2025.11.18: Lego Blockchain

Speaker 0 Oh no!

Speaker 0 Our cable

Speaker 0 is broken!

Speaker 0 Hey! We're recording the podcast! Gut up!

Speaker 1 Good!

Speaker 1 Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

Speaker 1 somebody.

Speaker 1 My name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there, silently protesting. Ashley Burns, I got Ashley, everybody.
What happened? I must have missed a button. Here we go.

Speaker 1 There you go. You got there.
It's a little late.

Speaker 1 Tuesday.

Speaker 2 Look, sometimes it's hard to get the kids out the door. They're running a little bit late.

Speaker 1 Sometimes all the way to the end of the intro. Me trying to convince him to put on his

Speaker 1 damn boots in order to get out the door for school. That's what that was.

Speaker 2 He's going, Finn, that's the bell. Run.
And then he like takes like three running steps and goes back to walking. And I'm like, no, no, no.
Keep, keep running. Hustle.

Speaker 1 He's He's just putting out a show.

Speaker 2 That's all. It's like that, uh, that like jog walk that you do when you're crossing the road and there's a car coming.

Speaker 2 And so you do like three steps of jog walk to be like, look at me getting out of your way, but you're not really getting out of the way.

Speaker 1 Can I, can I discuss something with you that hopefully isn't too like personal? Uh, it's about our kids.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 so every night we do this thing where after the kids, like, we'd have like what we call bops in the beds, where we do flips and somersaults and stuff.

Speaker 2 Well, right now we're doing

Speaker 2 a lazy version of that, which is called Tickle Chase, where

Speaker 2 we've got like, there's like a loop. There's a door from our bathroom that goes on one side, it goes into our bedroom, and in the other side, it goes into

Speaker 2 the office. And then they can go out and then down the hallway and then back into the room.
So there's like a, it's like a loop, right?

Speaker 1 It's a little track.

Speaker 2 And so I hole up in the bedroom and I'm not allowed to leave the bedroom.

Speaker 1 You have to do that. You have the easy job in this.
I got to run around this goddamn circuit chasing chasing them.

Speaker 2 Well, this is.

Speaker 1 You're the obstacle.

Speaker 2 If you think about it a little bit, it's your fault because you taught Finn that the chess pieces have different abilities, right? They can all do different stuff. And so as

Speaker 2 the queen, I stay in the room playing defense.

Speaker 1 Oh, I see.

Speaker 2 And you have different. Do you have what the queen does? I know, I know, but the point is we have different power sets.
And you get to chase, but you can't hide.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing I want to discuss with you, which I'm worried about.

Speaker 1 Our daughter cannot corner for shit.

Speaker 1 Like, I've never seen a kid who can't round a corner. She runs into the walls or she just does 90 degrees.
That's all she does.

Speaker 2 I think she must have learned how to corner from cartoons.

Speaker 1 I think that's where she,

Speaker 1 same thought.

Speaker 2 That's because she like slows down and she like turns her whole body to the side and then like ramps up again, almost like she's pumping her legs in place.

Speaker 2 And then she can take off with forward momentum again. But you're right.
She can't like get around a corner.

Speaker 2 She has no concept of, what you know what we should do is we should probably show her some Bowser and Mario Kart. Because she really likes cars right now.

Speaker 2 We should show her like some races and show her how like if you go to the outside and then like cut in the corner and then you don't have to lose your momentum.

Speaker 2 Maybe if we put it in the context of cars, she'll get it.

Speaker 1 She'll look gearhead. She likes him.
Maybe she needs to invest more of her points next time she levels up in cornering. That's what she needs to do.

Speaker 1 Put it all into acceleration and

Speaker 1 charisma.

Speaker 1 Glitter. She's going to be a bard.
Different outfits. She keeps buying skins and stuff.

Speaker 1 So we actually, there's something I want to call out because this is something that has been consistent through my whole life of raising kids now for 25 years and counting.

Speaker 1 I got to give a shout out to a video game company. Traveler Tales Video Games.
Do you know what Traveler's Tale makes? I have no idea what they make. They make indie games? They make the Lego X.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Yes, absolutely. They are an MVP of gaming.

Speaker 1 And I have been playing those. I have been sitting on a couch next to a kid playing those video games for about 20 years.
TT's Traveler's Tale, isn't that what it is? Let me look it up.

