2025.11.05: From A Hole In The Ground

Speaker 1 Fuck you, E-Man. Y'all pause?

Speaker 1 We're recording the podcast! Got up!

Speaker 1 Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

Speaker 1 for November 5th, 2025.

Speaker 1 My name is Bernie Burns sitting right over there

Speaker 1 from her hole in the side of the hill. It's Ashley Burns.
I had to ask everybody.

Speaker 2 Was that the disappointed sigh of the Blue Jays fans?

Speaker 1 Yeah, we had, I should call out those people by name. We had some fans who were all prepared to do a big morning somewhere shout.
This comes from the subreddit from Canadian Nirty.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they were going to do a big shout when the Blue Jays won the World Series, but the Blue Jays did not win the World Series.

Speaker 1 So instead of the Morning Summer Shout, we got a disappointed sigh instead, which I think works pretty well, too.

Speaker 1 I got no complaints about that whatsoever. Just in case, though, you're missing it.
I can't leave people out of their morning fix.

Speaker 2 Morning Subway! There! Now we got everything. And that's for you, Ash.
Best of all worlds.

Speaker 1 I appreciate that. So, big day yesterday.

Speaker 1 New York now officially has a socialist mayor.

Speaker 2 That's Democratic socialist Zaran Mandani. He won the election pretty handily from what it sounds like.

Speaker 2 And so there's a new mayor in New York. You know what I find weird about that, Bernie?

Speaker 1 What's that?

Speaker 2 Who's the mayor of Los Angeles?

Speaker 1 Is it me? Is this the way I find out?

Speaker 2 It's just, it's weird to me that, like, we always know who the mayor of New York is. Yeah, New York City.
Like, it's, it's weird that's the only mayor.

Speaker 2 I couldn't tell you like who the mayor anywhere is except New York City. And we always know who that is.

Speaker 1 You know, a mayor.

Speaker 1 I know a mayor. Tangently, yeah.
You know a mayor.

Speaker 2 What? Is this Ted Dans?

Speaker 1 Former mayor. Former mayor.

Speaker 2 Is this Ted Danson who did play the Los Angeles mayor in a television show? Did he? Mr. Mayor.

Speaker 1 Sexiest Man Alive, 1989.

Speaker 1 He is not. I was disappointed about how Ted Danson was not on the list of sexiest man.
He should have been.

Speaker 2 You know what? Men alive. You know what? His time is coming.
Next year. Next year.
Because he is still very active in the acting scene. In fact,

Speaker 2 he is

Speaker 2 about to be back on my screens because he's in a TV show called Man on the Inside, which I love. It's by the guy who did the good place,

Speaker 2 right? So, you know, it's going to be thought-provoking and it's going to like jerk your heartstrings a little bit,

Speaker 2 but also be genuinely like funny and enjoyable to watch. The first season was really fun.
It's like this guy, it's like this, this older gentleman, and he's lost his wife

Speaker 2 and he's been sort of in a rut ever since. And so his daughter, who, by the way, is played by the waitress,

Speaker 2 tells him to get a hobby and so he answered a class answers a classified ad to basically go undercover as a detective.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 So he's helping a detective out by going where the detective can't really go and go unnoticed.

Speaker 2 And I guess no one notices old people. So

Speaker 2 in the first season, he

Speaker 2 goes like

Speaker 2 undercover in a retirement home. He joins a retirement home.
And

Speaker 2 so it's this, it's a lovely season of him like getting to know all the people and their stories and all that stuff. And like it makes you cry a little, it makes you laugh a little bit.

Speaker 2 I enjoy it so much. And the second season is coming out this month.
So, in addition to being Mr. Mayor, he is also

Speaker 2 number one in my heart. He's the mayor of my heart.
How about that?

Speaker 1 When at the beginning of that, you talked about it was from the guy who made the good place.

Speaker 1 Do you know who that is?

Speaker 1 It's interesting. Some people's careers in Hollywood are really interesting.
That is Michael Schur. Yes.

Speaker 1 He is probably, you would best know him as Moe's on the office. What? Dwight's like weird brother who lives on the farm.
What? That's the same guy. It's the same guy.
It's the same guy. And weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he went on to produce the good place. It was obviously active in the office as well, the American office.
And yeah, then went on to produce the good place.

Speaker 1 And is a widely renowned creator and producer. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I never would have called it. You ever see a guy on your screen and be like, that guy, that guy's going to be a big deal?

Speaker 2 Like in the middle of Pineapple Express, would you have been like, that guy, he's He's going to run Hollywood.

