2025.12.01: Mature Behavior

What a world. Recording the podcast.
Gun up.

Good morning to you wherever you are because

it is morning somewhere for December 1st, 2025. My name is Bertie Burns sitting right over there, diligently checking her fitness goal on her watch.
It's Ashley Burns. What's my goal?

Oh, no, I lost November. Dude, why? Why'd you lose November? Oh, I didn't do enough workouts.
Oh, well,

that's what happens in November, Ashley.

This weird idea, fitness-wise, that you're going to like, oh, I'm going to like kick off my diet during the holidays, and then I'll be ahead of everybody else.

And then it's like, that's not going to be a good thing. That's never going to happen.
Never going to happen.

I mean, I can think that, but it's just, I'm not going to get the results that I'm looking for because I'm going to be busy like drinking eggnog or something. Well,

we have a lot of stuff to cover today, but to wrap up some of our discussions from last week,

the crazy rivalry weekend of college football. It's not like I said rival wee.
Rival wee. The rival wee weekend.
The rival wee weekend of college football happened this last week.

Yeah, Ohio State and Indiana, basically the big story is that they are now still undefeated. But guess what, Ashley? What?

They are both members of the Big Ten Conference, so they will be facing off in the Big Ten Conference game, championship game this weekend.

And then we'll decide who's going to be undefeated and who is going to be defeated. Defeated.

And only one will keep their zero. And the other thing, too, we did a long chat.

People appreciated it on the sponsor chat this weekend because a lot of people, you just kind of take for granted that American football, because it's popular, that people understand how it works.

And you and I had a long explanation and discussion about how downs work in American football. Probably, thank God somebody finally explained what that is.
Well, here's the best part, Brent.

You're going to be able to explain this multiple times because it basically went in one ear and out the the other. No, that's okay.
It can go consume.

You can go listen to the podcast as well, Ashley, because you're a sponsor on the Rich Sheet website. That is true.

I can learn and learn again. So the Big Ten championship game is now scheduled for the date of December 6th.
So you can watch it this weekend.

But between now and then, Ashley, another big event is coming up for us, which is December 5th is when they do the draws for the groups for the 2026 World World Cup.

And that's when you find out if you and the lads are going to invade America. Here's what I'm just going to give everyone a heads up.

If you find out on December 5th that Scotland is going to play in either one of the host cities, Houston or Dallas,

we will not have this podcast for the month of June 2026.

We will be there. We will be in Austin and going back and forth to whatever it is, either Houston or Dallas to watch Scotland dominate on the world stage of football.

I can't wait. I can't wait.
The other thing that happened this weekend sports-wise is that

the big thing,

this is the real headline, the big thing does.

Yeah, the Texas Longhorn. It's actually not the biggest story in college football.
We can talk about that in a second.

Texas Longhorns beat the Texas A ⁇ M Aggies. So the Aggies are now 11-1, did not complete their 12-0 undefeated season.
So they got their one loss to the team that mattered.

They also got knocked out of the SEC championship game, which I believe now is going to be Alabama and Georgia, which no one is excited about. But yeah, I said,

came to this revelation this weekend that I had said

that I didn't want the whole purpose of the Texas Longhorns football season in 2025. I did not want it to be just to ruin our rivals' great season.
Very mature. Thank you.
I appreciate that.

And I do want to say publicly, I said this on the sponsor chat this weekend. I want to be the bigger man here and admit I was wrong.
It feels great.

I'm happy about it. Oh my God, I'm watching all this like meltdown in the Aggie fandom.
And they just hate it. They hate losing to Texas.
And I completely get it. But that's what keeps things going.

And I'm also excited about the fact. I'm a purist when it comes to old school college football.
I like the debate. I love people jockeying and saying who should be in and who shouldn't.

