2025.12.03: Not Doing The Voice Anymore

It ain't got no gas in it.

Hey, we're recording the podcast. Got up.

Good

morning to you wherever you are because it is morning somewhere for December 3rd, 2025. So early.
My name is Bernie Burns. Sitting right over there.
No, she won't do the voice anymore.

It's Ashley Burns. Say to Ashley.
I was getting that

clip from Sling Blade. Some people call it a Kaiser Blade.
That's Billy Bob Thornton. Self-directed.
Do you know that he directed that movie? Did he? Yeah, yeah. He launched his own career.

And it was 1996 that movie came out. And he does not play, I haven't seen him play anything like, is it Carl, the name of the character from Slingblade?

But I got to thinking, the kind of guy Billy Bob Thornton is now, like...

He's very much a persona, right? Right. Yeah, you see me seeking.

He's like a living character. Yeah.
And I wonder if it's like, if anyone asked him to do the voice from Slingblade in like an interview now, I bet it would be a big deal.

No, not doing the voice too.

But it's cool. It's cool to see somebody who,

you know, just kind of kickstarts their own career like that. And

we have a story today about Francis Ford Copla that kind of plays into that. But I want to talk really quickly follow up on yesterday.
We got a lot of voicemails. A lot of voicemails.

We got a lot of voicemails yesterday about the

talk about Black Friday sales and the K-shaped economy and everything else. I will say this.

There were a lot of people who left voicemails who gave a lot of personally identifying information.

So we're not going to share that. There was one guy I really want to talk about.
He was, he mentioned that he was a, he had a CDL.

I found out too, actually, the people who left voicemails, really very different than what I've experienced from people who leave internet comments. Is that fair to say? Possibly.

Yeah, a lot of, like, we know a lot of commuters listen to the show, but there's a lot of like, what what I consider like blue collar, like people that prop up the entire economy with the work, keep everything running.

And there was a guy who called in, got a commercial truck driving license. He works for a very well-known American soft drink company.

And I won't say what, even though he said, because I don't want anybody to get in trouble. But it was really cool because he gave very specific information.
about the money that he used to make.

Like, this is someone who is very much in control of their finances. Said that in 2023,

it was the most money I ever made as a guy in my 20s. I made $58,360.

And he used to work at commissioned for delivering these soft drinks per case. I mean, careful here.

And that he worked 2,268 hours to get that. Then in 2024, they took away the commission and he worked more hours to make about, he gave me a specific number again, $2,178 less in 2024.

So he had to work a lot more to make less. I always appreciate people who give hard numbers like that.
Like, that's that's it,

especially in America, they kind of train you not to do that, right? To not do that. Right.
Like, you're not supposed to talk numbers. You're not supposed to do that.

So I always appreciate when people do it. But if you consider that along with inflation, I mean, that's a big hit.
Talked about his Black Friday spending habits and why he was spending less.

I also want to point out, Ashley, that I am actually doing a solid to people who call into the voicemail box by doing a little bit of editing. Okay.

A little bit of screening because there was also somebody who said, called in they said uh yeah uh i think the black friday thing is an indication that a lot of people are just spending money they don't have just to get the serotonin hit from shopping online which i i actually get that a little bit i totally do but then he goes like my wife and she

was like i'm gonna do

i'm gonna do this solid i'm not gonna play

I'm not gonna play your voicemail. Hope you listen to this podcast alone, buddy.
So my overall guideline is when you call into the voicemail, if you can make it short, that'd be great.

But I understand not everyone, like when they hear that double beep, which apparently catches a lot of people,

it's hard to be succinct. But also, don't give us a whole lot of revealing information.

You can obfuscate a little bit. And watch out throwing your wife under the bus, buddy.
Another guy gave a really interesting point.

Eric from Connecticut called in to say that he had been waiting for a long time to buy about 800 bucks.

worth of computer parts. Oh, yeah, Greg.
That'll get you a Ram. One stick of Ram.
One stick of Ram.