Speaker 1 Who's the guy you're talking about? Seth Rogan. Oh, Seth Rogan.
Okay. Well, the whole thing is.

Speaker 2 Who is very like kind of quietly become one of like the major powerhouses?

Speaker 1 Danny McBride, also. Like, no one had any idea, like, especially Tropic Thunder.

Speaker 2 King of HBO or what?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. They just, you know, it's weird how somebody can take over a network in a way.
Like, they just canceled Ridiculousness after something like 14 or 16 seasons or something like that.

Speaker 1 It's like, and did they cancel the show or did MTV just stop and the show went away with it?

Speaker 2 There's a couple of things going on there because I think MTV is canceling the like the programming on some of its European channels.

Speaker 2 So there is like part of MTV is going away, but also, yes, this ridiculous show, which, by the way, it's been going for 14 years, 1700 episodes, something like that. The first time I heard about it.

Speaker 2 was when it got canceled.

Speaker 1 Oh, really?

Speaker 2 I don't know what this show is.

Speaker 1 I know about this show, and I think it actually stems from another show that was like a spin-off of another show that was on MTV, but then eventually kind of one of those things where it took over the entire network.

Speaker 1 Like how, was it G4 or was it Tech TV? One of them became the cops network for a while.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they just did like cops reruns because I guess they could get it for cheap and get a lot of viewership out of it

Speaker 2 compared to what they spent.

Speaker 2 It is true that original programming costs a lot.

Speaker 2 There was, let me see, I'm trying to look up the new show from Vince Gilligan, the breaking bad guy, Pluribus, that's coming out in, gosh, a couple of days.

Speaker 2 I think I saw a stat that every episode has a budget of like $14 million.

Speaker 1 Weird thing about Vince Gilligan, he played Mick Lovin in Super

Speaker 1 People you don't expect to become huge.

Speaker 1 Christopher Nolan was the kid in Jerry Maguire. Who knew?

Speaker 1 I read a horrible thing about Christopher Nolan that he's blocking other movies from showing on IMAX during the run of the Odyssey. That fucking sucks.
If that's true, that's true.

Speaker 2 What you're just you're allowed to block everything else by what? Taking all the show times?

Speaker 1 I guess so. Or just saying, no, literally, like, it's other films are prohibited from showing on IMAX at that point in time.
Okay. Like, does that include everything?

Speaker 1 Is it just the Hollywood, like, narrative movies? Are we talking about like, we followed the whales for 20 years? Like, those kind of IMAX movies. Look,

Speaker 2 no one blocks the whales, buddy.

Speaker 2 right exactly it's like it's like I get it if you're blocking but people need to know about the whales Avengers 12 or whatever you know what I mean but we need our whales we we got to have our documentaries about fucking penguins or whatever did you ever watch that that big march of the penguins yes I did I did that's one of the few documentaries I don't watch a lot of documentaries but it's one of the few documentaries that I absolutely did watch I learned all about how the dad penguins sit on the eggs while the mom penguins travel like 1,200 miles for lunch or something like they just have like a whole big ladies night out.

Speaker 1 They're protecting the eggs.

Speaker 2 And they're like, they're like, all right, boys, you stay here. You are, it's not babysitting because you're a parent.
You're watching the kids. I'm going to go get something to eat.

Speaker 1 I do like

Speaker 1 to have an inherent, like built-in system by which they huddle together and then they rotate who's on the outside of the huddle, like in the harsh winds.

Speaker 2 Look, they don't get to do flying Vs. They had to get something.
Okay, so.

Speaker 1 They get the scrum. Right.

Speaker 1 They had to develop their own equivalent. Is there anybody, like going back to this Michael Shore Moe's in the office, then major producer and creator?

Speaker 1 Is there anyone whose career, you would never switch places with anybody, but is there anyone's career that you look at from afar with Envy? Because his is one of those.

Speaker 1 Like he's like, just plays like fun roles and does stuff and makes good shows and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 And I think like most people wouldn't know him, even though a lot of people have enjoyed his work on a lot of different levels. I think that's really cool.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess the most visible ones

Speaker 2 like that are the actors who managed to break out of their typecasting or like that one role that they broke out with and have been able to do weird stuff ever since.

Speaker 2 Like, I really think that Robert Pattinson has

Speaker 2 the career that he wants to have. Like, he did that like, one for the studio right up front, right? He was like, he was like, all right, fuck it, let's do Twilight.