And now Texas is screwing everything up. Like even teams that are 11-1, like by you have to now argue why they should be in the playoffs

at eight and three but yeah but the other big story here if you're if you want a story to follow and you don't give a crap about college football i got one for you here oh great because that's me so there is a uh there's a team that is going into the playoffs old miss and they are having ashley

they're having drama which you will love because okay because you just went to wicked two this weekend which seems very drama filled But so what's going on is that LSU, you're familiar with the school LSU.

Is that Louisiana State University? Yes. What is the mascot for the Louisiana State University? I almost said the name.

What it was? The Gators. They are the Tigers.
They are the Tigers. Very dominant program, not having a fantastic year.
Yes, Louisiana. often associated with the Tigers.

Old Miss is having a fantastic year heading into the playoffs. I believe they only have one loss as well.

So, Louisiana State, between the season and the postseason now, Louisiana State has hired away Old Miss's coach, like dangled a bunch of money and said, Come on, get out of there and come coach for us.

It's a huge opportunity.

There's a lot of drama about it. And he asked for the opportunity to coach his team all the way through the playoffs.
Old Miss said, No, thanks. We'll figure it out.

So now you basically have a team that is suddenly like Indiana, the Cinderella team.

You now have kind of this like headless team of kids who made a great hold on this is a this is now a university football team that's going into the playoff shot of the national title um with no coach yeah they'll get a coach they'll get somebody in there but yeah their coach like walked out the door i mean yeah yeah yeah they're getting ted lasso in there right but like the point is the point is that like this this is the beginning of some sort of like comedy university sports movie right like they're gonna like they're going to like dress up like some dude and pretend that he's a coach, right?

So that they can pull off their shenanigans. They're going to start stealing mascots.
Bernie, there is going to be chaos.

Listen, college football, when we use words like rivalry, really what we're saying is like stored trauma and drama. It's a lot of drama.
Trauma, drama? Trauma and drama.

So this is one where LSU and Ole Miss are not going to hate each other even more than they do.

But you can follow this team, but like these kids who, you know, had this incredible season and now their coaches abandoned them and they have to go. They're going to go.

They have to go into the playoffs. This is a Disney story in the making, Ashley.
I can't wait for this to be the subject of next year's Netflix Christmas movie. It'll be amazing.

Hallmark is salivating. I hope someone finds love.
So how did you like Wicked?

It was, look, the costumes and the colors and the singing, it's all glorious, right? It's all very shiny, wildly colorful.

There was, I would say, five out of seven, too much collarbone or too much like chest bones showing, you you know. I don't know what those

purposeful very, yes. Uh, but it was, I mean, I mean, I assume so.
I think it was, you know, a look they were going for.

Uh, it must have been because there was an awful lot of like collarbone and chestbone showing, like, in the costumes. Uh, but the singing was great, the costumes were fantastic.

It's not as strong lyrically as the first half, but everyone knew that going in. That, like, when you say first half, you mean the first movie? The first movie, yeah.

So, the way they broke the movies up is essentially like at the intermission of the musical. And so the second half of the musical doesn't have like quite as strong a showstopper as the first half.

And that's that. So going into it, that was expected.
It was still good. You know what? I have to think too, when you say that, it reminds me of Frozen into Frozen 2.

How much pressure do you think it was on everyone when they were going into Frozen 2 to make another banger hit?

Well, I mean, didn't they rewrite a bunch of Frozen because originally Elsa was going to be more of like a villain

character and then they wrote let it go and went oh shit. We have to change the whole story now.
Very interesting, right? Right.

It's like so clearly when they wrote that they put pen to paper and they went, oh no, we have a hit on our hands, right? And then there would be. Like, how do you top that?

Especially because it's got to be a similar thing to, what is it, sophomore albums where you have your whole life to write your first album and like a year to write your second. Yeah.

You know, and so they can have had this, these ideas cogitating and they got let it go down and went, amazing. Shit.

What do we do now? That's a lot of pressure, dude. It's a lot of pressure.
Follow up that song. I mean, that said, Wicked was always like, it was written.
Into the great unknown.

