2025.10.08: The Cool Teacher

Enough is enough.

I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday to Friday play.

Hey, we're recording the podcast.

Get up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is MORNING SUBWER!

For October 8th, 2025, my name is Bertie Burns, sitting right over there, humping on hump day.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

Always be humping.

That's my motto.

A-B-H, always be humpering.

Right out of the gate.

That drop, by the way, was part of the episode on Monday.

And I thought, ah, free drop.

I don't have to work for this one.

I've already done the work.

Besides, if we get a little giggle listening to it, then that just makes the morning brighter.

Monday to Friday planes.

You know, there's a group of writers sitting there thinking they're watching him talk.

Somebody goes, I got it.

Monday to Friday plane.

Do you think anyone does it?

Like, they intentionally try to get the most ridiculous ones possible.

Do they bring in like the bad lip reading guys?

Yeah,

and just and just say,

what can you make out of this that is absolutely stupid?

90% sure.

90% sure over here.

Those guys are from Austin.

The bad lip read.

Yeah.

One of those weird things that you don't, thing you don't associate with Austin.

Another thing that you never associate with Austin, even though they're like, you always hear about like Rodriguez and Matthew McConaughey and Richard Linkliter, if you're a film buff, Mike Judge, never hear about Mike Judge.

Mike Judge is a weird dude, keeps to himself, does his own thing.

But makes loads of stuff.

But makes hit after hit, banger after banger.

So what you would say is that like Mike Judge lets Mike Judge's work speak for Mike Judge.

The weird thing is, it's like if he's going to say something, he's going to do it in the content.

If you see a Mike Judge like piece of content, for lack of a better term, and you think, I didn't like that so much.

Give it a decade.

Like idiocracy, when that came out, everyone was like, this movie kind of sucks.

20 years later, everyone's like, it's depressing how accurate this was.

No Stradamus in a feature film.

Right, that they were trying to make something so far-fetched that it would never be possible.

And yet, here we are.

And yet, somehow now becoming irrelevant because it's like,

yeah, we're now beyond that.

Yeah, it's uh, it can be a little bit depressing sometimes, but you know, you have to take the joy you can get from an idiocracy while you have it.

Housekeeping, yesterday's drop I can now reveal was from the movie Rushmore by Wes Anderson.

Rushmore, kid from Houston, Texas, from the memorial area of Houston, Texas, a little Wes Anderson.

Did I ever tell you that?

Did he go to your university?

Did I ever tell you the weird story about that?

No.

I recently, when I was doing, when I did the interview with Robert Rodriguez, one of the things I did was I got in contact with the people at TSTV because I did an interview with them.

Robert used to to write a comic strip and draw a comic strip called Los Hooligans, which is the name of his production company, used to write that for the Daily Texan.

The University of Texas has a daily newspaper, at least it did when newspapers were a thing.

The entire back page of the paper was like student artists making dozens, at least a dozen comic strips.

It was pretty cool.

Robert Rodriguez was one of them.

Another guy was, if you watch Spill.com, Corey Coleman had an extremely popular one called Eddie the Albino Squirrel.

So I was in there and one of the things we used to do is we used to teach classes.

And they keep discovering stuff because there's not much media recorded in the mid-90s when we were all at the University of Texas.

One of the things they found was when you would check out equipment from TSTV, and that was the draw for the student television station, is you could actually get your hands on recording equipment.

And it was one of the only ways to do so, right?

Because it was like really difficult to get this recording equipment if you don't have, you know, some way to access it.

So you would join TSTV and then you you could check it out and make your stuff.

This is all like ancient history shit.

Sorry, guys.

Matt and I, when we were making the schedule, this is 1996,

we went skulking through the halls of the graduate building for the film school because they had an Avid, which an Avid was one of the first non-linear editors, which meant you didn't have to have like transfer the film to tape and then edit your film in order.

Like you had to go scene by scene and get all your shots right.

Like clip by clip.

Assembly editing, essentially, to where if like you wanted to change a shot two minutes into the film, you had to re-edit basically the whole thing after that.

It was, it was a tough deal back then.

There were people who were like cutting film on Steenbeck, but even that was like you had a deck with two reels of film and you roll it across this apparatus in the middle by which you would sit there and literally cut film and tape it together.

Wow.

And then you would do that with the negative and then make a print from that.

I never actually did that level, but it's that is the technology on which all later editing software is based.

It's why you have little razors and stuff like that for your tools and things.

It's all based on the initial.

It's like why the save icon is a floppy disk and no one who's growing up now has any idea what a floppy disk is.

It's just a save icon.