How much does Ram cost? Man, I don't, it's going crazy at the moment. I think Ram right now is going through what video cards went through

with like crypto money, AI. See,

a stick of RAM to me costs, one stick costs about $175,

but what that buys you changes so much over time. Like when I first bought it, it was $175 and I got...
four megabytes of RAM on that.

And now I would expect to get about eight gigabytes on a stick of RAM, maybe 16 at this point. I mean,

what I'm hearing now is that RAM is going to run you more than a PS5 at this point.

But Eric of Connecticut, if that is your real name, said that he had been waiting for a long time, like 10 months to buy $800 worth of computer parts.

And the reason that he bought it on Black Friday was because he was waiting until it would drop in price. And when Black Friday came along, he's like, okay, the price will definitely drop now.

Then it didn't. So he's like, okay, well, I guess I'll just go ahead and buy it because it's never going to drop.
It's not getting lower if it's not dropping on Black Friday. Right.

If it's not going to be lower today, it's never going to be lower than it is right now. So fair enough.
And then lastly, really quickly, I'll play this one.

We got a call in from our resident economist of the subreddit. This is Dr.
Noah Trudeau. I added the doctor.
He didn't say doctor in his name, which I appreciate, but he did say that he has a PhD.

Oh, doctor. Professor of economics from Troy University.
I had a question about where the hell does this metric of consumer confidence come from? And here's what he had to say about that.

Bernie's curious about where consumer confidence comes from. I've got you.
Consumer confidence comes from the University of Michigan or the conference board.

These two organizations both do consumer confidence surveys.

These include just questions about how people feel about the future.

So one example would be, now looking ahead, do you think that a year from now, you and your family living there will be better off financially or worse off or just about the same as you are now?

Yeah, so it's a survey that's done. And I guess the University of Michigan, the survey that they conduct, it is just renowned as the one that everyone uses as the metric for consumer confidence.

So if you were to survey, say, Francis Ford Coppola, what do you think he would have to say about his consumer confidence? He would probably, you know what he'd have to ask? This is a weird one, too.

He would have to ask a weird source like the University of Michigan or very specific source. Do you know where the Black Friday metric came from?

Do you know this thing about like record spending on Black Friday? No. Do you know who put that metric out? Who put that out? Adobe.
What? Adobe. Wow.
Yeah.

It's not where I would expect that information would come from. I would expect like the U.S.
Department of Economic Growth or something.

No, but you know what that makes me think is that makes me think that Adobe has like other things that they do that are their real business that are not like Photoshop. Yeah.
Right.

In the same way that when you think of Amazon, you think of buying stuff online, but also they run the internet. Right, right.
They run the internet with Amazon web services. Right.

That's like that, like that's the big business. You know, it's funny.
There's so many of these companies that are like B2B companies that just kind of live behind the scenes.

And you never hear about these companies until they fuck up and then everything shuts down for a day. I can't even remember.
What was an even company? WeWork. Well, like WeWork's a great one.

There was a company like six months ago, CrowdStrike. I can't even remember.

Yeah, CrowdStrike, where they had the outage. And like no one had ever heard of CrowdStrike until there was an outage and everyone went very suddenly knew what CrowdStrike was.
Right.

Or Experian or something like that. You hear about these names and they have a huge problem.
I think it's kind of like what happened with Enron back in the day, right? Like, who the fuck is Enron?

Like, you didn't know until it was bad. They were a little different.
They were like selling like weird electricity shares or something like that.

And yeah, and even CrowdStrike is one of those companies. It's like they're like Homer Simpson just going back into the hedge.

I can't even think of their name anymore, but it was so important six months ago when they were fucking up everything everywhere. Right, all at once.
Yeah, everything everywhere all at once

you know what though if you want to

if you want to know what the behind the scenes companies are that run everything do you know where you should go in order to experience that whole side of the economy a convention no watch golf on television what you will see advertisements for companies that you have never heard of man that makes me want to take up like watching golf just so that i can get a break from i'm assuming what you mean is that like it's a lot of what like what construction companies?

No, no, consulting firms. Consulting firms.
Yeah.

Would it be nice to get a break from like, I don't know, prescription advertising? So maybe I'll take up golf.

Yeah, like Spider-Man and Friends, which our kids watch, it's never interrupted by a KPMG act.