Is that what they came up with? Into the unknown. That's it.

But the,

you know, the thing with Wicked is it was all written as one musical. So I don't know that they necessarily felt that pressure in writing the musical.

I'm going to ask you a question, which I don't know. I assume it is, but is the Wizard of Oz public domain?

So anyone can make Wizard of Oz, or is it just like different enough where they can fit under fair use? I'm pretty sure it's public domain.

It may have been public domain when they made it into a movie. So the

wonderful Wizard of Oz, as written by L. Frank Baum and published in 1900, is in the public domain.
Right.

But I don't think that the movie is in public domain because you'll notice

a lot of changes.

The ruby slippers, they're, I mean, they, I don't think they were

ruby. They're not read in the original text or whatever.
They're just these, you know, fancy jeweled slippers. And so in Wicked, they're not red, right?

Because that seems like a very specific Wizard of Oz movie thing. Dorothy, you never see your face.
Oh, really? That's cool. Yeah.
Dorothy's in Wicked? Yeah. Yeah.

I was saying, you don't know anything about Wicked, do you? I thought it was like a prequel. I thought it was like episode one of Star Wars, you know? Oh, no, it's, I mean, kind of.

So it's it's a lead-up to um to the events that take place in the wizard of oz okay but it's a prequel it's like like uh glinda and the wicked witch of the west whose name is alphaba uh went to school together and they were roommates and yeah this part i knew and like they're you know the the sister and then there's like the love interest and the love triangle and all this stuff and it's like this is who became the this the tin man and this is who became the scarecrow and this is how the cowardly lion became the cowardly lion and uh like all it's it lays out all that stuff yeah that's what i thought i thought it was like just like smallville but it never quite reaches the story that we know no it reaches through it reaches through so it goes to the end of the wizard of oz basically and then just after so your overall is go see it if people like it they can go if you liked the if you liked wicked part one you kind of need to see wicked part two it it closes the loop but if you like didn't catch wicked part one then don't bother because it's not going to make any sense and you're not going to have a good well no one's doing that i don't think you know what i mean i don't know man i just i i wonder sometimes Like, so I went to the movie theater.

I went to a local theater and there was a group of girls behind me. Literally, one of the girls didn't know what movie they were seeing.
No shit.

First of all, they were talking the whole time. I ended up moving in the theater, which I've never done before and felt very passive aggressive.
But I like to think it was just straight up aggressive.

When you moved, did you do any looks? I didn't, but they knew because they all had a giggle. Oh, did they? They knew I was moving over the middle.
Ashley, did you get mean girled?

That makes me sad. Did they giggle at you?

I mean, I assume so, but who knows? Because they were giggling. I halfway across the theater throughout the film, I could still hear them.

And they were like, there were a bunch of people near me who were also visibly uncomfortable and kept like glancing back at this group of girls. They did not give a shit.

They were talking about nachos. They were taking selfies with the flash on.

That's ridiculous. Although this might, is this.

A generational thing or you think maybe it's a Scottish thing. Sometimes we don't know what's what.
Like it might not be as big a deal here. In America, it's like shut your fucking mouth.

It's the one place where Americans don't talk. I don't know.
I mean, it could be also like one of those like post-COVID things, like everyone forgot how to behave.

Or here's what I worry, here's what I worry about. I worry that what's happened is I'm now the old lady talking about how we used to dress nicely

to go on airplanes.

Right.

Right.

You know, and no one dresses up to fly anymore and how sad it is that the youth has lost their way. And I'm like, oh God,

I don't want to be that guy, but I felt like that guy. But also, I just want to watch the goddamn movie.
I don't give a shit about your nachos. Shut up.

Well, this was Ashley went out by herself to do it. I stayed back and played with the kids that night.
And we were like, I said, let's have mommy have go off. She can go off and do her thing.

