2025.12.17: The President Is A Loser

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Hey! We're recording the podcast! Get up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is MORLING SOMEWERE! For December 17th, 2025. My name is Bernie Burns here on my intro.

Sitting right over there, she's doubling down on her anti-Rob Reiner tweets. Tasha Burns, hey, Dash, everybody.

Did you read that horse shit from the president? I did. I did read that.
And I, at first,

thought it must be made up, but I guess not. No, no, no.
That stuff is like, yeah,

I'm well past the uncanny valley on that. What a fucking loser.
I know.

What else can you say? I feel like if I lose this uncanny valley, this sense of like, that's not possible, I will have lost something of myself. I get you.
I get you.

I'm still going to fight it. Of all places,

I was looking at

the last stand media subreddit, and there was a post in there, the headline that reached out to me through the muck of the internet, spoke to me, and it said, grabbed you by the throat.

It was in response to the Trump's tweets about Rob Reiner. And it said, read me, Daddy.
Which I

won't even repeat here. It's so fucking, just a fucking loser.
Anyway,

the person posted there said,

are we really holding? internet content creators to a higher standard than the president of the United States. And I thought, that's a really interesting point to make.
So.

Yeah, I mean, look, I understand that there's, there's something to the office of the presidency, right? That you can, you will never be satisfied. There will never be a perfect president, right?

Because if the president is a human, well, they cannot. Is that the mark we've missed here is perfect? Is that where, yeah, right.
But like, as a result, we're like, well, fuck it. Why try? Crazy.

Or just like the amount of stuff you have to give up, right?

I often think of that for my dear conservative friends. I think about, boy, the stuff you got to to give up.
You know what I mean?

There's a lot of times where people who are more moderate in America, which is becoming less and less frequent,

you know, there's just people who you have to give up certain things to get what you want.

But, God, I just feel like there's so much going out the door that they're not going to be able to get back, you know? Yeah. But you know what? I really don't want to talk about the president today.

I know what you're saying. So let's talk about his son-in-law instead.
What are we talking about? His son-in-law. Oh, his son-in-law.
Yeah, he's out of the paramount deal. Yeah.
So, so

Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, was one of the stakeholders in Paramount's hostile bid to take over Warner Brothers' discovery, which was widely like raising eyebrows because if there are going to be regulatory hurdles either thrown up or pulled down, you can see what direction that might go, right?

But now Jared Kushner's affinity has exited the Warner Brothers takeover battle.

So they're now pulling themselves out of the stake for that bid, which makes me really curious. Like, does then Paramount have to go around shopping for another stakeholder?

Are they going to go to the bank and get extra, extra money? How is that going to work now?

Well, also the signals out there are that Warner Brothers is going to reject

the hostile takeover from this group. I would imagine the shareholders have to vote on that if there's an offer to buy them all out for $30 a share.
Right, because that is more

theoretically than what Netflix is offering, but it's also like maybe how they're offering it or if it's like, you know, cash versus this or like you get this where you get this equity, what does that look like?

And what do the shareholders actually want?

But I think the management team is going to come back and say that we recommend that the shareholders don't take this deal, which is interesting because the management is also shareholders themselves.

Right. And usually the majority shareholders, like when it comes to the same thing.
At that point, for a company that big, I don't know if that's the case anymore.

Oh, true, they just have a big chunk of change, but I don't know. Majority would be a lot.
Okay, so majority

over everyone else.

In that case, Zaslav would be worth like what $50 billion? I don't think that's the case. It's a lot of dollars.
It's a lot of dollars. It's a lot of dollars.

Get my calculator app out. And I go, Yeah, lots of zeros.
Maybe they can share some of that with Ford. But it might not be up to them.
Or iRobot. I think they could just try to, oh, right, iRobot.

iRobot, the company now has been found under the couch.

We have to dig it out.

Yeah, so

we knew that it was coming. The signs were there.
We were kind of like on the lookout for it.

But yeah, the Roomba maker, iRobot, is officially filing for bankruptcy and they're selling themselves to their manufacturer. Yeah.

