2026.09.09: Lose By Winning

0:00Alright. Okay, good shot. Hey, we're recording the podcast. Cut up! Good morning to you wherever you are because it is... Morning somewhere! For September 9th, 2020, 6th, my name is Bernie Burns. Sitting right over there, she's gone up to spots in my pole to ask some Burns. I'm actually everybody. This is how you win by losing. Or lose by winning. Michigan Wolverines dropped out of the AP Top 25 pole after a win. Do you know where they were before? 16th place. And after winning against Western Michigan, they dropped off the Top 25 entirely. Yes, that is correct. And Western Michigan got some votes because you can see how many votes that the teams got, they didn't get into the Top 25 and Western Michigan got some votes. Congratulations, Western Michigan.

1:01I think you won the real game here. The game of life. Yeah, it is weird to have that in the win column, but then it just... It becomes not so much a win, but an asterisk, right? Right. It's like for the rest of the season. Do you... Do you know anything like that? You don't follow many sports at all, do you? No, not really. The first year I watched college football, really, was 1990. There was a game where Colorado versus the Missouri Tigers. And at the end of the game, they were trying to punch it in on the goal line. Basically, Colorado was. And for whatever reason, no one can explain it. They got five downs to do that as opposed to four downs. Like, it's literally just a miscount. Everyone on the field missed the fact that Colorado was on their fifth down. And won the game on the fifth. And you don't have five downs, right? No, no. You only have four. And it's got its own Wikipedia entry, the fifth down game. And then Colorado. And then Colorado. Why is it clarified 1990 if there's another fifth down game?

2:02I don't know. I don't think there have. This article is about the football game between the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Missouri for the 1940 game between Cornell and Dartmouth. So this happened once 50 years before that? See, fifth down game, 1940. That's weird though. 50th anniversary they did it again. So watch out, 2040. Yeah, every 50 years somebody gets an extra down. To happen. But Colorado that year went on to win the national championship. But it was back then it wasn't as clear. It was more just from the polls and the polls and things like that. Where at the end they would just vote and see who was number one. And number one and number two might not have even played each other at any point. Weird, okay. It's, it sounds weird, but it was how college football was different than professional. It was, it was a pageant. It was a popularity concept. So that year Colorado went on after getting five downs. They went on to share the national championship with the Georgia Tech yellow jackets. So they were saying that maybe they would have won it entirely without having to share it,

3:04except they had an asterisk and everyone was like, nah buddy. Well, yeah, and I remember it well too because it was the year that Texas had what they called the Shock the Nation tour. Where Texas was not a great program. They were historically a great one with like Earl Campbell and Darryl Royal as the coach of the Longhorns, but they had been good in a while. And they just had this incredible season. And we were kept out of the national championship discussion. I think we ended up third before the Bull Games. And we weren't even in contention because Colorado was there. Colorado had beaten us that season. But they had this fit down game in there. So it was like this big like, you know, stuck in my crop. Like yeah, but they got their fit down or whatever. And it's stuck in a lot of people's crop too. Didn't matter because we lost something like 41 to 3 against Miami. Okay. In our Bull Game. So it didn't matter. Well, that that clears up the asterisk a little bit. That was brutal, man. Well, given that this is right at the start of the season, do you think it's going to have like a lasting impact or is this just like, you know,

4:04a thing to kick the season off? And then everyone is going to forget about it. I think Oregon too, they were number two in the nation. And they dropped like four spots down to like number six or number five or something like that. And they won as well, right? So it's just kind of like they're kind of figuring out the placements right now. And it doesn't matter. Last year didn't UT start it like it was like the number one spot at some point. And then like, Bring this up. Yes. And then I had nowhere to go but down. Preseason number one is a little bit though like being on the cover of the mat and game that year. You know, it's the first. Yeah, it's harder to maintain it the whole way through. If you have a program where you can maintain number one, the entire way through the season, that's a lot tougher than like, it's better to lose early and win late. I'll just say that. Okay. Right? Because if all of a sudden you lose at the end of the season, then you're kind of out of contention. Right. And really what are you going to do? And college football is one of the things. There's like 11 games, ish, you know, not even everybody doesn't even play the same number of games, which is so weird. But if you lose like two or three of those like key games, then it doesn't matter at all.