Watches Saturday morning cartoons. Daddy, Daddy, have you considered signing KPMG as your consultancy? Right, like Palantir and things like that.

All these companies that you don't hear about until they're a major problem. Watch golf.
You'll know them. Daddy, I think I'm going to join Salesforce.

Salesforce, another one. Salesforce just came up because we use a product every day.
I use it begrudgingly. I'll give you a hint.
What is the product we use every day that is a Salesforce product?

That you use begrudgingly.

There's a lot of those, but

it's kind of a wide category itself. I think that made the list longer, not shorter.

You learned about those by listening to this podcast.

What is it? Slack. Slack is is owned by salesforce

apparently did they buy it mailchimp is owned by intuit which is quick quickbooks and quicken and all that stuff what yeah yeah so there's there's all these companies that like they do another thing right right they've got their like public facing thing and then they've got their real thing right their secret thing the actual money maker thing Yeah, like eBay.

They're now branching out into famous directors and selling their watch collections. Right.
So that's, I finally can talk about it. We tease the story enough, yeah.
I love this so much.

I mean, I, I love it, but also just because it's weird.

So Francis Ford Coppola has said, I think I, this is according to New York Times, he's selling like a million dollar watch because he says he's broke from self-funding Megalopolis.

Yeah, which was the movie. We talked about it earlier this year.

It was a passion project that he'd wanted to make forever and nobody. Yeah, like all the studios wouldn't touch it.
They all said no. And he said, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to self-fund it.

And he did.

And,

it well it hasn't made back its money no it did very poorly it did very poorly but also i i i love that people put their money where their mouth is i love that someone at that level will go into their own pocket go you know basically like put all their former success on the line in order to make something that clearly

nobody else wanted to see made that's kind of what art is i you know it's like in it it's not super relatable how much was one of these watches like like a million dollars

he's actually selling a couple Let's see. This is according to

Mansion Global.

He's selling a couple of advertisement on the golf channel. He's selling.

This is the star of the sale of Lot 17, a one-of-one prototype FP Journ FFC produced in collaboration with the modern watchmaking visionary Francois Paul Journ himself.

Given its extraordinary provenance, expected to fetch more than a million dollars.

Do you ever hear about something that's really expensive and you hear all those qualifications and those names and everything and you're just glad I don't know anything about any of that?

Yeah, like I feel my pocketbook feels much more comfortable that I don't know what any of that means. Like he's saying he's selling a fancy watch.
I'm like, oh, he has a Rolex or whatever.

I hear about these watches, but it's like sneakers too. That's the one I always look at because that's one that a lot of people get involved with on a more relatable level.

People always talk about like this drop or that drop or this is a whatever Jordan from this. I'm like, I'm so glad I don't know about any any of that stuff.

Well, but you know what's really interesting about this is a lot of people will refer to things like watches as like investment pieces and so on, right?

In this case, it actually was, and it's an investment he can pull the, he can pull the money back out of, right? He can auction it off and get the money back out of this like investment asset.

So, you know, it's, it's interesting. It's cool.

I was surprised to hear about it because, I mean, I guess I thought at some level that it was better received critically, like among the industry than maybe commercially.

So I went back and looked and I realized what I think of as my

indicator for what

the filmmaking industry thinks of like their fellows is

I measure it by how long they got a standing ovation at Can. I was thinking the same thing.
I was thinking the exact thing. That stupid standing ovation metric.

That we make fun of every time Can comes around. But didn't Megalopos get like 45 minutes or something? No, no, that's the thing.
I thought that it was going to be a big number like that.

It got the equivalent of like a pity clap at Cannes, which was three minutes. Oh, whoa, how embarrassing.
I was. Only three minutes of standing ovation at the highest level.

Put that in perspective, I think

the record is 22 minutes for Pan's Labyrinth. Okay, Guillermo de Toro.

And there are a couple of other films that have come close, but nothing that's gotten ready to break the 22-minute standing ovation of Pan's Labyrinth.

So three minutes is what it got, which is, you know, essentially they go, you know, that like polite clap where you don't want to like not clap because it would be rude.