So the company that I guess they worked with to manufacture all of the Roombas in the first place is a company out of Shenzhen in China. And they're now selling their company to their manufacturer.

How are you doing over there? I hate Shenzhen.

She hates Shenzhen.

I have to ask that. For clarification here.

It's the city. It's that city specifically.
And it's for a really stupid, petty reason. And it's because that's where we got eliminated from the amazing race.
And so now I just hate Shenzhen.

And I hate it to the point that I look at anything that we buy that's made in China and I look at it and it goes like made in like, you know, out of like Shenzhen, China. I'm like,

Yeah, I would, you know, you have lists of places in the world that you'd like to travel. A lot of the places we went to for the amazing race, we actually did not travel there.

We were there, but we ran through like lunatics doing these events and then got on a plane, like basically like running in a straight line, speedrunning countries, essentially. Yes.

And, you know, so you see little tiny pockets of things as you're stressed and frantic and sleep deprived. So you really, you don't enjoy a lot of it.
You had a lovely run around their theme park.

I went, I ran around a lot of Shenzhen that day, but we got eliminated from there. Last international city on our run through the amazing race.
And I know I'll never get Ashley to go back to China.

Ever. Oh, ever.
I'll go to China, but I won't go to Shenzhen. Really? You're done? No.
In fact, should we go back to that museum?

No.

But we, the worst, to like, like, put salt in the wound. Shenzhen's a very sort of like industrial city, right? So there's lots of manufacturing.
It's where a lot of stuff gets made.

It's not really like glittery, but where after we got eliminated,

we flew out of Hong Kong. Yes.
Right. So we they picked us up in a car and then they drove us to Hong Kong.
And so we're driving out of this like very industrial city that we're already mad at.

And then we drive into the glittering skyscrapers of Hong Kong. And I was like, motherfucker.
Yeah, she was fairly inconsolable that day.

So what's the connection between Shenzhen and iRobot? That's where they do most of their manufacturing? Yeah, so the company out of there, Paisea,

I think is how you pronounce it, out of Shenzhen, does the manufacturing for the Roombas and is is now buying iRobot.

Okay, okay, okay, because iRobot I've always associated as being one of these like Silicon Valley darlings, right? No, and well, in fact,

iRobot was very nearly acquired by Amazon a few years ago, but that deal fell apart under EU regulatory scrutiny. You know what I would think too?

I would think like if I was iRobot and I was running this company and we were looking at some dire financial projections for like three or four years from now, I would do this same thing, honestly.

Inevitably, if we were losing market share and we were looking down the pipeline at having to do this at some point in the future, do it now because there is a lot of money out there that is highly invested and motivated in propping up the personal robotics consumer sector, right?

So much. And if iRobot becomes like the android canary in the mine shaft, then it's like, they're going to get money.
They got to get propped up, right? Right.

This is the one that's in everybody's house already. Can't let them fail.

If this is in everyone's house and this one fails that's a dire warning to the rest of personal robotics i would think yeah but uh it is it reminds me a little bit of of dig as well because it's like they had this deal the deal with amazon in 2022 was for 1.7 billion dollars and now they're just bankrupt oh you're referencing when dig was going to be purchased by google this sounds weird now because this number doesn't even sound like that much money Dig was going to be purchased by Google for $250 million, reported.

And they were so close to getting the deal done. And then it fell apart.
The details of the collapse have not been released. And I think within three years, Dig sold for $500,000.

Like the brand for Dig sold for that amount of money. Yeah,

it was a big fall. And this kind of reminds me of that.
Like three years ago, it was worth, you know, in the billions, right? And now, eh.

You know, I got to say, though, it's interesting because when you talk about Dig, I've talked about this before, but it is a classic business case of when do you exit and how do you exit?

Dig had a $250 million deal on the table that they didn't take and the whole thing collapsed, right? Yeah, it looks like it was $200 million. $200 million.
Sounds crazy, right?

Like, and then Reddit now is worth $20 billion now as a public company or something like that. What's the current valuation of Reddit?

The current valuation of Reddit, they're at $224 per share, so that's pretty high. Just look whatever their market cap is.