Speaker 1 The developer of the Lego Star Wars, Lego Hobbit, Lego Lord of the Rings, Lego Indiana Jones, and now Lego Ninjago, which is somehow missed out.

Speaker 1 I guess I missed the Bionicle era, which I think would have been a whole thing.

Speaker 2 I guess so. Yeah, it's funny because so Finn got into Lego ninjas, Lego Ninjago, Lego Ninjago, whatever.

Speaker 2 He got into it via Netflix because he

Speaker 2 watched, they have the like a Lego TV series, and then he saw Lego ninjas and went, what's that? I'm curious. And now everything is apparently spinjitsu, which is the

Speaker 2 form of martial arts they practice. Is they spin a lot.
He also, by the way, employs that in real life during Tickle Chase. When I catch him, he does his best to spin jitsu out of it.

Speaker 2 It's surprisingly effective.

Speaker 1 Here's what I want to say:

Speaker 1 owe a great debt of gratitude to the TT Studio

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 they built into their game what has become a lifelong economics lesson and personal savings experience for my kids. Let me explain.

Speaker 1 What you do in this game is you, when you're playing through the levels and you break stuff, you get little studs and that's the currency of the game. Studs mean the little dot Legos.

Speaker 1 That's what they are. Different colors are different values, stuff like that.
Like silver is less than gold is less than blue, which doesn't make any sense. It's less than purple.

Speaker 1 Or in the case, I think in Ninjago, the top one is black now, which makes sense for the theme. But

Speaker 1 you use that to unlock stuff. The big thing that you unlock is you have this huge grid of unlocked characters, right? Of excuse me, of locked characters that you want to pay to unlock with studs.

Speaker 1 Like General Grievous is very expensive. He's like 300,000 studs or something like that.

Speaker 2 That's because they had to import him to a whole other universe.

Speaker 1 Versus like the Luke Skywalker Dagobah variant is like 10,000, right? No big deal.

Speaker 2 That's like a single blue stud.

Speaker 1 But it's a massive amount of characters. It's sometimes like 60 characters, you know what I mean? They'll have character packs, get shipped like 120.

Speaker 1 But in addition to unlocking the characters, you can also unlock different abilities.

Speaker 1 One of the abilities that you can unlock, and it's very expensive, is that you can get double the amount of studs every time you pick up a stud. Okay, so you

Speaker 1 can save, you can save up and if you save way way up Then you can spend all the money and have no money, but now you earn double money It also goes even further more expensive than the 2x multiplier is the 4x multiplier and the 8x multiplier and the 10x multiplier which all stack so stack so if you get the two so this becomes like a lesson for little kids and i've used it now for two decades plus for teaching them about saving and interest because you could buy a lot of characters before you unlock the 2x, right?

Speaker 1 But just stick with me. Don't buy any characters.
Watch this and watch how fast we'll get studs done with 2x. Now that we're getting studs faster at 2x, then we get to 4x, right?

Speaker 1 I basically turn them into bankers, right?

Speaker 1 But it's crazy. I've had this conversation now with Evie's obviously too young.
She's got to work on her cornering, but I've had this conversation with three kids now, like over the course of decades.

Speaker 1 And some of them, it's interesting how the lesson applies itself. Teddy was like, no, I'm buying the characters.
No way. JD, like, I get this completely.
And now you can see it as an adult.

Speaker 2 And he's not going to unlock a single character until he's got the 10X.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly.
Like,

Speaker 1 now the difference as they're adults is one is like,

Speaker 1 hey, I'm thinking about selling my NVIDIA stock because I think it's overvalued. The other one is like, hey, I bought another NVIDIA card.

Speaker 1 But when they stack, it's like you get to the point where it's like, you work so hard to get these studs. And then when you get to like, it is such a lesson in like money makes money.

Speaker 1 Like 2x, 4x, then you're at 8x. Then you get the 10x, and you're at like 80x.

Speaker 1 And you get, I think the, the biggest the multiplier gets, I can't remember for Lego Star Wars, it looks a little bit different in this Ninjago one.

Speaker 1 It gets game breaking where you get like 3,000 X when they all stack up. And like you walk into it.
Does your frame rate drop?