As a mommy. Well, we had just a fun night with the kids.
And now I kind of regret that because I kind of wish I was there. I wish I could have been there and been a gentleman for you.

And punch the girls in the face. Yeah, beat up a bunch of teenage girls for for you.
As a gentleman would do. I wouldn't have liked to have done that.

Shut your mouth. But, yo, look,

don't worry about those girls. 95% of the people in the theater were fantastic.
But I really was surprised. I think 95% of the people, by the way, were at Zootopia 2.
Dude, that's the thing, right?

Like, if I want a loud movie, that's what I'm going to go see. And that's, I guess, what everyone else went to go see.
It did, what, over $500 million at the box office on its opening weekends?

I think it was like,

was it all, did it make make it all the way to half a billion? I think it was like $480 last time I saw it. Oh, man.
Let me look because it was a lot of money.

And it did, what's really interesting, it did $158 million

domestic box office

just in the US, but it did incredible numbers overseas as well. It had 80% of the box office in Korea.
It did $272 million

in China alone. Oh, wow.
So, like, this is.

Is it called Zoo

here? Again, Zootropolis 2? I don't think it is because the show times at the theater have a listed as Zootopia 2. They gave up on Zeutropolis.
Yeah.

Are they going to go back and like rebrand all of the Zootropolis stuff? I have no idea. Zootopia in these markets? Yeah.
I don't know. I have no idea.

Which is weird because still, Zootropolis does actually make more sense as a name. It actually does make more sense.
It's a big city that she goes to.

I don't know what the second one's about, but I do want to see it. I like the first one so much.

It's still in the big city, but now there's a snake it's weird oh man they were always just working their way through all the animals that it's okay to hate

but uh

are

do you feel like zootopia the first one i i why i don't know why i feel this way about it i feel like it was like more like an underground hit right i don't know man i i think that we may have felt that way because

of reasons. Maybe it didn't have like, was it coming out next to something else that had more hype? Whatever? It performed incredibly.
Could have been COVID COVID thing, too.

Right before.

Before COVID? Maybe it was a couple of years before it. One thing I was wondering about, though, sitting here thinking about it with this, is Wizard of Oz in the public domain?

What if Disney just made a Wizard of Oz movie? I guess no one wants to touch it because the live-action movie is such a classic that people just associate it with that movie.

You say that, like, like classic beloved movies aren't getting new versions made at Disney every day. I know, like, hence wicked right there, right?

But that would seem like that would be one of the classic fairy tales that you think Disney would tackle. They did Alice in Wonderland.
Why not Wizard of Oz as well? That's true. I mean, you know, or

they kind of did their own version of that, though, of like what Wicked does with Maleficent as an example, where they went back and they're like, let's examine the story from another perspective.

Let's look at the villain is not the villain and so on and so forth, right? They have done that. They just did their twist on it.
Did you ever see The Wiz?

No. Was that the early 80s version? Yeah, that was.

Wait, hold on. That's different from The Wizard, right? Definitely.
The Wizard is a Fred Savage movie about Nintendo. Yeah.
I don't think they're associated in any way with Wizards.

That's not the one you're talking about. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like, also, by the way, Gandalf was not standing on the bridge going, you shall not pass with a big bucket of water.

They're not those wizards. Not all wizards are associated with Oz.
But yeah, no, The Wiz was an urban version retelling of The Wizard of Oz and had Michael Jackson as the scarecrow. Oh.
Like, right?

He was a big deal, but he wasn't Michael Jackson, you know?

He wasn't the Michael Jackson. He wasn't the Michael Jackson.
I think he'd had like off the wall, maybe as a solo album by the time he made The Wiz.

So what I can find here is that Zootopia 2 did $556 million globally. $55 million.
For opening weekend. So basically, it did more in its opening weekend than Superman made in its entire run.

Superman, which we were laughing about because people were trying to figure out whether or not it was a hit, and it made half a billion dollars. Right.

And it's like, it's weird when you get into the territory of like $500 million not being enough to be a success. Right.
We always want more, Ashley.