Market cap, $42 billion. $42 billion.
The founders of Reddit sold a Condonast for a reported $9 million.

So, I mean, $9 million at the end of the day is $9 million, but it is two interesting cases of timing and exit where somebody tried to get out and get $200 million.

It fell apart and they ended up with 500K, if that. And then the other one is Reddit, where you sold for $9 million, but then you watched it fly up to $40 billion.

Which is harder, do you think?

As the person who sold the thing.

Well, in one case, you've got $9 million, right? Right. You know,

split among several people. But it is interesting.
It's like, it's, you know, buy low and sell high, right? It's like trying to time that is really tough. I don't know.
I don't know.

And it does just go to show that, like, timing is everything, right? It's like the big short guy said. Yeah.
Yeah. You're not, we're not wrong.
We're just early. Same thing.
Same thing. Same thing.

I love that quote so much. It's such a throwaway line.
It's in the scene where Michael Burry, where they're trying to get the money back from

Scion Investments or whatever the name of the fund it is that Michael Burry runs. But yeah, so in one case, they lost $200 million, right? You can kind of put a price tag on that, but did they?

Because they never actually got the money in hand. But I'm sure they think about it that way.
A lot of people would. But the other people, did they make $9 million or did they lose?

Billions. Yeah, what is that? Like $41.9

billion, you know? Right.

Which is the case? I mean, I guess you have the $9 million to comfort you in your FOMO, but there would be a lot of FOMO. $41.99 billion.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's really crazy.

But then there's other cases where it's like, you know, you take a swing and it's not a matter of timing. The thing just maybe didn't work.

Ford just announced that they are no longer manufacturing the Ford F-150 Lightning. Their EV F-150 truck.
They're giving up on it. They're like, this is a, it's a money pit.
It's not working out.

We're just going to stop. Equally as shocking to me, probably more shocking than iRobot shutting down.

Like to me, if iRobot, if iRobot's going to shut down, dude, I would have thought that the F-150, any version of that, would have been a massive bestseller. Man, I don't know.
I feel like

if there was anything that I would have expected not to work out in the EV market, it would be the F-150 because I feel like...

the vast majority of the F-150 market is probably not interested in having an EV.

What do you, when you say, I get what you're saying there, what do you think when you're picturing that market, what are you picturing? Who's the person?

I guess generally I think of people who need to haul stuff around.

Are you thinking rural people? Are you thinking urban people? Yeah, mostly I'm thinking rural, largely because in the really major cities, that thing's not fitting on the street.

See, but that's, I agree with you in the market, right?

That's who I, even though it probably isn't the lion's share of where the F-150s are sold just because it's a much smaller market, but rural people are fucking innovative, dude.

Like, you look at John Deere tractors and the technology behind those and things like that. I would have, again,

I would have thought it would have been kind of going against the grain a little bit,

you know, but I would have thought there would have been a huge adoption for this. Also, the amount of torque, amount of power in the EV that an EV truck could put out would be pretty impressive.

But I think that between

EVs being politicized

and with the

conservative side of politics generally not preferring EVs

and

that generally being the people I would assume want a truck. Right.

I just don't see it. The Venn diagram there feels a lot like two circles.
Also, this might sound ridiculous, like when we're talking about rural and farmers and things like that.

Also, I thought maybe they would just have that as a tool in their tool chest. Like they would have an EV in addition to a gas-powered truck, which might sound luxurious.

If you think your budget for technology is very high, you should see the average farmer. It's insane how much their stuff costs.
Let me see.

I'm going to look up how much it's going to cost me to buy a combine harvester. I have a buddy here, local to us, who I was going over to visit his place and he was out in the field on his combine.

And I watched him from afar in a field pop the tire on his combine. I turned around and drove away.

And I hoped that he didn't see me see him do that because I didn't want to have the conversation with him of how terrible that was going to be.

So, here on eBay, I can buy a 2022 John Deere S790 Combine Harvester, a 40K auto track, one, two, four, five engine hours with 941 drum hours.

You say that with such confidence. I love it.