Speaker 2 Like, how is the game even managed? That kind of thing.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. It doesn't change the amount of studs on the screen.
That's a good question.

Speaker 1 No, it just, like, when you pick one up, like one that was previously worth like 10,000, when you pick it up, all of a sudden you've got like 12 million, you know, or something like that. It's insane.

Speaker 1 Like, you have to, like, there's goals in every level that you have to like get a certain amount of studs to perfect the level. That's yeah, okay.
Yeah, to unlock something, basically.

Speaker 1 It's really hard to do that until you get these multipliers and then you walk in the first thing you pick up, like

Speaker 1 perfect at the level. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 Well, while we're talking about Lego, there's something else that's been on my mind and under my feet. Uh, and that is specifically Lego Caltrops and Hot Wheels Caltrops.

Speaker 2 And I've been thinking about this a lot because right now, so Finn leaves Lego all over the place.

Speaker 2 The path from his door to his bed in his bedroom is like i i cannot walk on that without my house shoes i'm just not even going to try i never don't step on something right um

Speaker 2 And Evie,

Speaker 2 I can't currently take showers because Evie has filled the shower with all her Hot Wheels. And I am absolutely going to step on something and slip and kill myself.

Speaker 1 Dude, you're raising a bag, lady. I just got to say this.
Our son walks around with nothing. I get her out of the bed today.
Two owls, a blanket, four cars, and a book. Where did the cars come from?

Speaker 1 She was always supposed to have one car in the bed.

Speaker 2 How did I get it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, okay. I would hurt shit.
I'm a rat.

Speaker 2 But it's got me thinking because we're also up against a big home alone anniversary, right? It's the 35th anniversary of the Home Alone movies coming out.

Speaker 2 And I'm thinking that this movie gives this kid way too much credit, right? You don't need to be dangling like paint buckets on strings and stuff for your like home security.

Speaker 2 All you have to do is just have a kid and they're going to take care of it completely.

Speaker 2 There is no part of our house that is not impossible for robbers to get past because it's all covered in Lego or in Hot Wheels.

Speaker 1 Or the new thing is there's like those wooden train tracks. How many

Speaker 1 fucking things do we have? They go all the way through our house now.

Speaker 2 You say that, Brittany. Didn't you just buy them a new set of train tracks?

Speaker 1 Well, they didn't have enough straight pieces. So I went out and bought some straight pieces.
I guess that's what made them them be able to go from one room to another.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they got a lot of distance on. Hindsight's 2020.

Speaker 1 Going into winter, need some firewood.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right now we've got a train track that's strung across three rooms.

Speaker 1 It is crazy, too, because it's like, I went through this stage where, and we actually just went through it too, where it's like, you get to the point where it's like, you're done with stuff.

Speaker 1 It's like, I'm done with diapers again for now, the second time in my life. I've never had to buy a diaper again.
And it's, it's

Speaker 1 people will pass things off to you. And it's, it's weird how people, I think in America, too, they just don't take stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Whereas here, it's much more common of like, we got a ton of like toys or like my kids can't use these anymore here. You take this.

Speaker 2 Yeah, please take these off my hands.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is like, we just met you like five minutes ago.

Speaker 1 Take this bin. Take it.

Speaker 2 What's your name again? Yeah.

Speaker 1 The other thing, though, too, is that I think you could have a very successful career in media.

Speaker 1 And you're talking about Home Alone backs this up if you just watch like old cartoons and you recreate those things in different ways, like when you talk about Home Alone and you talk about all the different traps that Kevin, McAllister says, yeah, when he set that stuff up, that's basically like the third act of that movie is like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, right?

Speaker 1 Or the Rube Goldberg machines. You remember those? Yeah.
Did you have that? Was that a big deal when you were a kid? Like the bowling ball goes down and it hits the teeter-totter?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. There was a, it was always a big deal when like a shopping center had one of those.
And at like on the hour, it would run or something.

Speaker 2 It would like drop the ball, and then you could like, everyone would gather around the atrium and watch this thing go.

Speaker 1 I was weird. Yeah, I think what you're talking about is a little bit different.
What I'm talking about is like the one with like, like, the game Mouse Trap, like, recreates it.