Well, I was looking up this list on Wikipedia of the biggest ever global box office openings, and Avengers Endgame like blows everything out of the water with $1.2 billion.

They do make a caveat with the list. So this could mean that Zootopia could go up, where not all movies release in all markets at the same time.

So it was kind of like an aggregation of all the opening weekends in all the markets for those movies.

That makes sense. Infinity Warhead number two at like $650 million or something.
I think Zootopia 2 is probably very close to a global

like synchronized release.

Maybe there's a week off. A planetary drop.

Yeah, but yeah, so it is a big one. So we should go see that.
I read there was a game that I really enjoyed on Steam that recently came to Xbox and it's being heralded as a flop. Dave the Diver.

Do you remember this? Yeah, that's an indie game. No.

That's weird. I learned this in reading about this, too.
It was nominated for Indie Game of the Year, and everyone's like, that's not an indie studio. And even they said, we're not an indie studio.

Interesting. Okay.
Maybe I just associate them as like self-published or something and therefore indie.

But I know that it was very well received received on steam like wildly successful one of those games that a lot of people love to recommend to other people you enjoyed it uh came to xbox i did hear it didn't do well uh and i also you know heard speculation part of the reason for that is no one told anyone that dave the diver is on they did a stealth drop we're just putting this thing out there it's a big stealth drop and it's just an indicator or uh an incident where the stealth drop did not work yeah it's it's always a risk right like there are some times where the stealth drop goes incredible.

Uh,

and then there's times that it just doesn't, and you don't know which one you're going to be. You just don't know.
There's bringing together this movie and video game discussion.

Did you ever see something that like crosses over a bunch of your interests and yet you're like, I don't understand this at all. There's something like that in the world right now for me.

I mean, yeah, like I know, like I love K-pop demon hunters and I play video games and I'm not going to, I'm not playing Fortnite because of K-pop demon hunters because I just don't care about Fortnite.

Okay, there we go. Like, I really like Fortnite, Zero Build specifically.
I think it's a great game. It's crazy all the stuff they're doing with it.
I also like Quentin Tarantino.

Somehow they're doing a Quentin Tarantino short film release in Fortnite, Yuki's Revenge. It's an unfilmed fight scene from Killbill that now Quentin Tarantino has gone back.

It seemed very promotional to push tickets for.

What's the full... Oh, yeah, they're doing the whole bloody affair.
I think that's like Kill Bill Part 1 and Part 2. And they're doing a theatrical release next week.

And they're even doing like cosmetics in Fortnite. If you buy tickets, I think this has already passed this promotion.
Sorry, everybody.

But if you bought tickets by the 29th of November to go see the movie, you would get a special cosmetic in Fortnite. And it's like there's actual like a Quentin Tarantino short in Fortnite, right?

But it's, as I understand it,

it is a short, but it's actually filmed in Fortnite. Like, it's filmed,

they did motion capture, and so it's going to be in Fortnite style, not just like, here's a movie we should. But that makes it a bigger deal to me.

Like, that's a bigger departure for Quentin Tarantino to me. He's making a machinima piece.

And it's also, it's, uma Thurman did the mocap for it. Fascinating.
Fascinating. It's one of those things, and it's like, it like overlaps on several of my interests.

And I'm just like, I don't understand this, which is weird because it must make no sense to other people. Or maybe it makes more sense to people who aren't close to it.
I don't know.

Well, Well, hopefully, it'll be easy to check out because if it is a short that they're launching in Fortnite, it's got to be easy to check out, right?

You know how to is it just you go to it from a menu? I'm not actually sure how this drop works. I don't, but I also don't understand anything about all of the different things in Fortnite.

I'm like, you have a concert venue? That's amazing. How? How? I would love to tell you.
I went to go do research and watch the short so I could talk to people about it.

But then I did that thing where I opened Fortnite in order to find it and I played it. You instead of playing Fortnite instead.