Speaker 2 And then he was like, now I get to spend the rest of my life doing whatever weird shit I want to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. You know, and same thing with Daniel.

Speaker 1 It's like he went the Elizabeth Berkeley Showgirls path, but right, it all worked out well

Speaker 1 for him, right? Same thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because she was, she was what, saved by the bell, and then did show girls, and that was supposed to be like her like sexy breakout, like I'm a grown-up role now.

Speaker 2 And then instead, it just ended her career. Well, I did it though.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 2 I don't know. I have never seen this film, and all I know about it is the legend that it destroyed her career.

Speaker 1 That is a well-deserved, incredulous what on my behalf. You have not seen Showgirls? Let me tell you something.
On our media server,

Speaker 1 I haven't watched it yet. But we don't just have Showgirls.
We have, we bought Showgirls 2. No, we have the Dutch import version of Showgirls.

Speaker 2 Okay, what's different about the Dutch import version?

Speaker 1 Netherlands, baby, there's no rules wherever. It's even more uncut.
Like, they didn't just uncut it.

Speaker 1 They added more in somehow they got extra stuff in there all the dongs they went in and they used vfx to uncircumcise we will absolutely showgirls is a fantastic movie it is a fantastic movie it is undeserved as being credited as a career killer or something like that which Elizabeth Berkeley she's awesome in it

Speaker 1 all next week we're gonna have drops from showgirls that's it I'm declaring it right now okay so next week is showgirls week yeah there's a uh there's a dude in I won't tell you where he is let me see if you know who he is Jared Kiso Keso.

Speaker 1 Do you know who Jared Keso is? I don't think so. My God, this guy has such an enviable career.
He's a Canadian guy, right? And you know how Canada has like weird offshoot like shows?

Speaker 1 Even Kids in the Hole was that?

Speaker 2 Hold on.

Speaker 2 Is this the guy who got the, was it Shorzy? That's it. Spin-off

Speaker 2 from the Canadian show that everyone absolutely loves, Letter Kenny.

Speaker 1 Letter Kenny, that's it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I've seen some Letter Kenny, but mostly I think I've seen clips of this guy.

Speaker 1 He's like a Canadian Rob McElhenney, essentially, right? Okay, yeah. Another enviable career there.

Speaker 1 But Jared Keeso just like, just does his thing up in Canada, you know, in the spirit of like kids in the hall, trailer park boys, you know, all the shows.

Speaker 1 Strange brew.

Speaker 2 I feel like

Speaker 2 I feel like Letter Kenny is one of those shows, too, that like everyone uh

Speaker 2 in Canada that I'm aware of loves that show, but it's also a show that has made its way thanks to like the power of the internet all over. And everyone who watches that show loves that show.

Speaker 2 It's like there's some shows where they don't necessarily have the widest reach, but the people who love that show

Speaker 2 fucking love that show. For me, another one of those is Shit's Creek.

Speaker 1 Okay, yeah, I get it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I haven't watched a minute of that show. But I know people love it.
It was a big pandemic show, right?

Speaker 2 Maybe it broke out during pandemic, but people just really like the, it's got like a fun vibe. The first season is kind of tough.

Speaker 2 I've done the thing where, you know, people will say, go ahead and start on the second season.

Speaker 1 And I go, no, I shall get through the first season first and then I'll watch all of it so I have the proper background.

Speaker 2 And then I fall off through in the first season because it's, you know, still finding its feet.

Speaker 1 I feel like the Schitt's Creek demographic, they reached a junction and they said, look, do I want to go either all in on Schitt's Creek or do I want to listen to nothing but true crime podcasts?

Speaker 1 I don't know why in my head that's that same demographic, but it is to me for some reason.

Speaker 2 So it's the people who decided to chase joy and the people who decided to plan against disaster.

Speaker 1 I'm going to just come up with a new demographic called Women Who Like NPR.

Speaker 1 That's the demographic, and that's who watches Shit's Creek and listens to

Speaker 1 True Crime Podcasts. True crime.
NPR women.

Speaker 2 NPR women. NPR women of the world.

Speaker 1 A very specific group of people.

Speaker 2 Where in the demographic of NPR women do hobbits fall?

Speaker 1 Fuck off with this. I don't even want to talk about this.
I do want to talk about it. Don't talk about it.

Speaker 1 Elon Musk said the dumbest fucking thing yesterday where he was somehow he's not sowing enough division in his part of the world. Now he's saying that

Speaker 1 rural Scots live like hobbits, which is fine. Then he went off on this immigrant tangent.