Speaker 1 You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, okay.
Where it's like, it's all these different things, like a shoe, and then a guy dives into a bucket of water, and then the trap goes down.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, there's a ball in there, too, but it's like, it's usually just a bunch of unrelated, like, utensils and kitchen appliances that make some kind of machine that has some kind of effect.

Speaker 1 There's one in Back to to the Future as well, like the beginning of Back to the Future. But yeah, and then Jackass, which was enormously popular, Johnny Knoxville is pretty open.

Speaker 1 He just would watch Tom and Jerry cartoons and like Roadrunner

Speaker 1 and just like, we're doing that. Yeah.
Like, look how flat they got.

Speaker 2 Let's try that.

Speaker 1 We're going to try to flatten this guy's face with a frying pan or something like that.

Speaker 1 Did you ever, like, was Jackass compelling to you? As a lady, was it compelling at all to you?

Speaker 2 No, it wasn't even on my radar.

Speaker 1 Not even just like, these are bad guys. Like, you could fix fix them kind of a thing.

Speaker 2 No, no, they no. I mean, I mean, the hospital is going to be the one fixing them, right? That's not like they're going out misbehaving.
They're just destroying themselves, right?

Speaker 2 That's like a very, I don't know. For me, that seems like a really dude sense of humor thing,

Speaker 2 which is so far backed up by the difference in like our Instagram algorithms. Like, that is in your algorithm.
You love that stuff. You think it's hilarious.

Speaker 2 And I just, I close my eyes so I don't see whatever horrific injury someone is is about to give themselves and move on.

Speaker 1 Did you know that there is a female member of Jackass who they don't really talk about?

Speaker 2 Did they flatten her face with a frying pan? She got hurt.

Speaker 1 She broke her back.

Speaker 1 From what I recall, it was a sledding accident of some kind. It was something to do with snow, which you used to snowboard, right? Yeah.
And she, yeah, she went off a walk.

Speaker 2 But no one was like jumping out at me to like flatten me while doing it. I was doing a pretty good job of that myself.

Speaker 1 Let me see if I can look this up and I'll get her actual information. But yeah, it's like, you know, and Jackass was a weird group too.

Speaker 1 It was like two groups that came together. It was kind of similar to like

Speaker 1 Rooster Teeth in a way, where Rooster Teeth was like my web buddies and my filmmaking buddies kind of coming together. Jackass was a group called, God, it was one of Jeff Ramsey would know.
It's like

Speaker 1 one of these skating zine groups and then another group called Trigger Warning Here for self-harm. It was a group called Can't Kill Yourself, I think.

Speaker 1 And then they came together and they made Jackass.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I know about Jackass? What's that? I know that the guy from Jackass was on the TV show called Reboot, where it was about

Speaker 2 people rebooting a sitcom, and he was one of the main guys in that. Oh, really? That's what I know about Johnny Knoxville.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 1 Men in Black 2? He was in that. It wasn't a great.
He was? Yeah, it wasn't great.

Speaker 1 Was he an alien? He was an alien. Yeah, he was an alien who had two heads, if I recall correctly.
Hey, while we're talking about aliens, you were talking about anniversaries.

Speaker 1 Home Alone had its, I guess, 25th anniversary. 23.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Gross.

Speaker 1 Oh, is that true? I guess that is true. That's true.
That's a 90s movie. Yeah.
Yeah, but

Speaker 1 there's another movie, which I think is highly influential in ways that we don't appreciate, that just had its 20th anniversary on November 11th. It's a movie called Zathura.

Speaker 2 Oh, wait, hold on. That's the one that's got

Speaker 2 the Werewolf Kid Before Twilight?

Speaker 1 I can think of him as the Hunger Games kid before Hunger Games.

Speaker 2 You're right. No, it's got, but it's got Kristen Stewart from Twilight, and then it's got...

Speaker 1 Yes, that's the other weird thing. I just saw it.
It's got Kristen Stewart.

Speaker 2 And then it's got, yeah, you're right. Then it's got Hunger Games kid.

Speaker 1 I don't know the actors in Hunger Games that well

Speaker 1 besides J-Law.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think he was PETA.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was weird because kind of when he was younger, he might have been a bigger kid relative to other kids when he was young enough to be in Zathura, but

Speaker 1 he kind of like, I guess, grew up to not be like a super big jockey kind of a guy, but he kind of feels like the big, like...