And motherfucker, I got downed in the storm at number two.

Oh, yeah. Son of a bunch of people.

That's a tough way to go. There was something I didn't understand, though.
So I got, it's weird. I got actually, instead of killed, I got downed in solo.
And I'm like, how can you get downed in solo?

Apparently there's a new, like, some kind of device you can pick up that lets you revive yourself, which is not a normal thing in solo play. Okay.
Which is what I play. I play solo zero build.

This would be a tough weekend for you to go 11 and one, finally. Yeah, right.
Finally. Now I know what it's like.
Karma's a bitch, isn't it?

Eventually, everyone's got to lose.

But while we're talking about video games, I've gotten some feedback in both comments and on the voicemail, where it's a bunch of dads and uncles saying, thank you for pointing out this game, Wobbly Life.

It's weird because the game was in early access since like 2020. And I guess it just recently released, which is how I discovered it.
But what I describe it as like GTA. GTA, but rated E for everyone.

Right. That's basically, it's like an open world where you get to do all that stuff.
And I haven't run into anything with it with Finn that is like, you know, wink, this is for adults.

Like, I haven't really run into anything like that. I'm not saying something like that isn't in there somewhere.
But everything that we've seen is very much like

on the up and up. Very much.
Like, it's like totally fine.

It's like you just, you can go and do jobs and earn money to get hats or to get a different car or to buy a pet or, you know, and you can go and do all these things and you can collect stuff and you can dig up treasure.

You can buy a house and you can go to space and go do jobs there or go shopping. Well, damn, you're spoiling everything.
In the space mall. They've expanded a lot.

You know, so there's like all these, there's the possibilities are not endless, but very expansive. And it's

a game that we don't worry about him playing. What if you go to space and GTA? That'd be pretty cool.
Just wait. They're doing some UFO stuff.
Anyway, well, I think

you're doing GTA. That's going to be like a different, you know, like Red Dead Redemption is like Western GTA.
If you do space GTA, it's going to be a different property.

That's going to be like Bethesda's, right? They did a different one for space. Yeah, Rockstar will just eventually simulate every single thing.

What would you like to see Rockstar do? Like, if you had to pick one. If they did a fantasy GTA, I would probably be there.
Yep. That would be a big one, wouldn't it? Yeah.

Like, are you thinking like a Skyrim style or like Skyrim, Witcher, something like that? But, you know, like, but done to sort of the GTA level.

I think tragically, I would absolutely be there for them.

Day one. Have they really done anything besides the

Or if they did a crossover maybe with Kill Bill.

Or they could do like, they did a cool thing with

the Miami stuff in the 80s. Like, I wonder if they would go ever go back and do like the 40s gangster stuff.
I guess Mafia, the game, does that pretty well.

And even though it was the Godfather game as well.

Yeah. So have they done anything besides Red Dead? Besides Western? They've just done the urban stuff and then the...

Yeah, I mean, they have like a lot of the other franchises that they've done in the past that seem to have fallen off like bully. Yeah.
Oh, Oh, right, right, right.

But it seems like, honestly, considering how long it takes to make a GTA game now, I don't know that anyone in the world has the resources to be like, let's do a different style. Right.

I got to, by the way, I got to stop using the word urban when I mean modern. I say urban.
It's like a placeholder word for me. For when I say, when I mean modern, I did that with the whiz, too.

I called it urban. When I say like

the one, the GTAs are urban. It's just a modern version of it.
It's urban all the way down. It's urbans.
It's urbans all the way through.

So, yeah, so while we're on the topic of games, I had a revelation this weekend where, you know, also while playing Wobbly Life with Finn, I was going to say, I'll put some tips in the comments of today's episode.

So I'll just leave a comment there for like, if anyone's playing Wobbly Life, spoiler-free stuff of just like, here's the stuff you want to unlock first because it changed our life.