For 200,000 pounds. 200,000.
To use, this is a three-year-old combine harvester. I can get for 200,000.
That's over a quarter of a million dollars U.S. Yeah.
So it's

farm equipment in general is not cheap. It does not fuck around.

There's a, there's a funny, I'll see if I can find this TikTok, but it's, it's one of these, like, like farm guys watching someone on TikTok talk about how much stuff costs.

And they're like, oh, this would cost $100,000. And the farmers are like, yeah.
for a tire. Yeah, that would cost me a tire.
Like, I can get a tire for that.

So I just, it's, it's a very,

you can make a lot of money farming, but you're spending a lot of money farming. So there's, there's a, there's a also, I think, a reputation for farmers of being asset rich, cash poor.

Like you have a lot of things that cost a lot of money, but you don't have a lot of money. It's insane.
Does that make sense? Yeah, they're just saying

we underestimate sometimes when we say rural, sometimes we just think about people like rolling around in horse-drawn wagons and stuff like that.

But it's like, there's an enormous amount of technology investment in rural communities. I mean, I consider farming to be like our first proper mech.

They're purpose-built robots. You look at those things.
They have lasers now. They do laser weeding.

I was just about to bring that up. I love this.
I love watching these videos where it's like this bar of lasers pointed at the ground and they just go, you don't belong here.

It's like the most bizarre category of ASMR ever.

I mean, even if you go back like, you know, 70 years, they were doing crop dusting with biplanes and stuff like that. You know, you think the average person had a goddamn fucking plane?

You know, it's crazy. There's always been a lot of technology in rural communities, I think, at least, you know, in a lot of.

There has been, but I feel like, I don't know, EVs feel like an exception to me. So I'm actually not super surprised that the F-150 Lightning is not making it.
I was shocked.

I would not have called that. I would have thought that would have, I thought that would have

revolutionized the EV market itself. So to hear that they've stopped it.
Like, this is done. They're not making the EV Lightning.
They are now going to focus on more of their hybrid models.

And they're like, they're diverting all the factories and everything they built to make batteries for the F-150. They're diverting them now to

prop up the grids.

So they're going to, I guess, sell them to local grids for energy storage. Yes.
And just want to head off any comments. Anyone who thinks I abandoned my friend, that was 100% the appropriate response.

He didn't want you there either. There was nothing I would have been able to do to help him.

You could have helpfully stood around going,

wow, that looks expensive. Right, exactly.
It's like, it would have been great for me to like help the guys building Voltron trying to troubleshoot the green lion.

Did you try turning it off and back on again? Right. You know, I got to think.
I got a jack in the back of my truck. Do you want me to get that out of it? Just a jack.

Could replace one of the wheels with my car itself. God, if I'm smart.

The scale on those things is otherworldly. It really is.

It got, as soon as that thing popped and I could figure out, I had people in the car with me. As soon as I figured out that it popped, it was like the world got quiet.

Like, I don't know how else to describe it. Everything got quiet at that point.
Yeah, like everything within a mile had a moment of silence. And the birds were like, Yeah, let's fuck off.

We should not be. I know we're heading south a month from now.
Let's do it right now.

So, what else is going on in the world? There was a lot of news. I guess everyone was holding off on the horrible weekend, and all of a sudden, all this news came flooding in.

Yeah, it's been pretty crazy.

I guess measles cases, measles is back also. So it's not like the terrible news is all gone.

So there's a measles outbreak in South Carolina. So if you're in South Carolina.
Before you read the numbers, I want to talk. I want to cover something that we talked about before.
Okay, go ahead.

Before you read the actual numbers.

So you might remember previously we talked about, this is probably over a year ago now, we talked about the N factor for diseases, and that's the number of people that you can expect to become infected when an infected person enters an unprotected population.

And I think, for instance, COVID was like

somewhere between two and four, right? And so that was kind of the thing. It's almost like this, the same way we talk about reproductive rates for people.

It's like under a certain threshold, like 2.2, 2.1, then it will die out slowly and it won't spread to other people, like it won't grow.

And COVID was one of those things where they were never quite sure, but obviously it's like our huge reaction to this pandemic is a constant source for debate, but we were trying to flatten that curve out.