Dude, try clapping for three minutes.

If that's a gimme, if that's your baseline, good lord, that's still a lot. How long was Pan's Labyrinth? 22 minutes.
Yeah, Del Toro was also in the news just recently.

I will never pass up an opportunity to say something nice about Guillermo de Toro because he went on Twitter and said the nicest things about Laser Team when it came out, but he just got an award for

Frankenstein? Yes. I think it's Oscar Isaac and that's his, that's his new one.
Is it? I don't know. Yeah, I think it is.
Is it? Is it? Hold on. I'm going to look up who's in Frankenstein.
But

he got

an award and he went up to the mic and he basically said, just went up and goes, fuck AI.

Good.

He talked about how his movie, Every Frame Shines with Human Artistry. And I'm like, fuck yeah, dude.
I love this fucking guy. You're right.
It's Oscar Isaac. Yeah, it's Oscar Isaac.
I missed that.

I was thinking, I knew that Jacob Alordi and Christoph Waltz were in it, but somehow I missed that Oscar Isaac plays Dr. Frankenstein.
Technically, it's Dr. Frankenstein, Doctor.

I fucked that joke up.

It's actually Victor Frankenstein's PhD. Yeah, it's Guillermo de Toro's Dr.
Frankenstein's PhD.

I want to see it. This is honestly, it's like, there's never a bad Del Toro movie.
No, no, everything that he's put out, they're always like a little bit weird and really great.

I have trouble saying Guillermo. Me too.
Guillermo de Toro. Altogether, it's like tough for me to say.
And I want to say it with like reverence, you know? The reverence that he deserves.

I want to put some gravitas on it when I say it. And I'm like fumbling with my gringo accent.

But anyway, love that guy. Love him to death.
Yeah. And I love his take that

you can't replace the human ingenuity in these creative industries, no matter how much you try. Yeah, no.

There's actually a crackdown on sort of not AI exactly, but robotics in general happening in China as well. Have you heard about this? Bro, I went down.
Bro, I just said,

Spin around Finn a lot lately. Bruh.

I went down kind of a rabbit hole with this article, and I'll tell you about it in a second. Why don't you tell us what you're talking about here?

So what I was reading is that China's been experiencing,

you know, the same sort of like flood of interest that the whole AI industry has been experiencing, specifically with robotics, where everyone is trying to make a humanoid robot.

So there's dozens of firms all now making these humanoid robots, but they don't really do anything yet, right? They're not really good at anything.

Like they'll, right, you know, maybe they can walk if they're lucky. We've seen some like, you know, dance numbers that everyone's like, wow, that's incredible, but they can't really do anything.

They can fold a towel as long as there's someone like in a call center driving old country folding a towel and showing it how to do it. Exactly.

So, you know, there's this whole, this budding industry all trying to make this same thing, but it doesn't really do anything. And China's starting to crack down on it.

I guess it's in an effort to avoid a repeat of what happened with their bike bubble, where

that's the rabbit hole I fell down. This bike bubble, what the hell was that?

So I guess a couple of years ago, think of it as like in the U.S., the equivalent of that, I think, was the lime scooters, right?

Where every city was littered with just these piles of lime scooters, where you could just walk up to a scooter, you could rent the scooter, you could ride the scooter somewhere, you get off the scooter, and you just fucking leave it there, right?

And so they were doing something similar, but with bikes and had these, I mean, there are

you talk about the lime scooters. Everyone can kind of picture this, I think, if you were in the U.S.
or lived in a major city.

We're talking like seven, ten lime scooters or, you know, these electric scooters abandoned on a corner and how annoying that was. Now take the picture, scale it up.

Dude, I don't know how they managed to even make all these bikes. There are photos.