Speaker 1 But the thing that really irked me about it, and you can actually probably read the actual quote there, but essentially what he said, paraphrasing here, I wouldn't want to, you know, say that I'm quoting this eloquent man,

Speaker 1 is that basically that the people who live in Scotland are protected, and they're protected by tougher people who keep the horrors of the world at bay, like the hobbits who live in the Shire.

Speaker 1 Boy, that fucking pissed me. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 Did he read those books? Because as I understand it, the Shire was in fact not protected.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, also it's like a way to classify yourself as as what? Mordor? Do you think he's Gondor?

Speaker 2 Does he think he's Gondor?

Speaker 1 I guess so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he said, he said, they are lovely people who like to smoke their pipe and have nice meals, and everything is pleasant, like the hobbits in the Shire.

Speaker 1 We're good so far.

Speaker 2 The reason they've been able to enjoy the Shire is because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world.

Speaker 2 But since they have almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don't realize they are there. So one day, a thousand people show up in your village of 500 and start raping the kids.

Speaker 1 All I can say about that is this, and you can do this yourself. Go on Google Maps.
Go on Google Maps and look up a town called Mulben, M-U-L-B-E-N on Mulben. Mulben.

Speaker 1 You can see on Google Maps, you can see the probably the satellite photos of the place. Small little town in rural Scotland, tiny little place.
You could probably count the houses there.

Speaker 1 And then, because it has street view, because I guess the tech companies thought mapping Mulben, Scotland, was an important thing to do, you can go down the road towards another town called Keith.

Speaker 1 I think it's the A95 that runs through there. And there's a church.
You can't miss it because it's one of like eight buildings in the whole place. In Keith? No, in Mulben.
Oh. And

Speaker 1 in the courtyard of the church, you can see the World War I memorial, which shows all the people that left Scotland to go fight and were lost.

Speaker 1 And there's probably a few dozen names on that war memorial. And this is a tiny little town.
There's more names on there.

Speaker 2 Than there are people in in the town.

Speaker 1 Than there are houses in the town. Yes, there are more names on there.

Speaker 2 It is an astonishing thing to see here:

Speaker 2 every town that you pass through, every village, every town has a World War I memorial.

Speaker 1 We have definitely talked about this before.

Speaker 2 Yeah, with a list of, you know, all the names of the people who came from that town, from that village, went to World War I, and were lost.

Speaker 2 And these lists are incredibly long, especially when you look at the size of,

Speaker 2 the towns and villages.

Speaker 2 That war had an astonishing impact on the population of this area.

Speaker 1 And that war was just over 100 years ago, and you might say to yourself, hey, Bernie, that town was probably a lot bigger in World War I. Yes, it probably was.
And why isn't it that big today?

Speaker 1 Probably because they lost that many people to World War I, defending the world from fucking tyranny.

Speaker 1 Fuck anybody who says that the Scots are a protected class.

Speaker 1 They over-index in the military, over-index in the special forces, contribute a third of the energy they produce to the rest of the UK for green energy.

Speaker 1 Fuck anybody who says anything different about the Scots. Fuck off.
You and your patter are shite.

Speaker 2 Fuck you.

Speaker 2 It's so weird that people like to think that also people who live rurally are soft somehow.

Speaker 1 Eat shit. Eat shit.

Speaker 1 I don't know why. It really irks me.
It really irks me. And it's like, and what a weird thing.

Speaker 2 Well, I get it because, like, we're, we're in the middle of that area. We know

Speaker 1 like almost exclusively rural Scots.

Speaker 2 And so to have like this like fucking weirdo, you know,

Speaker 2 a continent away who clearly has never been here because we only sometimes live in the hills.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Sometimes we live above ground.

Speaker 1 I don't think the I don't think the hobbit in the shire part is an inaccurate description, do you?

Speaker 1 No, i would say that people have uh you know they choose to find happiness where they are able to do so uh but that's not a soft thing it does it's just a different quality of life here and we love it and let me tell you something it was one of the best decisions that i ever made and i'm so glad that you made it with me ashley to move here and live here look back on it all the time it just felt like the right thing to do and we did it and it's a decision that we made about eight years ago pulled the trigger on it five years ago, almost six now.

Speaker 1 But I also feel like we remake that decision every day and we talk about it all the time.

Speaker 1 And we don't talk about it as much as we actually talk about it to each other because it's not the most relatable thing, right?