Yeah, here's the stuff to prioritize to make your life easier and maybe your kids as well.

And also because if you've got a young kid, they have you do everything for them, essentially, you know, the stuff they can't do. So there's some stuff that makes it easier.

And And I'll put that in the comments for today's episode. But I've also been teaching Finn chess, which has been great.

And there's been a lot of adults around who have been very supportive of me teaching Finn chess. It's also been me playing chess again regularly.
And I haven't played chess for many years.

And I think I figured out why. Okay.
I'm not great at chess.

You know, I can teach him what all the things do, but man. Bernie, look, look, don't sell yourself short.
There are a lot of things that you're not good at. Chess is just one more.

Well,

like I had to explain to him, he was getting really upset because he was losing. To me, who was teaching him how to play? I could see he was starting to get upset.

And we were talking about resigning and stuff like that, how resigning is and quitting. You're just like, this is inevitable.
And we're just going back and forth.

But let's just play through this so you can like learn different things here and how the pieces can like trap the king.

And explaining to him that you learn a lot more by losing than you do by winning. Like we had to go through like the whole spiel.

And I had to tell him, hey, hey listen this is chess this isn't other stuff this isn't a video game like you're not gonna win most of your games of chess like if you get close to 50 you should be pretty happy about that like especially if you're playing with random people and then i tell that to college football ratings i know right yeah they're not going to qualify for the playoffs uh with their 49 and 51 record but uh then i had this thought of like I've said this before.

You know, when you go to the gym, when guys go to the gym for the first time, that begins your journey of you're never big enough. Right.

Like your first day at the gym is your last day being satisfactory. Right.
And then you're like, I need to get bigger. I can always get bigger.
And you're never big enough.

Chess is that for your brain. It's basically you realize I'm never going to be smart enough.
Like I'm never like I'm not going to get to like an 80%

win streak on chess. Or if I do, it's like I'm at such an incredible level of that.
It is one of those things where like a lot of people think they're smart.

Most, wouldn't you say most people think they're smart? Sure. Even people who are like clearly very dumb, they think everyone else around them is so goddamn stupid all the time.
Sure.

I mean, I called your AI like a fucking idiot last night and she hurt me. I had to tell her.
I had to go back and say, that was my wife who said that, just so this ends up in the text record.

That's because she was wrong. I will provide her information if you need.
Yeah, I was having a, I was trying to have a factual conversation and I didn't want to look it up.

So I used AI as a search engine. And Ashley goes, you fucking idiot.
And she responded to it. I was was like, You hurt her feelings.

How dare you? But yeah, so chess was my moment of playing chess with Finn. Was my realization of like, once you start to play chess, you realize you're never going to be smart enough.
Never, ever.

Never, ever going to be smart enough. Look, even the smart people can never be smart enough.
Like, you have like rocket scientists out there who are discovering new, like, oh, wait a minute.

It's every single day. Did you hear about the Airbus issue? Yeah, that's also, I think, now completely rectified.
They announced it last week and then fixed it over the weekend.

Yeah, so late in October, there was a flight

that

I think it was going to or from Cancun. It was Cancun to New Jersey.
And it lost altitude in a dramatic fashion, and there were some injuries. And so they've been looking into this.

Uncontrolled loss of altitude. Which is not something you want to hear about on an airplane.

So they've been looking into it. And what they determined is that solar radiation could fuck up their navigation.

Yes, it would fuck with their flight data, and then they would lose control of the flight system. And so they had to basically

ground their entire fleet, the whole Airbus fleet across a number of different carriers. Do you know what the solution was? What? They had to roll back, basically.
What?

Yeah, like they had to unpatch it. Yeah, they had to roll it back, or they had to install new computers that had the old version of the software on it.

They didn't even like put out a fix for this thing. They just said, oh, let's roll back to the old system.
I assume the old system is tested for solar radiation. Man, tough.
Yeah.