Speaker 1 hulking bully kind of a big brother kind of character in Zathura when he's younger. You never know how kids are going to grow up, right?

Speaker 2 That's Josh Hutcherson. Also,

Speaker 2 interesting cast in Zathura. I didn't realize.
Dax Shepard.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, a little bit of a spoiler there, but yeah, Dax Shepherd is it.

Speaker 1 Well, he makes an appearance later in the film. Okay.

Speaker 2 Tim Robbins. Frank Oz was the robot's voice.

Speaker 1 So that's the thing. The influential part of Zathura is that, do you know, without looking, do you know who directed it? No.
Jon Favreau. Really? And so it was almost like a weird predecessor

Speaker 1 to the MCU. Because would you say it's fair to credit the success of Iron Man for launching the MCU?

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Like technically, the Hulk was first.

Speaker 2 Technically, but that felt an awful lot like we'll go ahead and keep you.

Speaker 2 I think they had like actually, I think Hulk does have a button scene or something that's starting to introduce the universe, but no one was thinking of it at that level at that point until Iron Man came along.

Speaker 1 I think Iron Man locked it in for sure. And the approach of it, and it didn't have like even, I heard like Robert Downey Jr.
got paid something like $250,000 to be in the first Iron Man.

Speaker 1 That's an investment level. That's investment level.
Fantastic, yeah. Paid off big for him.
He got the 4x multiplier like right out of the gate and worked it up to 3,000 X.

Speaker 1 He's saying that for the 100x. Somebody's been playing his Lego Star Wars.

Speaker 1 But yeah, but if you go and watch, like, in my opinion, the BTS stuff for Zathura and the way they did the robot in particular, it was a way to like test all the practical effects and Jon Favreau, like learning how he could do that stuff and mixing it with computer graphics in a way that made Iron Man, like, I think, feel really visceral in the way that the Hulk did not, right?

Speaker 1 And there was so many practical effects in Iron Man that people just locked into it. I really think Zathura is

Speaker 1 an uncredited major boon to the Kickstarter of the MCU, which is interesting.

Speaker 2 And it's a great movie. Which is interesting as well, because I guess the spot in my mind that Zathura always occupied just very loosely was it's like Jumanji for kids.

Speaker 2 It's Jumanji, except that Jumanji is also for kids. Is it Jumanji?

Speaker 1 Like, I can't figure this out. Is Jumanji? I feel like it's an SNL sketch.

Speaker 2 Jumanji can't say I never don't say the word Jumanji.

Speaker 1 Jumanji comes out.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 Jumanji, is Jumanji a board game? And was it a board game before the movie? Did they make the movie? And is Zathuro related to Jumanji, or is it just such an incredible clone of Jumanji?

Speaker 2 Here we go. Let's ask.

Speaker 1 Did Zathuro go into Jumanji or did Jumanji come out?

Speaker 2 Jumanji was indeed a board game before the movies. The original Jumanji board game was created in the early 1980s based on the 1981 fantasy story by Chris Van Allsberg.

Speaker 1 Book to board game to movie

Speaker 1 to movie about a video game? That was the second one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I feel like where they went with that sort of mythology is that Jumanji always finds a way. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 2 And if the kids aren't playing the board games, then Jumanji is going to find a way to Jumanji.

Speaker 1 Don't you tell me about Jumanji.

Speaker 1 All the jokes I'm making here is reference to a Kristen Wig when she came back and hosted SNL. They did a Jumanji sketch, and you can't watch it to me and not laugh.

Speaker 1 no i'm gonna i'll we'll put it in the link dump because it's we i feel like it's one of the classics now right like it's a new would you say it's a new classic yeah i would i know i said kristen wig hosted but maybe it was just one of those big 50th anniversary s nls because there's another cameo in it by another cast member who was long gone by that point okay okay yeah but so zathura is it In the Jumanji family or does it feel Jumanji-esque?

Speaker 2 No, I feel like it's Jumanji-esque. I don't feel like it's really, I don't feel like it's in the Jumanji CU.

Speaker 1 Oh, somebody got genre.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, the idea of finding some way to launch kids into a surreal adventure is not a new thing, right? I mean, you know, you had,

Speaker 2 was the

Speaker 2 Time Bandits? Yeah. You know, they actually, and they, which they turned into a series not that long ago as well.