I guess they were very embarrassing to the Chinese government. These photos of these bike graveyards.
It's just bikes. They're piled high.
It's just.

it is a mountain of bikes i don't know how i missed these photos apparently this happened in like 2018 yeah it's it's you look at these images of how many bikes there are it's insane and they're just piled up just it's it's they had to put a human in it to give you some kind of perspective as well even some sense of scale and even that is like it's it's hard to comprehend a lot of times when you're looking at the photos you can't tell what you're looking at it just looks like abstract blobs of color you should make it the thumbnail so the people are like what the hell is this thumbnail i i absolutely will and uh and so they had you know this this whole like oversupply and they had you know the their city infrastructure wasn't built for bikes you know it's not it's not like amsterdam right where like yeah there are a lot of bikes but the city's built for it so not only did they have you know millions of bikes that no one was using i mean people were using that but not at this

at not at the number of bikes that were available no it's crazy it may remind me of like where you see those ghost cities in china where they built the cities and then they just didn't have enough people people to put in the cities.

Right. Like they built them predictively.
They thought that we, if you build it, they will come, right? There will be people and they will live in the city and it will be great.

And then there just weren't enough people to live in the city and now they're these concrete skeletons. Right.

And they're actually, they look really cool if you didn't think about like what it took resource wise to make them.

And that's the crazy thing is like this bike thing too is they had all the resources and the manufacturing capacity to produce this amount of bikes.

And I'm sure if you piled up like every bike made in America, it would look like this but that's what it looks like it looks like every bike they ever made it's so many bikes um so they had the manufacturing capacity to make this amount of bikes but then not like the consumer capacity to use them it's so so strange you know what i mean it's like it's so out of whack right it's it's like what they were selling they were they were selling to each other like within the industry or something right like they were hyping each other up and they just assumed that everyone would go along with it and they they just forgot to count the people whatever the chinese equivalent of golf is, that's where they advertise all these companies to each other.

Yeah, but it's, I wouldn't be surprised actually if there was like in golf ads, I would not be surprised if there was like offshore manufacturing, like

probably firms that can help you do that and stuff like that. But yeah, so I was thinking about this and I was thinking about the phantom cities.

And then I had this weird, you know how you like these weird like red flags or economic indicators? Yeah.

The whole thing of like the phantom cities and this mountain of bikes is just like,

I don't associate the country of China with a scarcity of people, right? Correct. They're like the tip of the spear.

They have been for almost a century now for the overpopulation, which we've all been taught overpopulation, overpopulation.

And now we're having to make the ship shift the other way to think about like what happens when we have a population crash.

And a lot of people don't like talking about this because usually the people talk about this are talking about like future workers and shit like that. But I got the weirdest red flag about that.

My parents were high school teachers, public high school teachers.

So whenever I want to seriously doom scroll, I've said this before, I go on the teacher's subreddit on Reddit, and I just, it's all these public high school teachers like talking about their experience.

And it really is, it'll horrify you. Very sobering, would you say?

Weirdly enough, what just came up was a highly upvoted topic was one of the teachers going, hey, I got to throw this out there with everything else we're dealing with.

Does anyone else have the experience that I'm having where 20 years ago, 15 years ago,

we constantly had to build new facilities, constantly had to build new schools? Right. You had to like bring in those.
Do you remember for a while they would bring in those like pods? Like portables.

Yeah, like they're like outdoor classrooms that they would like park in the parking lot because they were out of room inside the school.

When JD was in elementary school, his first two grades, he was in like mobile home trailers outside the school because there was not enough room inside the school.

And now this teacher, she says, I don't know, it's she, but they said, now I'm dealing with a situation where we're constantly closing down programs and we can't fund things because there's just not enough students to justify having that program anymore.

Like an extracurricular thing or something, an additional program. Is anyone else dealing with this? And they even said,

I wish my district would shut down a few schools so we could consolidate down to like one or two schools that could actually have more programs and more funding.

Because we'd have enough students to actually justify the program. Because we don't have the density and the comments were filled with teachers with the same thing.
Man, that's a huge shift.

It's interesting. And it's anecdotal, but it is an indication of like the direction things are heading.

And I got to think too, also anecdotally, the number of people I know under 40 at this point is everyone's getting older.

I was thinking about all the couples I know and how many have had kids even into their 30s or are planning to have kids. And I

had to think for a a long time before I could think of one, right? Yeah, yeah. I can't think of many off the top of my head.