The one we always talked about was measles,

which not around two, not around one. Measles is a 16.
Oh my God. So

theoretically, every person with measles who enters

a community in which people have no protection, no immunity against it, is expected to infect 16 people. Yes.

Mathematically, hard to control. Sorry, a quick correction here.
I said the N factor, I meant the R-naught factor. I just couldn't remember what the actual name of the actual factor was.

So it's the R-naught factor, which is how quickly a disease will propagate and essentially how fast it'll exponentially multiply itself within a population that's unprotected.

So, really quickly, what were the numbers, the change in the numbers for measles cases in the United States? What is it, North Carolina? So, this is specifically an outbreak in South Carolina.

It was, so it's up to 135 cases.

So you can see why people would be concerned. Once again, this is factoring for unprotected communities.

So most people get a range of vaccinations, you know, when they're when they're young against measles. It's the MMR, measles, mumps, and rubella.

They group them all together and you get a series of them when you're little. So most people do have some protection.

So, I would expect infection rates to be much lower than the R0 factor of 16 or so. But

still, it's a problem. You know what you don't want to get? Measles.
No, you don't want to get measles. But I guess we have to figure that out every couple of generations.
I guess so.

That we don't want to get measles. I figure it's one of those things where a generation who was greatly protected against the diseases that came before polio, all that, via vaccination,

you almost like, you weren't scared enough of them, right? Because you didn't grow up with anyone who had to go into an iron lung because of polio. You don't like, you weren't raised with anyone.

You haven't lost family members to any of these diseases. And so it loses its scary factor, right? You're like, it can't be that bad.

And then you don't protect against it. And then you find out that it really can be, but who's going to pay that cost? The kids that you didn't vaccinate.
Right. Look at this.

Look at this with our liberal podcast. Look, I'm just, like, saying.
Bitching about Trump. We're telling people to take vaccines.

Well, to be fair, that tweet was very uncalled. Do you want to update your pronouns or anything like that?

I think my pronouns are as expected. Listen, everybody over there.
Do better. Listen out there.

You all need to do better.

We all do. We're just doing our best.

Yeah, so it was crazy. It was crazy the amount of news that the floodgates opened after this weekend.
Thank God there was something else to talk about besides all the horrors of this weekend.

And some of them are just, the Brown thing is still just like up in the air. They're still trying to figure it out.

They found one, the last I saw, they found one fuzzy picture of a new person of interest. It's like a person in a coat with a hat and a mask.
And you can tell very little. I hope they find something.

You know, we think of ourselves as sort of like under surveillance or like inside of like a camera that's recording us at all times and recording everything that we say.

And, you know, to a degree, that's true.

But there's not an all-seeing eye collecting all that stuff together under under one roof. You have to pay for that.
Well, do you know? That's the service you have to buy.

They're going to sell you that data. Right.
You have crime data becomes subscription only, right?

See, that's how iRobot could have saved their company, I think, you know, and had a whole new revenue stream. They just could have, what, sold the police the layout of your kitchen?

No, you put in DNA analyzers into the robot, and then you get the genome of like from dust and hair and stuff like that. Yeah.
All right. Take it easy, Theranos.
Yeah, get your

toxicology reports. You know, it's all data, man.
That's what anyone wants to buy these days. It all comes down to the data, man.

By the way, do you see the footage of this delivery robot like just waltzing up the stairs?

I don't know about a delivery robot. I did see a demo of a robot that goes up the stairs.
Now it just like turns itself kind of sideways and starts elongating itself and it's crazy.

No, this thing is like

it all. It actually It always fascinates me how for granted we take stairs because we can get upstairs so easily.
It's one of the first things that the kids learn is how to go up and down stairs.

And this is such a hang-up for robots. Right.
And it's like, up until this point, it's like, look at this dumb robe. It can't even go up and down.
Look at this dumb robot.

Can't even go up and down the stairs. But now it's like, you see this thing, you're like, oh shit, that's not good.
Well, now we're screwed. You didn't see this?