Speaker 1 Wasn't it Tekka YT who did that? I think it might have been. The series?

Speaker 2 I think it might have been. It might have been.
Although maybe I'm mixing up him and Sexy Blackbeard, the pirate show that he did.

Speaker 1 Go ahead. Oh, Our Flag is Death.

Speaker 2 Our Flag Means Death. That's the one.
Yeah. But, you know, just because he was working on that, and so maybe I'm conflating too many things in my mind.

Speaker 2 But I do know that they did a series for Time Bandits not that long ago. I think it only got the one season.

Speaker 1 Do you know that Our Flag is Death? That's what kick-started the Pirates of the Caribbean universe.

Speaker 1 Not many people know that. Came about 20 years after, but it didn't.

Speaker 2 It time traveled back and started it.

Speaker 1 So really quickly, just to follow up here, lost member of Jackass left after suffering brutal injury. If you're a Jackass fan, this is from Unilad.

Speaker 1 Believe it or not, the Jackass cast wasn't originally just made up of nine men with a ferocious appetite for outlandish and daring stunts.

Speaker 1 LA model and actress Stephanie Hodge took part in the first few seasons too.

Speaker 1 However, Hodge, the show's first female stunt woman, there was the Next Generation where they added, I think, a couple female cast members, isn't well recognized from the program as a result of suffering a brutal injury.

Speaker 1 which meant she had to tap out of the franchise for good.

Speaker 1 They were doing a thing on a, to paraphrase here, they they were doing something on a slope where they were going down a like a ski slope in lots of different stuff, like a bouncy castle and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. She got hurt doing that.
Brutal. So yeah, the

Speaker 1 often forgotten female member of the original jackass cast.

Speaker 2 Man, how much would it suck? So like you're like you're doing this stuff and you think you're having a good time and you're just like going down a mountain that's snow. How hard can it be?

Speaker 2 And then you break your back.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing about when people do stuff like that, when I see, this is weird because this is actually, we just talked about a real person and a real thing that happened to a real person.

Speaker 1 But when I see like people doing these incredible stunts and you hear about like somebody getting hurt, that's what makes you interesting to watch doing this is because it's dangerous.

Speaker 1 So when like evil can evil breaks like 50 bones, I'd be like, oh my God, that's terrible. It's like, is it though? Because that's what makes it interesting to begin with.

Speaker 2 Right. It's not exactly, you wouldn't call it the end goal, right? But it is, uh, it's the element of danger that makes it compelling.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That's what you're leaning into.

Speaker 2 And the element of danger is the very real risk.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is enormously sad when somebody gets hurt, especially a spinal injury or something like that.

Speaker 1 But when you're leaning into that danger for your own benefit, you shouldn't be too shocked when it leans back. Is that right? Okay.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
I feel like it sounds callous, but

Speaker 1 I'm not expressing it probably in the right way, but I'll leave it out there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I want to say, too, we were talking about things that get genre-ized. Guess what I'm playing recently? Just kind of taking a wander through every now and then.

Speaker 1 It's like my,

Speaker 1 you probably see me playing it.

Speaker 1 The connection here to genreization is the Battle Royale. Right now, Fortnite is all Simpsons.
It's a full-on,

Speaker 1 like, cell-shaded world.

Speaker 1 You can go and walk through, like, go into Moe's Tavern, go into The Simpsons' house.

Speaker 2 And this is separate from the Battle Royale portion of the game?

Speaker 1 Right now, they're having a huge activation, which I can imagine generates a

Speaker 1 shitload of money for all these skins and everything that everyone's getting. And it's like full-on, looks like the animated world of, where do The Simpsons live?

Speaker 1 springfield springfield

Speaker 2 you asked me that and it did my brain went

Speaker 1 i'm going on vacation it's been around for 35 years it's part of the culture now

Speaker 1 i wonder if they ever revealed what you bought a bunch of vbucks i bought why did they buy the vbucks i bought the v-buck oh because i wanted to check one thing in particular out so i did i bought some v-bucks yeah i saw that come through and i was like Aren't you just playing Fortnite?

Speaker 1 That's all business expense again now, baby. And I'm like, I'm talking about it right now to justify it.
Look at that.

Speaker 1 I like it.

