cassette tapes?

You know, they're buying old iPods.

They're buying really old analog cameras.

Like there is some interest in like the non-digital coming up from them.

So maybe that's like a kind of backlash from them for that.

Also very interesting, which is relevant in my industry.

I mean, there's a lot of backlash to alcohol starting now where a lot of the kids coming up, just are not even drinking, which is having downstream effects on the economy because all the the bars and nightclubs can't make money really if

they're not buying alcohol.

So they're trying to pivot to

the CBD drinks or soft drinks and such.

So it's an interesting group.

I don't understand them.

I think they're crazy.

Once again, like the little windows that happen generationally, alcohol seems to be having a moment that tobacco had about like 20 or 30 years ago.

You can go look at movies.

Everybody smokes in the movies.

You watch a show like Mad Men.

People are smoking at work in a conference room.

That was not a big deal at all.

It really was not a big deal.

You just blow it straight in someone's face and no one cares.

No one cared.

No one cared.

In fact, I'm weirdly nostalgic for going into a bar and smelling smoke because that's what bars smelled like when I was a kid at restaurants even.

We'd smoke on airplanes.

For God's sake.

I think I have a Nathan for you episode that will help with that.

Oh, is it really?

What is that?

What is this one?

Because he wants to be able to smoke in a bar, so he manages to do it, but he has to rent out a bar and put on a play.

Because if you're performing in a play, you can smoke.

Right.

So everyone in the bar is acting in an improv play.

I love it.

I love it.

That guy's brilliant, man.

Did you ever watch The Curse?

A little bit of it.

Not a lot of it.

Do you know that our old workmate, Nathan Zellner, was involved, directed one or two of those episodes?

Oh, really?

Zellner brothers, him and David.

Yeah.

And sometimes I'm not sure how they divide up duties, but it's one of the rare instances where Nathan Fielder has turned over to somebody else.

And the Zellners are a great choice for that.

Really great choice.

But yeah,

everyone smoked when I was a kid.

When I talk to anybody who's younger than me about smoking, I have to to say the weirdest thing.

I say, well, I haven't really smoked since I was about 14,

which sounds like, it sounds almost evil, but it was just, it was just the way it was back then.

But that, that sort of, that happens every day.

Like, you remember, I don't know if you're familiar with Skins, which was the British like teenager show.

I never saw it, but I'm familiar with it.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, all the background, it's like, surely kids aren't, kids like 15, 16 years old, they aren't out doing cocaine and MDMA and drinking.

And I was like, oh, they're not getting into nightclubs at 16.

I was like, boy, were they?

Yeah, were they?

Yep.

But you just don't think they are, but they are.

What time period does that take place in?

Well, it was contemporaneous with myself, so I know.

So I was, so I left school in 2008.

So it would have been 2006, 2008-ish kind of time.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

That makes sense to me.

Before like the

puritanical gates slammed closed.

But yeah, I think I do worry like what's coming down the pipe.

We were talking about this in the car.

You're a guy who has his finger on the pulse.

I've I've known you since you were a teenager, and I could always go to you for new technology and stuff.

But even you're getting to the point, like, look, I'm going to dedicate myself to certain things, and I can't keep up with everything.

And we were talking about FinTech.

The buzz that's going on right now beyond tariffs and everything is everyone is watching this one cryptocurrency wallet that just kind of showed up.

This is from three days ago from Unusual Wales.

It says, look at this.

A new crypto account was opened yesterday morning.

30 minutes before Trump's announcement of 100% tariffs on China, it added a huge multi-million dollar levered Bitcoin short position.

The market then dumped.

The trader made a profit of $192 million in two hours.

And everyone is wondering what is up with this account.

One of the interesting things about blockchain is everyone can see it.

So now everyone's monitoring it.

Yesterday, it put in a half a billion dollar, $500 million short position against Bitcoin.

So now

everyone is speculating who owns this account from like financial guys in Hong Kong all the way up to is it owned by the president of the United States?

And everyone is wondering, everyone is watching this thing and wondering what it knows about Bitcoin.

And so it's got it's got the

modern financial world enraptured at the moment, even more so than like tariffs on cabinets, which is another big deal today.

I mean, I barely understand real money.

you know

right interest rates and mortgages and such like i can't wrap my head around digital Bitcoin stuff.

I just, I tried.

My friends have tried to explain it.

I'm just, I don't have the space in my brain.

Which is interesting to hear you say that because you were the guy who was like anything and everything.