It looks like a, it's like one of those Boston Dynamics dog style robots, like one of those. No, I think the one I saw was

a really interesting take where it almost looked like it was made out of like connect, you know, the those like sticks that kids play with and build stuff. Fuck that.

And it

instead of being like set up as a square, it was kind of set up as a diamond shape, but it could reconfigure itself and like stretch and like it could squeeze itself into narrow spaces by squishing its diamond down, narrow, or like spread itself out, or it could use them and like lift itself up.

And it turned itself into its diamond shape and then it went up this, like it got the first wheel up the stairs and then the second wheels go up the stairs and then the third wheel and it just it just took itself up it was pretty impressive here let me i'm sending you right now the footage of this thing and you can react to it on the fly so okay

coming to you live you watching it now

yeah no i'm watching this this is what's the name on the side of it um river we'll we will but it's not river it's like what one of those like they remove vowels and make a new word

r-i-v-r yeah so that is actually fairly impressive that's that's a speedy little robot going up the stairs. It's three flights of stairs, it goes up too.
It is in a straight line.

It doesn't turn any corners, but I don't think that's the major challenge in going up the stairs. Right.
I don't think cornering is their big problem. It's been the stairs themselves.

So I wonder if this one is able to like lock its wheels. Tell you what, it's not doing at the end of those three flights of stairs.
It's not going, I'm not out of breath.

Trying to pretend like it's not out of breath. I'm going, I'm like, no, I'm fine.
I'm fine. That's good.
It's fine.

We have some stairs where we live, and occasionally we have people come over, like if we're troubleshooting a problem, we have a a tradesman or whatever and I'm I go up and down those stairs all the time and I'm always like shocked by when we get to the top of the stairs now and some of the people we're with are like

I always look at those stairs as like they're my they're my little personal gym and I I measure my fitness based on how tired I am when I get to the top we manifested by the way somebody showed up two people showed up yesterday in the comments talking about one of the things they do is I guess they work in some kind of agency or some kind of support role where they help people get health insurance plans through the Affordable Care Act.

They had a lot of great information. And now I'm thinking I overpaid for JD and Teddy's, you know? So, can you go talk to these guys instead? I say I paid.

They're on their own plans, but I feel like I guided them into these plans. And I'm like, holy shit, you guys are fucking low-income pricks.

You should

be getting better deals than this, man. He was talking about people getting $0 premium plans.
I'm like, hey, I got to look into this. I got to look into it.
Well, especially because

I think that they usually are what they're low premium, high deductible. But if they're not going to the doctor anyway, then is that a problem?

It did sound we were in the range for like everybody else. Like, either they were zero dollars or the per month, it was like 300 to 650 bucks a month.
It's a lot of money for a person.

A lot of money for the ability to go to the doctor, essentially. Crazy.
Right. Just to like have that option.
But don't forget, you're saving money by not having universal health care.

You know, you're saving money somehow in that process.

Well, it's a difficult math to do and to like reconcile because the way it's done in the U.S., it's like a monthly expense, right? As opposed to like, this is our taxes. Right, right.

You know, when you, you know, we, and it's, we, we fall in the same thing here. You look at like that and things like that, where it's 20%.

It feels very, very high. I think sales taxes are so regressive, too, because you're penalizing like the main necessary thing.
in an economy, which is the basic transaction going between people.

You'll choose not to buy something. No one's going to choose to make less money if income taxes are high, right? Right.

They'll They'll jump through hoops and do weird shit to try to hide the income or defer the income or something like that.

But at the end of the day, no one's going to say, well, I'm just going to make less money because.

Well, I mean, actually, it would help a lot if there was more tax literacy taught in schools in the U.S.

I did once get a raise that was going to put me into the next tax bracket. And for a minute, I was worried.
Most people are. Most people don't understand.

I was worried that as a result, I was actually going to make less because I didn't know the way they stair-step the taxes meant that I was only going to be taxed at the higher rate on the amount above this.

I thought that now I had just gone into this like other category and I was going to make less, even though I made more. Right.
You know, and that's a very real fear.