Speaker 1 Done. I think that works in the U.S.
I'm not sure that works in the U.K.

Speaker 2 Well, we'll see. We'll find out.
I guess we'll see. If not, then we'll just hand the V-Bucks on to like the next kid we find, right? Exactly.
That's how that works.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you get your 2x multiplier.

Speaker 1 Save up for a rainy day with your V-Bucks kid. Get your interest on it.
Man, if Fortnite, Epic started offering interest

Speaker 1 on V-Bucks and you didn't spend them. That would, I mean, essentially, you're giving them the money for it, right?

Speaker 2 Okay, here's the next generation of technology is it's

Speaker 2 V-Bucks is going to become like a real cryptocurrency and you mine it by playing Fortnite.

Speaker 1 Listen, listen, this could be a good thing for kids in general. They're young, so it'd be good to get a start somewhere.

Speaker 1 But if you give your money to someone and convert it to V-Bucks, do they have an obligation

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 give you interest on it? Like in the U.S., let's take a UX tax.

Speaker 2 I'm going to say no because it's now no longer a currency. You spent it and you have a thing that is not a currency.

Speaker 1 What? You have like an icon with a number next to it?

Speaker 2 That's what you've got? Yeah, it's not money anymore. You can't spend it outside this ecosystem.

Speaker 1 For instance, if at a certain level in the U.S., if you loan someone some money for something, it doesn't matter what it is.

Speaker 1 If you loan them some money, if over a certain threshold, and it changes every year,

Speaker 1 if you don't charge them interest, then it counts as a gift and you've got to...

Speaker 1 they got to pay taxes on it like a 1099 or whatever so that like people can't pass a bunch of money to their kids and that kind of thing but like if you give someone an actual loan to help them do something, you've got to charge them a certain level of interest.

Speaker 1 Are you not taking that money as like a loan for a future product? Isn't that what a V-Buck is? Or is the V-Buck the end thing itself?

Speaker 2 No, I think it technically is the end thing itself,

Speaker 2 like as far as financial institutions are concerned, because it's now gone into an ecosystem. It's not, you can't transfer that out to be worth anything else, right? It's gone.

Speaker 2 Do you ever think though that like, do you remember Microsoft points when Xbox Live launched and you could spend

Speaker 2 you could spend like $10 for, I don't know, 300 Microsoft points or whatever. And they moved away from that because everyone was like, I hate this fake currency.

Speaker 2 Just tell me what the value of this thing is worth. Just like remove this obfuscation layer.
I just want to pay for things in dollars. And so Microsoft finally got around to doing that, right?

Speaker 2 And they moved everything to dollars. And now we've got Fortnite with its V-Bucks.
And I'm sure like everyone's got like their premium in-game currency that you can buy.

Speaker 2 And I'm sure Microsoft is just like, what the hell, guys?

Speaker 1 What the hell?

Speaker 2 You made us move away from this. And instead, you got 50 different versions.

Speaker 1 And maybe we could look it up or we can call Phil Spector.

Speaker 1 I think there might have been a threat of regulation when it came to that. I want to say that there was a tax implication because of it, which is kind of what I'm talking about here.

Speaker 1 None of this is financial advice, by the way, with your V-Bucks and your Microsoft points. Do you remember also they had a symbol for the value of Microsoft points?

Speaker 1 It was like a dollar sign. I can't even, I remember that it existed, but I cannot picture it in my head.
It was a terrible symbol.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was one of those like, look at this fake money.

Speaker 1 It kind of looked like an icon for Pac-Man, if I recall correctly, with an eyeball on it or something like that.

Speaker 2 I think I know a thumbnail.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it was like, it's always one of those things. It's kind of like, you always hear about those scams where somebody...

Speaker 1 develops an algorithm inside of a bank where they realize that there's a rounding error on interest and there's like a half penny and the computer just throws it out.

Speaker 2 Isn't that the entire premise of office space?

Speaker 1 Office space is like, it was a whole story, but office place used like that like urban legend and used it in their show, in the movie, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Whereas like, where it's like just the rounding, it's a fraction of a penny.

Speaker 1 But if you collect all the fractions of a penny that no one's going to miss, then you get a ton of money.

Speaker 1 Like even to this day, when you go buy gasoline petrol in the U.S., it's still like, $249 and nine-tenths of a cent.