Yeah, and I'm not like, you know, I'm not dismissive of new technologies, but like, you know, it's especially like the, well, I mean, the NFTs were bullshit.

That was always.

You know, we're going to sell some digital trading cards.

They were always bullshit.

There was never like.

It was so clearly not a thing.

It was so weird.

That was people who had a ton of disposable money, I think.

I never knew anybody who was excited about that stuff.

I think it must have just been money laundering or something.

Or it revealed to me people who were like, really just, they were in it to make a buck.

You know, people who got really excited about NFTs, it's like, if someone talks about a new technology and the only thing they have to say about it is how much money they can make from putting it out there, what's the point?

You know what I mean?

It's like, if it doesn't add anything to the world, if it doesn't create any good or anything like that, they're just talking about, yeah, but the upside of this or you know the return on that, that's not what it's all about, right?

You know, some people just, that's all they care about.

Well, similarly, like new technology, like a lot of people get excited about technology for technology's sake.

True.

And it's like, true.

Well,

what's it solving?

What's the actual solution?

And, you know, I think that was one of the things that a company like Apple did well where, you know, they switched from selling a computer based on technical specifications.

Oh, it's got X amount more RAM, whatever, to now it's just, here's an experience for you.

And like making it actually just a more solution-driven message than a, you know, it has so-and-so

gigaflops and blah, blah, blah.

Right, right.

Goes back to that old Jurassic Park quote: like, you're so consumed with whether or not you could, you just give you should, kind of a thing.

Yeah, I feel that, I feel that entirely with the AI video stuff, that quote, exactly.

Yeah, but Archie, I'm guilty of that on some level.

I think we all are on some level.

And obviously, some people are guilty of it on like a trillion-dollar global scale, like Sam Altman.

But I was even thinking when you were talking about that, like I look at a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that was generated two years ago.

And then I look at one that was generated six months ago versus the fidelity of one generated yesterday.

And I'm like, this is incredible.

What a huge step up in fidelity of a video of a guy eating spaghetti, right?

It's just like, why am I falling into this trap of like, who cares about the fidelity of something like that?

It has no relevance to the world in any way whatsoever.

You know, I get what it indicates, but yeah, I got to be a little introspective when you say something like that because I fall into that trap myself sometimes.

My TikTok feed lately, which I love, by the way, and I'm like, China, you can have all my data.

Like, it's worth it.

It's worth it.

So it's banned in America.

I'm not here, so we're fine.

Good luck with all that data, China.

What are you going to do with it?

And a lot of my feed has been these reposted like Sora videos, and I regret to say they are deeply funny.

So it's like, but all the funny ones are really like bad taste humor, which is my kind of humor.

And it's all based on like real people, right?

So it's really like copyright IP issue based.

You know, it's Queen Elizabeth doing a WWE entrance.

Jesus.

All those sorts of Diana having a fun, you know, all those sorts of things.

And they're funny, but then at the same time, it's like, okay, well, there is the novelty factor to that stuff.

Like, is that going to be funny a year from now?

Probably not.

And it's like, so yes, the quality is astonishing and they are getting very good.

But then the downside is, well, you know, it's going to destabilize elections and it's going to, all the deep fakes and all the disinformation.

And then, you know, when you talk to, when you listen to like Sam Altman at OpenAI or these other AI companies and you say, well, what are you going to do about the downstream bad effects of this stuff?

And the response is basically, oh, we're going to just let society figure that out.

Wow.

They're like, nah, we're just going to put it out there and see what happens.

And it's like, okay, I mean, but you don't have to.

And other knockout effects, like here we are, we're worried about, you know, misinformation and potential effects from climate change.

And here we are inventing something that like triples down on both.

Yeah.

You know, I even read an article the other day that just

stabbed me in the heart.

It was about how they're rescinding restrictions on coal in America.

We're going back to coal because we need to power data centers for AI.

You know,

call it a conspiracy theory.

I'll just say that like this is my sci-fi writer brain kicking in here.

I mean, let's just say this: if they're, we're all heading towards uh AGI, right?

That's the thing, general intelligence.

That's the goal.

That's what they want to do, but there's no obvious path to actually do it at the moment.

Right, but they're saying, like, we'll get there eventually.

And that's what these trillion-dollar bets are on.

Yeah.

Is because whoever, that's a gateway technology, and whoever gets it first, it's like, you know, watching people chase the holy grail, essentially.