Yeah, it's just a save icon.

They've never seen a floppy disk.

They wouldn't know anything about that.

It could hold 1.44

megabytes.

That was the big one, was the floppy that could hold 1.4 megabytes.

But anyway, so we would check out equipment and then we had a tape that was there that you could just use as a tape uh to record like five or six seconds of footage to make sure the camera was operating correctly you could white balance it and do it and that's one of the things that i would do i helped work on the system because i was the computer science guy i helped work on the inventory system and the checkout system because it was all just like

almost like word of mouth like people would write a note on a post-it note like who had the cameras and stuff so i i helped build an actual inventory and checkout system

They two or three years ago, COVID era, they were going through some of that stuff.

Somebody sat down and watched the test tape, and they found like all these people who are on the test tape.

And I got contacted because I said, Here's Bernie having a conversation with somebody.

You can't see him, but he's off camera in like 1997, talking, chatting with someone while they're testing the equipment.

And I'm not sure if it's public.

I'll see.

We'll put that in the link dump if it is.

If we can find it.

And trust me, when someone contacts you from the university and says, hey, we found a tape of you talking from two decades ago, you're like, oh, shit.

Did your butthole punker?

What's on it?

What did you find?

Who do I have to pay off?

You know, because you just never know.

But it's a pretty benign thing of just having a conversation.

A guy that I greatly admire and respect, a guy named Ed Garanya.

I was talking about him and he was leaving the station.

He was the guy who gave me my first yes in entertainment.

He was the guy who said, I wandered down there and he was the station manager.

And I said, as a computer science student, can I come down here and take these classes and learn how to edit and work here?

And Ed, who was station manager, like there were seven employees, he pops out and he goes, You want to work here?

And I go, Yeah, I'd really like to work here if that's okay.

And he goes, No, I don't care.

Nice.

And thus began my career in media.

I was going to say that, like, the first yes is a big one.

That's an important milestone.

But yeah, that kind of it does, it doesn't feel like it at the time.

I'll never forget it.

You got to remember your first yes, the first person who says yes to you, man, and starts that journey because you always need someone to say yes at the beginning.

But

wrapping this back around, long ass story.

Somebody recently discovered on my last trip there, going through the archives, the paper system with index cards, when people would be certified for the equipment by taking the class.

There was a young fellow by the name of Wes Anderson who took a class so that he could check out cameras in order to record some kind of video for his landlord, a commercial or something.

What?

And so nobody knows because it's not signed who the instructor was on the index card.

But one of us has the bragging rights of now saying they taught Wes Anderson how to use a eight millimeter, not even high eight, just straight eight millimeter tape recorder in order to record video footage.

I always wonder with a lot of those like old inventorying systems, like how much stuff could you just get away with?

If you wrote something on an index card, could you just start checking stuff out?

Because who's like, who's going to go back and check it?

Your name's on an index card.

It means you can do that.

You just like.

Slip it in there, right?

Just slip it in the pile.

And now you can just check out your video equipment.

I always wondered a a thing, like when I, because I spent a lot of time in the library as a kid, I would check out a lot of books at the library.

And I always wondered, because they would go in and they would stamp, there's a little card inside the book where they would stamp when the book is due back.

And I was like, yeah, but how do they know?

Like, I know now when it's supposed to come back, but like, do they have like an elaborate tracking system?

Are they going to come for me?

Like, how are they going to know that I have the book?

Turns out they had computers at the time.

But

I always wondered that, like, before computers, did they handwrite them down?

I'm pretty sure they they were running on like Apple II, you know, the black and green, probably like putting in a floppy disk with like the 1.4 megabit capacity to track who is, you know, who's taking what book, right?

And then like, what check against it and call my mom.

But I always wondered, right?

Like before all that, how much could you get away with by just faking it and writing it down?

Oh, a ton.

I'm sure.

I'm sure.

Did you ever, when you were in school, were you issued textbooks in your public school that then had the names of the kids that had previously had that textbook?

Yes.

And also, when we were ever issued a textbook, we had to do the extra thing, which was cover the textbook.

We had to wrap the textbook in like

brown paper bags to preserve the textbook and keep it like clean and tidy for the children who would come after.

I took an AP history when I was a junior.

And it was weird because it was

so advanced, I can AP as a junior.

This was even to show you how uh college really is you know because it was kids who were getting ready to go to university was you actually could buy your textbook which was really strange and a system that developed was we would buy the textbooks from the kids the year before us and I had a friend Jennifer Haley who is now a very successful playwright She sold me her book and she had gone through because we couldn't highlight in our books that we were given by the school, but because she had bought the textbook, which by the way, I remember was like $25.