I was like, can I turn down the raise? It is a common fallacy. And you'll have,

the reason why we thought that, actually, is because we had adults that told us that. Like, you got to watch out.

That's how they're going to get you because you can get more money and you make less because you go into a higher tax bracket. Because that's the only education about taxes we got.

Like school wasn't telling me about that stuff. That's not the way that works.
No. That's not the way that works.

Progressive taxes. Like that's maybe that should be like the final class you do in math.

Let's, let's put in high school for math, maybe put calculus aside or whatever and focus on like financial literacy. Instead of what? Like probability or how

to fill a pool while you're draining at the same time.

I can tell you that I have gotten by all right, not knowing how to calculate a cosine.

Have you? I think so. Really? I think so.
Maybe I'm not doing all right. The area under a parabola has not come up in your life.
They haven't been launching rockets that are affected by gravity.

Not on a regular basis. Although, you know, that could come into play more because we're actually running into a real issue with satellites.

There is a countdown, I guess, to this sort of, like, that we're very close to

where satellites may start degrading. And once they start degrading,

then they're going to cause problems for other things

as well. We are 30 minutes in, but I really do want to talk about this.
This I found fascinating. This is one of those things, though.

It's like I hate to put anything out there that's one of those things you can't do anything about, really, but it's a potential problem.

You can't stare at the sky and worry. So, what's come up is that there's been a warning that is like a couple of different factors coming together.

One is the number of satellites we have in our constellation now in low Earth orbit.

And then, what they're seeing as an increasing incidence of solar radiation events that cause outages for electrical devices.

And so now what they're saying is that we are 2.8 days away from disaster for what they're calling a Kessler syndrome event.

Kessler syndrome is the most famous embodiment of this catastrophe where a debris cloud around Earth makes it impossible for humans to launch anything into orbit without it being destroyed.

But Kessler syndrome takes decades to fully develop.

To showcase the immediacy of the problem these solar storms can cause, the authors came up with a new metric, the collision realization and significant harm clock, the crash clock.

That'll really communicate with you. So is this like the countdown to midnight doomsday clock

where it's like we're two seconds away? So, but we've got 2.8 days until we have a disaster from satellites. Okay, so this is from fizz.org.
I hope I'm saying that correctly.

It's a fizz like physics, p-h-y-s.org, not fizz like a soda, you fat bastards.

This is an article they have about the number of satellites that are in low earth orbit and the number of maneuvers that they're having to make on a daily basis in order to avoid collisions and what would happen if there was some solar event where they couldn't make those maneuvers.

It says calculations show that across all low Earth orbit mega constellations, a quote, close approach defined as two two satellites passing by each other at less than one kilometer separation, that occurs every 22 seconds.

For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes.

Another known metric of Starlink is that on average, each one of the thousands of satellites have to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in orbit.

According to their calculations, as of June 2025, if satellite operators were to lose their ability to send commands for avoidance maneuvers, there would be a catastrophic collision in around 2.8 days.

Compare that to the 121 days that they calculated would have been the case in 2018 before the mega constellation era. And you can see why they are concerned.

Perhaps even more disturbingly, if operators lose control for even just 24 hours, there's a 30% chance of a catastrophic collision that could act as the seed case for the decades-long process of a Kessler syndrome.

If you saw the movie Gravity,

great example. Great movie.
Well,

that's what happens.

There's an explosion in space, which causes a debris field, which then orbits around the Earth, which then causes more collisions, which causes a huge debris field.

And it just becomes a cascading issue. Yeah, and I don't know if that's specifically supposed to be a Kessler syndrome.

I know that Neil deGrasse Tyson caused a lot of heat for saying how stupid it was, but that's what they're talking about.

See, I feel like instead of focusing all of our technology development efforts on AI, I really wish that things would develop like a technology where all of our stuff can talk to each other without us getting involved.

Like cars, um, satellites. I feel like they should be able to talk to each other.
That's the only way I feel like uh self-driving cars are really going to be able to like focus on

it is like when they can go all imagine this though imagine if your car was able to talk to all the other cars on the network and go all right well um we're in austin so i-35 sucks right now we're gonna take an alternate route and we're gonna all work together to minimize the traffic overall and i know uh because of the network that there's cars here here here here and here they're going this direction um this one's like stopped for this reason and they all know where each other are and what they're doing.