All I'm saying is, if something like that spontaneously generated itself, if it existed today, for instance, like maybe somebody created it and it got out of a lab.

Like that's a feature.

If it existed today, if there was an artificial general intelligence out there today, right now, let's go to Dave.

And it was influencing the world, what would that look like?

And would it look like a lot like the world that we're dealing with now with destabilization via information channels?

Would it look like inexplainable efforts to create data centers and harness energy and everything else and rolling back of like things that we've had locked in place for like the last 30 years and the pathways we were on.

Even though they were like shaky, they seem to have unraveled very quickly.

What would that look like if there was a, if there was a hidden AGI out there hiding itself and acting to build itself up before it's revealed?

So it's, I think it is Mark Zuckerberg, right, who's, I think he's said he's going to do like several trillion dollars in investment in like new data centers for that stuff.

And people have always said he's a lizard.

So like maybe there's some truth to that.

Right now, I've read some articles too that he owns something like 9% of one of the Hawaiian islands.

And it's one of the small ones you don't.

Oh, who doesn't?

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

We might own one.

Who knows, right?

But yeah,

he's building a doomsday bunker, you know, which is, they're basically creating, a lot of these billionaires are creating

doomsday bunkers to hide from the fallout of the disaster that they're creating.

Which is just like, maybe just stop all of it altogether, right?

If you have to sink all of your fortune into creating the safety mechanism to protect you from the thing that you're making, just don't make the thing.

Yeah, it's a short path.

I think the answer, I think, honestly, governments should by now have done very hardcore regulation.

Like, they're too behind on that.

Yeah, but they're behind on everything, aren't they?

Yeah.

Well, that's government for you.

Yeah, weren't you dealing with something like that, like the tourist thing in Barcelona?

Oh, man.

Well, that's a hard pivot.

We actually got to be careful.

There's a really interesting story out there right now, which pertains to both you and me.

This is going to color your comments, but the story that I woke up to this morning is

six visa holders in the U.S.

had their visas revoked, and they've been, that just means they've been deported.

Right.

They got deported from the U.S.

and all six of them were deported for the same reason.

And the headline was announced by the State Department where it was all for tweets that they made about Charlie Kirk after his death.

And they were seen as being negative or celebratory comments.

And so they revoked the visa of those people, people from like Germany, Argentina.

But the State Department like announces gleefully and then posted all of their tweets for you to read.

And then after each one, after they quote tweeted, they just wrote visa revoked, visa revoked, visa revoked.

So it's something that a lot of people don't think about.

You live on a visa.

I live on a visa.

So whenever we talk about like local government or like where we live, it's like it's something that can affect us in a way that we don't possibly anticipate.

Well, I live in a country with a good government, I would say, is the nice way to put it.

No, I mean, we are successfully batting back.

I say we, I'm not Spanish, but you know, they are successfully batting back the

bad people.

I think the, I mean, while she was saying that, I was thinking, well, that's surely a First Amendment issue, but I guess it doesn't apply to non-citizens, I suppose.

Right.

When does that line get crossed, right?

Is it when you're in the country?

Is it when you're a citizen of the country?

You know, it's up for debate.

But they definitely, I would say they fall in the gray area and now they've been deported.

Can you imagine imagine going into work and saying, hey,

I can't come to work anymore because I made a tweet?

Yeah.

I mean, lots of people made these tweets and you can debate the morality of the tweets, but a lot of those people still get to stay in their home and stay, you know, in their job and everything else.

And to be fair, it loops back to the Jimmy Kimmel thing, where I did see a lot of conservative sort of podcasters, commentators say that he shouldn't, that shouldn't have happened.

He should be allowed to.

have that free speech and not get you know retribution for that and he didn't even say any ban to be honest um So yeah, I think there is an interesting,

I think people are like starting to push back a little bit on that, of that sort of overreaction from government pushback to just speech and the speech that you may not like.

Or even in those cases, some people said, oh, I don't like what he said, but I don't think he should be retaliated against for it.

Is free speech a thing in Spain?

Like, do they talk about it?

Because in America, it is literally one of the most important amendments to the framework constitution of the country.

But is that a thing in, like, it's not a thing here in the uk it's interesting yeah it's interesting because it is like you say it's the first amendment so it's like it is enshrined in your constitution i think uk and spain

i it there is it is accounted for but i think it's not as like enshrined in a constitution necessarily um but you know i mean like uk for sure i can say there is some uh some news stories going on lately of um

people being arrested for tweets inciting violence or you know talking about particularly when it comes to like immigration.