Yeah, try to get away with that now.

Have you heard of inflation?

Do you know how much books cost?

Because you didn't go to university.

Do you know the racket that buying books at university is?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I hear a lot about it indirectly.

I never had to suffer through it, but the books are hundreds of dollars.

And they're usually written like by the professor and updated every year.

And you have to have the current year's model.

So you can't get a used book, right?

You're not allowed a used book because that's not in the curriculum.

The curriculum calls for this year's edition.

And it can be like an absolute nightmare.

People spend as much on books as they do on tuition.

Hundreds of dollars per book.

And then you go to sell it back.

And like you said, now suddenly your U.S.

history text is irrelevant somehow.

Yeah.

And you go to sell it back and it's worth nothing.

To relate this to our audience, GameStop aspires to this model.

And

it's a huge difference.

I know that because when I was young, my mom went back to university and she would go into

the university bookstore.

And I'm pretty sure they had a section where the students could sell their books back and then you could buy them from the bookstore.

Probably not as cheap as you could if you went student to student in that kind of chain, but you could go in and buy a used copy of the textbook for a discount.

And that was like, you know, a thing that the university supported.

Not anymore.

No, not anymore.

Not anymore.

Yeah.

So it's a complete racket.

So

all this leads leads to the fact that the person who won the drop contest yesterday.

We're almost at the end of the housekeeping.

The person who won the drop contest yesterday.

Actually, Calvin P, one of our moderators, won it and got it first.

But listen,

I have to, you know, avoid any sense of impropriety with our t-shirt contest.

So I'm just going to give it to the person who also got it in addition to Calvin.

Calvin still gets his t-shirt, but I'm going to give it, you know what?

And screw it.

I'm just going to give it to a lot of people who guessed it in the comments.

comments anyway in the root sheath comments but the contest now over the the drop comes from rush more it's uh the jason schwartzman character after his big play and he's uh in public school and he's mad because somebody dropped a line and he uh he goes after him well i'm really glad we got through the housekeeping so that's our show everybody we are like 15 minutes in

so uh i guess it's got more of a follow-up episode today anyway because one of the big stories developing actually is the Xbox thing.

Have you been following that thing with the price change?

Yes.

So it looks like our speculation was fairly on point yesterday that it is a region-based thing.

Specifically, there are countries in the EU where I guess that kind of price hike is not allowed and a couple of other countries as well where it's not, the price is not going up for grandfathered members.

Let me see if I can find the list of countries.

So the language I was trying to figure out yesterday, I'm fairly certain now, was Polish.

That's what I was trying to figure out.

I see.

So yes, we have Xbox Game Pass subscribers in Poland, Ireland, Italy, Germany, and South Korea have all received emails basically saying, hey, your price isn't going up.

You know, it's one of those things, too.

It's like one of the reasons that this is, and a lot of this is speculation, but there's a Verge article that we'll link in the link dump where Xbox actually confirmed that they are delaying the price change for some markets.

The UK and the US are not part of the delay.

Sorry, that's most of our audience.

So your price will be going up.

The subtext here, though, is that these other places have consumer protections and our markets do not.

And that's what our takeaway from this delay should be.

It's like the reason why they can't do it is speculation, once again, is that in most markets, they have to communicate at a certain time window when they're going to raise the price of an auto-renewing subscription or just general consumer price protections.

And we just don't have those.

And why don't we?

Why don't we?

If we're the biggest market in the world, how come we don't leverage that as consumers and get these protections for ourselves?

How have we convinced ourselves, like what's about to be an RTA, when we convince people who spend all their time outdoors that protecting the environment is bad, how do we convince the people who spend all the goddamn money that they shouldn't be protected in the way they spend money?

Yeah,

it is an interesting thing when you look at the countries that have the protections and are now going to enjoy the fruits of their, I guess, their labor or protections and are going to have the lower price because that's what they've fought for and that's what their lawmakers fought for.

And then look at the regions that don't do that and see where the priorities are.

We say labor too, but it's really like there's a different category now of just consumers and spenders, right?

There should be power with that.

This is capitalism.

We're the capital, bitch.

You know what I mean?

It's like, without us, without us, it's just ism.

What are you going to do with just ism?

What are you going to do?

Why have we convinced ourselves this is not in our best interest?

You know, just like a lot of things.

Why have we done that?

It's clearly in our best interest, but we've convinced ourselves it's not or allowed ourselves to to be convinced thereof.

There's another thing that I wanted to bring up, which is kind of related actually to what we were talking about earlier with like the paper trails and like old technology.