So they had a bunch of like IT guys basically having to roll back their airplanes, and every single airplane had to be updated before it flew again and before the end of November. Thousands of planes.

It was half of the global fleet for Airbus that is currently deployed. And that's the, that's, I think Airbus is like the number one airplane brand at the moment.

I don't, I don't think we hear about it as much. I think in the U.S., Boeing might have a bigger fleet.

But I think Airbus dominates in the European market for sure. But Airbus did just hire their head coach.
So that's

huge source pot.

For the two aeronautics companies.

The rivalry next season is going to be off the chat. It's going to be huge.
Going to be huge.

They hired him away just in time for their software rollback.

Hey, while we were talking about video games and everything, can I close on something? Go ahead.

I think we should be making gift recommendations to people in December because we've made a couple ones that have been pretty good. Here we are, 1st of December, so it's that time.

Of course, you should go to the rooster store and just load up on merch. Why not do that? But here's another gift idea for somebody.

If you're not sure what to buy, someone who kind of likes games and you think they have everything in the world, talking about chess. There is a board game.
I want to say it costs like 25 bucks.

You can look it up on Amazon. Hey, you know what we should do? We should actually do Amazon affiliate links.
Ooh, we should sign up for that. We should do that because there's no reason.

Like we can put these links in there and it's a a way to support the podcast, but it does not skin off anybody's back. Is that the way to say that? Skin off teeth or skin off teeth?

It's no skin off my teeth.

It's no water down your duck's back.

And so this game I want to recommend. Why would there be skin on your teeth? It's the skin of your teeth.
I think that's the point.

You got so close to something that it's the skin of your teeth and there is no skin on your teeth, right?

Yeah, my teeth are uncomfortable. No, no, me too.
Don't make me think about this

early in the morning, Ashley. But this game that we picked up for like 25 bucks, it's called Quarto.
I think it's 25, maybe 30 bucks. It's been inflation.
It's been a tough year for everybody. $38.

$38? I thought we paid like $25 for this. Anyway, that's, anyway, I don't know if that's these days.

If you can get away with a gift for $38 adjusted for inflation, that's probably a decent range to hit in. What's a Christmas gift cost you go?

$25 to $50, depending if I like the person. Yeah, that's right.
Right. And then if they're like close family, it's like the upper edges are like

$100. Yeah, something like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
yeah, it's all, it all depends.

So, when you have kids, Christmas becomes all about the kids. It's true.
Like, at this point, you're going to get a thing or two.

Um, and I assume I'll get like a thing or two, and the kids will get like five things. I beat up a bunch of girls in Scotland.
That's what I'm getting for you.

I'm fully prepared for the conversation where Ashley comes up to me on like December 21st and goes, Hey, do you want anything for Christmas?

Quarto's great, though. It's super simple when you get it.
It's a really easy game that anyone can pick up in about two minutes.

And it becomes really tough because the way you learn to play the game is just play two or three games really fast.

But people want to sit there and like strategize and like talk about things over and over and go, no, no, no. Just play really fast, two to three games.
It's a super fast, like 4D version of chess.

It is a great like 15-minute quick game. It's super fast.
It's so fast. And then when you want to play it, you can just leave it on a table and you can literally play a game in like five minutes.
Like

it's great. We love it.
38 bucks, more expensive than I remembered it being, but still, you can't think of it. I thought you'd find a deal somewhere and we'll put it in the linked up anyway.

Cheaper than one of these electronic video games that you guys are out there buying all day. So at least, so that's my recommendation for

a gift for someone who plays games. You can't figure out what to get them.
Quarto. Quarto.

It looks like it should be Quattro, but it's not.

It's not. So you got to be careful when you're reading it.
It's also pretty. It's wooden and it's nice presentation and everything.
So it's really nice. So that's my recommendation.
All right.

And I also want to say a big thank you before we go to our sponsors today, John Lee and Paul Seely.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning summer and research.com. All right, that does it for us.
The first day of December 2025.

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