And

so it doesn't sound like you spend much time, like mental overhead, navigating the politics of Spain and worrying about it as an expat in Spain.

I mean, I do pay attention to it.

And especially, well, I pay attention to the national and then the locals.

Actually, I can vote in the local elections, which is.

I can vote in the local elections here, too.

Which I was surprised by.

I was shocked by that, too, that I'm allowed to vote without being a citizen.

But yeah, and they were pushing me to do it.

Yeah, when I first arrived here.

Yeah, which is good, actually.

I think that that makes sense.

Yeah, it was definitely interesting.

I can't vote for parliament.

So I can't do that.

So I guess anything that would qualify as a national election.

And I can't vote for King.

They left me out of that one.

No, no, we're all kind of locked out of that decision.

Right.

I was going to vote for Jimmy Carr.

So I have the protest vote for King.

I couldn't think of a UK celebrity.

We just ran into this.

We were talking about the difference between UK.

You know, if you go to a different country and you see their celebrities, you're like, I don't know who any of these people are.

That's something that as an american i definitely have a bias towards and there's a show here called the traders i'm sure some people have watched it there's an american version of it but they're doing a celebrity season of it i only recognized stephen fry that was the only person i recognized i didn't even know he was in that i haven't watched it but i didn't even know he's in the but i know there's a lot of famous very british famous people in it and ben was like no these are like actually very very famous people

yeah like we Alan Carr is one of them.

Good on that casting team.

They've done well.

I was embarrassed to know.

I still don't know who Alan Carr is, but I'll take your word for you.

I think you get along well with him.

He does a chat show.

Oh, does he really?

Okay.

Okay.

I need to watch.

You watched,

what's the Paul Thomas Anderson movie?

I want to say like all the battles everywhere all at once, but it's not that.

What is it called?

That's kind of

a good way to describe it.

One battle after another.

One battle after another.

That got enormously high rankings.

Well, so this is my, so my friend, so like, don't listen if you don't want any, I'm not going to spoil it, but my friend hadn't watched it yet and he was trying to tell me like, well, what did you think of it?

And I didn't want to tell him because I went in completely blind.

That's how I do movies now i don't watch trailers i just go in blind and i didn't want to set his expectations at a level

and i was like i think it's my favorite movie i've ever seen you think it's your favorite movie you've ever seen really and that and i've seen some good yeah

i'm dying to see it i love paul thomas anderson i'm actually shocked that i haven't gone to see it yet but i've been really busy with other stuff and honestly i i kind of want to see uh Tron Aries in theaters before

is that like the third or the fourth or what's going on?

I'm not sure.

It depends on which ones you count.

But it's basically the fourth one or excuse me the third one there's Tron Tron Legacy and now Tron Aries because the only reason I want to go see it in theater is because I'm told by everybody it's terrible oh but it's such a spectacle you want to see it in a theater in the big oh there's yeah lots of things like that for sure yeah and so it's uh it's one of those things where it's like I love the Tron aesthetic so much that we'll go take a

walk through the IMAX theater down in Edinburgh that's how far I'd have to go to like go watch it on IMAX when there are other sort of spectacle movies I do definitely I literally go to London to see them in the biggest screen I can because we don't have such great ones in Barcelona.

And I do that every time.

Like I want to see it on the best possible screen, best possible venue.

And it's always lost on me though.

Like even after five minutes, you know, it's a Gavin always had a better eye for that kind of stuff.

Like he would tell me after Interstellar, what do you think when they changed the full IMAX aspect ratio?

And I said, I didn't notice that.

Dude, I saw Dune in the BFI IMAX before it switched to 4K and I didn't know.

So it was 2K.

And I was so angry, sat there.

I i was like do i leave like am i is this gonna ruin this experience for me because it was blurry as oh was it really yeah like even like do you ever watch hunger games was that one you watched yeah apparently when she goes up through the tube oh it does yeah yeah they change the bags that's very that's very smart yeah it is really smart i

i'm sure emotionally it registered with me you know which is the intention really but

i never noticed it honestly i never noticed it all right ben uh you're gonna be back with us tomorrow right you think yeah go on why not we're having our first uh ever well the of the new generation of Rushith, we're having our first ever Rooshi summit here in Summit.

We're having our salon where we sit down and plan out what we're doing for the next year.

So that's what we'll be doing this week.

So, Ben will be back with us.

I'll be back with you as well tomorrow.

We hope you all will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.