Uh, and that is, did you see, Bernie, that Asahi, the beer brand, um, is being forced to take orders by facts?

Why are they, why are they taking by facts?

They got hit by a ransomware attack

that took down a ton of their um operations.

And so they're like, they're they're taking their orders for like these enormous uh like consumer and like bulk through like orders, like the factories and the distributors and all that.

They have to take the orders by hand over the phone or by fax.

Yikes.

Stepping it way back.

Have they just, have they revealed like what happened?

How did the ransomware get in the system?

So

I believe the ransomware attack was disclosed at the end of September.

It has specifically affected their IT systems and shut down a lot of the logistics and customer services operations.

So they're working to bring a lot of that back online,

but they don't have like full capabilities again yet.

It says in their official statement on the 3rd of October, the company confirmed traces suggesting a potential unauthorized transfer of data, but they haven't disclosed exactly what that data is.

So it looks like they're still looking into it while they try to get themselves back out of the stone age.

That sucks.

It sucks.

Remember, I went through something like that a couple of months ago because when I registered the business, it wasn't until the press around rebuying the Rootsheet brand.

I had had the forethought, you have to put a phone number on some of these records when you like register a company publicly.

They have to have a number to call, so you get a business number.

I thought, I'm just gonna get like a burner phone number, like a, I got a Google voice number, and I use that for all the registration.

And then it became like this little like shortcut, essentially, like on your desktop that, yes, it pointed to me where people could reach me if they needed to, because you have to have this for like copyright, DMCA, that kind of stuff you have to have a reachable phone number sure enough after the press for rooster teeth and things went public in like march or april

then what happened was all of a sudden i started getting thousands of phone calls on that phone number like non-stop it would just ring constantly because someone had spoofed the phone number and made a bunch of calls with the phone number.

So people were calling me back.

Do you remember that?

I do.

And then I just had to go, nope.

And I just changed that phone number out, cut it off like a dead limb and then like replaced it with something else.

It's weird.

Were we just talking about like spam emails and I remember that was a big issue before is people could spoof like your email address and make it seem like emails come from you.

I think that's still a thing that can be done.

But it I remember that used to be I feel like a bigger a bigger thing.

Like I would get emails from people I never emailed.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Going like, hey, what did you want?

You know what I get still, and it's only my American phone number that I still kept, my mobile number, my real one.

Is I get that thing every now and then where I get a text that goes to like 30 people.

It happens less frequently now, but it used to happen all the time where that happens and someone replies, take me off this list.

You know what I mean?

Or who are you?

I don't know who you are.

And then everyone

know not to do that now, I think, right?

Or there might be like technical protections in place to prevent that from happening.

I think a lot more people have grown up now on the like block it and move on

sort of mentality as opposed to the,

I guess, the classic communication strategy of if someone sends you a thing,

you are expected to respond and you simply must respond.

Yeah.

And if you don't, that would be rude somehow.

So instead, you just set off a communication bomb.

That, that, by the way, that is like when I had that problem with Google Voice, most, you remember most of the messages were, hey, sorry, I missed a call from this number, so I'm just reaching back out to you.

I'm like, who the fuck does that?

Who does that?

And it was hundreds of people that do that.

I missed,

I saw I missed a call on my phone, and I'm just going to call that random ass number back.

No way.

No, my strategy is if I don't know a number, it goes to voicemail.

If they don't leave a voicemail, it wasn't important.

I'm just going to raw dog it on the telecom network.

No way.

Not happening.

Not happening.

You think I'm just going to communicate with no protections in place?

I have an unfinished story here.

The textbook that I bought from haley the best part about it was what she would do is after the quizzes in the class she would go back and highlight all the answers so you were she was very upset she was a very good student and i was very happy i had this like magical text you were a very lucky student and miss startsman who was our uh she was did you ever teacher that the kids were weirdly obsessed with yes miss startsman who taught ap history all the we were all the kids were weirdly obsessed with her you know we had a ms allen who did our ap history and she was like she was she loved history.

It was like, she got really excited when she was teaching about it.

She was also a very strict teacher,

but she was so excited about history and about what she was teaching that like we all got excited about it as well.

And then I also had a science teacher once that like you could tell that he, what he really wanted in life was to be like Bill Nye.

Oh, yeah.

And he also, he loved science.

He loved talking about science.

He was really animated about it.

But I was like, this guy went to the Bill Nye School of like teaching science.

Miss Starzman was like pretty young and she was closest in age to us than any of the other teachers.

We felt like we weren't sure.