Speaker 1 But we talk about it on a regular basis, how much we love being here and how much we love the people here. And fuck anybody who has anything negative to say about the people who are here.

Speaker 2 It's true. I'll be driving down the road.
It's really pretty here right now. It's very autumnal.
We get get the

Speaker 2 changing leaves, which is not something that we ever got in Austin. I remember in our neighborhood in Austin, there was one tree that would change colors.

Speaker 2 And I know because I would drive past that tree and go, look, it's autumn. And that was it.
And sometimes I'll be driving around this time of year here, taking Finn to school, whatever. And

Speaker 2 I'll just marvel at how lucky we are to be here. There's like a little mist coming across the road and the trees are like glowing yellow and they're so beautiful.

Speaker 2 And then I'm going to come home and I'm going to let the chickens out. If you, Bernie, when we started dating, if you were like, hey, girl, you want to buy some chickens?

Speaker 1 I'd have been like, the fuck is wrong with you? Fuck off with this. That would not, those conversations would not

Speaker 1 have made any sense at all. That nothing, nothing about our relationship would have made sense.

Speaker 1 The weird, strange path to where we ended up together is bizarre.

Speaker 1 But to get off this topic altogether, also, how weird is it, by the way, to take something as complex as immigration and sexual crime and combine that with a Lord of the Rings metaphor?

Speaker 1 Get the fuck out of here. What a, just bizarre.
Don't you have, listen, I'll just say this.

Speaker 1 I openly lament,

Speaker 1 mourn the death of the timeline that we could have been on that died the day that Elon Musk started a social media account. I really, I really do believe that.
Here's a guy who seems to understand

Speaker 1 how devastating distractions are because he talks about like Diablo and playing playing video games and how he doesn't, if he did that, it would just ruin his life. He'd never get anything done.

Speaker 1 And then he's on social media what seems like 24 hours a day.

Speaker 1 You know, the timeline we could have been on if Elon Musk was just the quiet behind, if he was the Jared Keso, the Michael Schur of the technology world, we would all be in the silver jumpsuits and riding on monorails and all that other stuff.

Speaker 1 We would. We would.
We would. I really believe that.
Social media is fucking poison. That's the other decision we made was to get off social media.

Speaker 1 Once you do it, it is the greatest thing. We should be more on social media to promote our business.
I can't do it. I can't do it.

Speaker 2 I can't bring myself to do it. I make a concerted effort every couple of months and that lasts.
Yeah, maybe two weeks. And I just, I can't do it anymore.

Speaker 1 Put the metaphor back in place here. It's like slipping the ring on.
And it's just like, oh, it's like that. What's that king of Rohan? It's like, that's social media, dude.

Speaker 1 The moment it goes away, you'll watch the eyes clear up and the hair will ungray and everything like that.

Speaker 1 And people will notice you again, not like the old people in Ashley's story that she was telling you earlier. It really is.
It's cheerful and sad. Social media is terrible and it's awful.

Speaker 1 And it's terrible and awful all of the time. All of the time.
And people still do it on a regular basis. Don't get it.

Speaker 2 It's so easy to lose yourself in it as well. And I will say, like, I, I consume it.
Like, I, I read it. Uh, you know, I scroll on Instagram.
And it's weird. Like, I can be doing something.

Speaker 2 I open my phone to go, like, do a specific task. I need to look something up, whatever.

Speaker 2 The second Instagram opens, whatever I was going to do is just out of my mind. It's gone.
Yeah. And now I'm like scrolling through things going, ooh, I can make that.

Speaker 2 Oh, there's a children's resort in Germany we should go to. Ooh, this, look, oh, a winter Aperol Spritz.
What a great recipe.

Speaker 2 Ooh, some people are doing really fancy choreo. Or in your case, wow, look at all the ways these people can hurt themselves.

Speaker 1 Right, right, yeah. Our Instagrams are so different.
They're very different. We've trained our algorithms to be like us.

Speaker 1 I think our algorithms are a better mirror than anything else in the world, it feels like sometimes. And then it feeds on itself too.

Speaker 1 But man, what a different, what a different world we could be living in.

Speaker 2 And now we're getting compared to hobbits.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I'm just mad. I'm just mad today.

Speaker 1 I'm just mad today.

Speaker 2 Well, I want to say a big thank you to our personal hobbits, Mike and Carter King.

Speaker 2 Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

Speaker 1 All right, that does it for us today. November 5th, Guy Fawkes Day, 2025.
We will be back to talk to you tomorrow. We hope you will be here as well.

Speaker 2 Bye, everybody.