Speaker 2 Yes, yeah. And it's like, well, you know, we're just going to go ahead and round that up.

Speaker 2 Speaking of which, though, the value of all that, do you think they're gonna change that now that no one's making they're not making the penny anymore?

Speaker 1 Oh, right. They're not the penny's done, everybody.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the final penny in the U.S. has been minted.

Speaker 1 I've always heard too, because I've seen signs going up saying that they're no longer like calculating anything in less than five-cent increments. I wonder how I always heard this thing, too.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard this? That a business in the U.S.

Speaker 1 can't not accept cash. Have you ever heard that rule?

Speaker 2 I have heard that rule that because it's official currency, you have to accept it. Right.
And you, you know, that's, that's what makes it currency, is that it is universally accepted.

Speaker 2 You can't not accept it. I've heard that.

Speaker 2 I don't know how much that's being enforced anymore now that everyone is just like, you know, doing tap to pay and got their, you know, their Apple wallets and, you know, no one is carrying cash anyway.

Speaker 2 You know, like you got the guy like hustling on the corner asking if the, if you've got money and you're like, no. And and they're like, you're like, I don't care cash.
And they're like, that's fine.

Speaker 2 You can, I've got my stripe right here.

Speaker 1 Isn't that crazy? My stripe terminal. That's wild.

Speaker 2 I don't know if that's real. It's just one of those stories that you hear.

Speaker 1 I have seen it personally. Really? But I've seen it for busking, not for panhandling.
Okay. Was that the right term to use?

Speaker 1 I know I use the wrong term, but yeah, busking, meaning like there's a music performance. I see it all the time now.
There's a little terminal tap.

Speaker 1 I saw one online the other day that people now have at the bar, which it's a tap to paint.

Speaker 1 It's just three bucks and you just go by the station and tap it to pay it cool that's it cool except i've run into the problem too where that thing has kind of a decent range depending on the device and i went to go like pay for something at the store one time and i was going to switch to a different card But before I could do it, it just did my default card and charged it.

Speaker 1 It went, got it, thanks. Yeah, it went to my American credit card or something like that.
Or it was in the U.S. and it did my UK credit card.
I'm like, damn it.

Speaker 2 And they're like, what are you doing there?

Speaker 1 Well, because I know they're going to charge me so much more for fees.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, fees fees or like now they're going to lock your card going, what are you doing over there? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you need to put a travel alert on your card?

Speaker 1 Ashley, don't give me a sign.

Speaker 2 I'm about to get you working on that.

Speaker 1 Did you watch my face drop?

Speaker 2 I did. I did.
I watched that. So I'm just going to move solidly away from that right now.

Speaker 1 I have an interesting thing going on right now. Go ahead.
This is unrelatable to anybody at all, but this is weird when you get a manufacturing flaw in something that's like a mass-produced product.

Speaker 1 I have a chess game. I'm teaching Finn to play chess right now.
We opened up the chess game to put it out. The black pieces, three nights, one rook.

Speaker 1 So now I've got to try to get the rook from the chess company and try to get them to send me the rook.

Speaker 2 In the meantime, why don't you have him build a rook out of Lego?

Speaker 1 I would have returned it, but I bought it like two years ago and just opened it. I was really ambitious when he was four of teaching him chess.

Speaker 1 Now he's finally at the age where I think maybe six is better.

Speaker 2 And now all he's learning is that mom and dad get to do different power sets at bedtime chasing.

Speaker 1 It boggled his mind that a mistake like that could be made.

Speaker 2 It boggled his mind. Like he just didn't even know that that was possible.

Speaker 1 Like he could, we had to get to the bottom of it. Like, dude, these mistakes just happen.

Speaker 1 It's people like throwing stuff in a box and they're doing a lot every day and they're going to mess up every one every now and then. You know, he just was like boggled by that.
So valuable lesson.

Speaker 2 He's going to call someone's manager.

Speaker 1 He gets a compound interest and mass automation lessons at six years old.

Speaker 2 Well, I want to say thank you to a couple of people who've saved up for their 10x multiplier, Alex Raynard and Jake Patrick.

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 Hey, everybody, that does it for us. Tuesday, November 18th, 2025.
We're going to be back to talk to you tomorrow. We hope you will be here as well.
Bye, everybody.