We knew she went to Tulane and everything.

And so people just thought she was so fucking cool.

So it's like, was she like the mystery or wrapped in an enigma?

Yeah, a little bit.

A little bit more.

Yeah, yeah.

She was also unmarried, which was a, it seems weird thing to say now, but it was a big deal at the time.

Our teacher was unmarried.

So she was a Ms.

Or like a Miss so-and-so?

Yeah, she was Ms.

Startsman.

Did you ever have a teacher get married and you have to go from calling them like Miss So-and-so to like Mrs.

something else?

And that was like blew your little mind.

Probably, yeah, probably.

This is going to sound like a joke.

It's not a joke.

We were all obsessed with this one English teacher we had.

I had a year where I said, I'm dropping out of honors classes and I'm going to go down to the on-level classes.

I did it for a year and I was in this class for English.

And it was this very attractive English teacher.

This is not a joke.

Her name was Miss Hot.

Oh, God.

I can't make that up.

I can imagine what that poor teacher had to deal with.

She's like, fuck, you have to do all these like stinky, smelly ass teenage boys calling me Miss Hot.

Oh, God.

It's weird how, too, you adapt to your environment.

I slept in that class all the time.

Like, kids were all sleeping around me.

So I'm just going to go to sleep too.

I mastered the ability to sleep through my U.S.

history class in high school.

But if called upon, I could absolutely answer the question.

I managed to sleep while listening.

You know what I remember in class a lot?

It just goes to show, I wonder if this is a problem they deal with at school now.

I always remember being so hungry and my stomach growling constantly when I was in class.

Like it was an ongoing problem for me in high school, having a stomach that would growl.

You know what my persistent thing was?

I was always cold.

Ah, that makes sense.

I was always cold in school.

I was never warm enough.

I was like, that's such an easy problem to solve both.

You bring a jacket, I bring a snack.

Like,

to me, we are so unable to solve our own problems.

I was absolutely helpless.

Yeah, it's like, how do I solve this problem?

How could I possibly get it?

I live in the mountains of Utah.

I have a parka.

I probably left it in my car.

It's probably on the back of my chair right now.

You ever have the thing where it's when it gets, because it's starting to get colder here?

The thing where you leave your jacket in your car.

And having a cold jacket is worse than having a no jacket.

It's fast.

But you've got to.

It just feels wet.

You've got to invest in the thermodynamics of warming up the jacket yourself.

Yep.

And then you get the benefits of it warming you back.

Right.

I dealt with that for a long time before I saw somebody else solve that problem in a much better way.

How'd they do that?

They sat on it.

Which is so much smarter than the way that I did it.

I have no idea once again what this episode of this podcast was.

We did all housekeeping.

We did stories from high school.

No, we talked about at least two things that have happened.

Okay, we'll talk about one last thing, one last thing that is new.

I cheated in AP History.

Yep.

Outside everything you've learned today.

And the new Tron movie is a Tron movie.

Here's the review I read of the Neutron movie,

which I'm very happy to be disappointed by.

It said, it's a great audio-visual representation with a weak script.

And I was like, Yeah!

You said that to me, and I was like, Oh, so it's a Tron movie.

I'm so excited about this.

That's like every Tron movie.

That is the Tron franchise.

So, we're absolutely going to go see the Tron movie in theaters and be really pleased with the visuals and underwhelmed by the movie itself, right?

Like, if we're going to go do that, if you ever hear that Paul, Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino get a hold of a Tron movie and they're going to make one, it's over, right?

We'll finally have a great script.

What will we do?

I hope there's a Jesus metaphor in this one.

All right.

Well, I want to say a big thank you to today's personal Jesuses, Max Field and Graham Donaldson.

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

All right.

Also, we might be retooling something in our Spotify library.

We got hit on first time ever on Spotify.

Yeah, I guess Spotify is doing copyright now.

So if you want to listen.

Bernie's got to watch his drivetime radio.

These fucking computers gatekeeping me.

Gatekeeping my fair use rights.

So if you haven't listened to Tuesday's episode, you should probably listen to it sooner rather than later.

Yeah,

we got hit with that too.

Our Monday episode didn't go up on YouTube at all.

It got blocked on copyright grounds.

What was the copyright on that one?

That was Bare Naked Ladies is what stopped that from going up.

No, was it Monday?

Was the Taylor Swift one?

Was that Monday?

I guess so, yeah.

So I'm talking about Monday's episode.

Spotify is a little bit slower than YouTube.

They got us, though.

And they're all spoofing my Google voice number now for some reason.

All right.

Well, that does it for us today, October 8th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.