You know, so yeah, it is a, it is definitely like a shift in the way that people are living. It's also a lot of reasons for that as well.

What we're talking about here is the overall impact going forward. Like what's the end result of all those other things? And now we've got this situation where it's like, you know.

empty cities, mountains of bikes. It's going to be, I think, a thing we talk about more and more.
Probably. But going back to the China story, but the robots, the thing I I took away from it

was

this came from like some ministry in China that I wouldn't know what it is. It's like the

Ministry of Finance and Projection.

I'll look it up because it's interesting. It comes from, here we go.
It's the National Development and Reform Commission. The article makes a point of saying it has no U.S.

equivalent, so don't even ask. It wasn't America Online that came up with this stat or whatever.

It's actually from Kill Ogs.

What they said was

that they learned the lessons from 2018, which is great that someone can learn a lesson from a recent thing.

It seems like in the U.S., if there's one of these huge bubbles, it seems like we just race to repeat it again if we can. We're like, well, look at how much money was made during the bubble.

We got to do those things again. Yeah, like, oh, the crash was tough, but look at how much money we made while it was good.

And it's a translated statement, but China said basically

they said like you're you're you're all doing the same thing and these robots don't do a goddamn thing.

Yeah, they're basically gonna put restrictions on who can enter and exit the robotics market based on whether or not they're gonna do something new, right?

Like you don't get to just come in and build the same robot that everyone else is building that doesn't do anything. It's just gonna cause problems for us down the line.
So you can't do that.

What are you doing that's new if you want to make something?

But then also it sounds like they're gonna be putting limits on exiting. Like you don't just get to like make a thing and then walk away from it, right? Like we have nowhere

the, the, the parking lots, they're already full of bikes. We have nowhere to put your robots.
So you need to actually like support them and do something with them.

So I found it interesting that this is something that the Chinese government is basically taking in hand within China. You know, we've talked about this too.

Since the announcement of just reacquiring the Rooster Teeth brand,

my email box has been flooded with investment offers and everything. And the easiest way to get out of those conversations and say, this is not an exit strategy.
There is no plan to exit.

This is not an exitable company. Meaning that, you know, you sell it and then you head off into the sunset.
Once you say that to investment people, they all just go to you. They're going to you.

That's their exit moment. They're like, they don't even enter at that point.
Yeah, it's a really easy way to get out of it. You're not trying to pump it up? I'm out of here.
Yeah, I'm out of here.

What I took away from this announcement, Ashley, is that... It's all translated, of course, but basically I got the overall tone was, hey, enough with the dancing demonstrations.
Did you get that too?

Like, I feel like they called out specifically dancing robots. We're not, we don't want our economy based on robots that dance.
Right. Like, like dancing isn't going to do it, buddy.
Right, right. And

what they're doing is by

limiting the exit ability of these businesses is that then they get, they kind of like kill speculation, right? Of people who just like, oh, I can make a ton of money doing this.

So go and raise a bunch of money, put up some cool presentations, and then the whole thing falls apart.

And then somehow a bunch of people make a bunch of money and this thing doesn't help anyone at all and you end up with a mountain of bikes right uh and then that that then we have to deal with yeah so it you know i think it's an it's interesting and i wonder if we'll start to see more things like that i can't say i would hate the idea of having um like guardrails for like AI development and things like that simply because, well, it would be nice for us to be able to afford RAM as consumers as well.

You know, but also then I go, oh, but do I want the government telling the companies like who can make what? I don't know. I don't know.
That's also a scary thought.

So I don't know where to go with it for you. Here's what I'm saying.
We should make Guillermo de Toro the ambassador. Perfect AI.
He's in charge.

He just goes into every meeting and goes, fuck AI.

I hate

this AI. I hate it.

He's such a gem. All right.
Well, that does it for us today. Ashley, who do we have to thank for helping us shine with human artistry today?

All right, like to say a big thank you to a couple extra gems, Jose M. Villanueva and Dylan Hinners.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morningsummer and roosterteeth.com. All right, that does it for us today, December 3rd, 2025.

We're going to be back to talk to you tomorrow. We hope you will be here as well.
Bye, everybody.