Remember when you learn to drive, they say that you drive your car, but you also are driving the car in front of you and you're driving the car behind you, right?

Wait, what are you talking about? I never heard that. You never learned that?

Well, it's less that you're actually driving them, more that you need to be as aware of them as you are of where your car is.

That you need to be aware of what the car in front of you is doing.

And you need to, that's, that's why we've got, you know, signals and indicators and all that stuff. And you need to know what the car behind you is doing as well.

Like, have you ever slammed on your brakes and then had to look like in the mirror to see if the car behind you is going to stop in time? It's being aware of all the vehicles around you.

Now, imagine that on a mass scale, that seems like a great way to make self-driving actually work. Now, if the satellites could talk to each other and go, hey, bud, I'm coming by,

move, then that would be really helpful. Maybe, you know, that way they could talk to each other instead of having someone go, oi, can you go a little bit to the left?

And yeah, so when you look at this stuff, it's like it, you know, they're just launching satellite after satellite.

We said at one point, Starlink was on its way to 40,000, I think, 45,000 satellites in orbit or something like that. But

yeah, so and then all it takes is some major event. And then what do we do? We should talk about this because it just came out, too.
It's a long one. Sorry, everybody.

Spielberg just put out a teaser trailer for his new movie. It is like Spielberg, super weird.
It feels very trippy sci-fi. And the lead actress is Emily Blunt.
I mean, this checks like so many boxes.

I mean, I'm already in a seat at the the theater. What's this movie? It's called Disclosure Day.
And at one point, I think people thought it was going to be named All Will Be Disclosed. Okay.

I'll let you go watch the premise of it yourself. It doesn't give you a lot of information.
And I think it's supposed to be

intentionally

vague. Thank you.

Yeah, and so it's, but it looks really cool. And I love the, I love any time that Spielberg like leans into sci-fi a lot.
I like all of his stuff, but man, the sci-fi stuff just hits home for me.

Close encounters. I'm with Emily Blunt.
So we'll be there together. E.T.? You think E.T.
is important to later generations? It was really important to my generation. It was really important.

I don't know.

It's not like our kids are aware. They don't even know E.T.
exists. Yeah, I wonder if that was the time I grew up in, but I felt like E.T.
was like the blockbuster. of the early 80s.
Such a big deal.

And I just feel like when we talk about major blockbusters in U.S. film history, we don't talk about E.T.
ever. Maybe not enough.
I mean, isn't it, is it Amblin Entertainment that E.T. is their logo?

Yes. Yeah.
The bike going by the sun. Yeah.
That it's that it's

such an iconic, important image to filmmaking that it's their studio. That's Spielberg's company, is Amblin.
Okay. Yeah.

And then he's part of DreamWorks as well, which is the kid on the moon and stuff like that. Got it.
And then because of Jaws, I think he owns. Maybe for moons.

He owns something like 5% of Paramount or something like that as well.

Or did at one point. Hey, Spielberg, you can own a lot more now that Kushner is pulled out.
Right, you can just step in there and you can get yourself a little Warner Brothers while you're at it.

Probably does. Who the fuck knows? Yeah, but Close Encounters, E.T., War of the Worlds, the Tom Cruise War of the Worlds.
That's Spielberg. Okay.
Yeah. Eric Vespy talked about being on that set.

He got to go visit and got to like talk to Spielberg on the side of the hill. You know, when they have the big first invasion is like there, it's like, it's almost like talking to a general.

I know that's silly, but you know, it's really cool. Fuck it, Spielberg's the best.
I love Spielberg. You know who else is the best, Bernie? Russell Hopkins and Jonathan Cerna.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morningsomer and roosterteeth.com. Our liberal rag of a podcast today that we have.

We're going to try to, we're going after that NPR money today. Sorry, all you conservatives out there.
They're making a lot of money. We revealed ourselves.
All right. Well, that does it for us today.

December 17th, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well.