5:09Nothing matters, you know what I mean? It's not like the NFL words like, oh, we go to the playoffs with like an eight and eight record or something like that. It's like, how many games did you have this season? I had 11. How many did you have eight? I still, I'm just saying eight and eight, too. I don't even know if 16 games what they play in the NFL. I know you know. Well, you know what they've got? They've had no matter how many games they have, they have more games now than the, the live golf tournament. Oh, this is a great day for sports L stuff. We all wanted to get punished. Yeah. And is doing it. So there was the, the, the Saudi funded golf tournament that was, it was the, basically the, what the new like contender versus like the US, the PGA, and it was like, luring away the players with promises of tons of money, all this stuff. It's called live. And they've just filed for bankruptcy. Yep. Yep. Yeah. There's been a run of those, too, because there was something that went through the comedy world like that, too. Do you remember the Riyadh comedy festival where a bunch of comedians got paid?

6:10Like it, they just lay out these huge checks. And a lot of people are feeling like it's a kind of like a PR washing of Saudi Arabia, where they just lay out these enormous checks for people to come there and perform play golf, do whatever. And this one, the live golf tournament, I'm not much of a spectator of golf myself, but I know people wanted this thing to die and it died. Your day is here to celebrate. So congrats. So if they filed for bankruptcy, does that mean that this is like the like Microsoft's mixer, right, where like all the players who signed really lucrative contracts with live connect, go back to PGA and keep all the money? Yeah. I'm going to guess that people who signed those massive contracts with live, maybe we can look one up as an example. I imagine that those sports stars had incredible attorneys when they were at the table negotiating those deals. I would just imagine that those who were like your top shelf attorneys. Okay. Well, just looking at this quickly, it looks like John Ram, who we all know,

7:13signed a $300 million contract, Michael Sin sign a $200 million contract. How do you know it was the live? Brooks, he is apparently Cincinnati, Arabia. Brooks Keppka signed $130 million and Dustin Johnson signed $125 million. So those are some of the biggest live golf contracts. So curious to see if all those guys are now going to pop them back to the PGA with a couple extra digits in the bank. I think there was even a point in time where they said stuff like they weren't going to let them come back in if they went and they were going to deliver, which is kind of anti-competitive as well. I'm not sure how they feel about that, but I mean, they are coming back with egg on their face, right? I'm sort of as a very expensive egg. Yeah, I've really a very lucrative egg. You could spin this as like, look at this, all this money we pulled out of Saudi Arabia for New York. We didn't even have to do anything. Yeah. So they filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It looks like earlier this year, live faced a Saudi funding cliff.

8:15They launched an investor road show to try to raise $350 million. I guess, you know, the equivalent of signing a player and it wasn't enough. So as part of the proposed bankruptcy deal for which they do have to go to court for approval for it, but they're expected to be majority owned by the players after this. I guess because that's who's going to have what equity. No, that's interesting. So if they don't get their money back, they just get a share of this tour that they helped build. Maybe which is going to be worth nothing if it can't continue to function. Do they play all the golf in Saudi Arabia? I can't imagine a more inhospitable environment for a golf course. Right. I mean, imagine like the amount of water it takes to maintain a golf course is insulting even in areas that get a lot of water. Yeah. I can't imagine what it would be like to maintain golf courses in the middle of the goddamn desert. Right. I mean, I was just saying after I said that I was thinking I've seen so many golf courses in Arizona where no golf course should ever exist.

9:15Right. They have the state's entire share of water. Yeah. So people might not be aware of what you're talking about, not everyone who listens to this podcast is a gamer. So the mixer deal that Ashley was talking about was after Twitch was bought by Amazon. There was everyone else was also trying to create a streaming platform like Twitch. And Microsoft had one called mixer. It was integrated into the Xbox systems like every Xbox game. You could just start a mixer stream. Remember for a long time there was really heavy integration. And the biggest streamer that they ended up signing was Ninja, who was at the time the biggest streamer on Twitch. They gave him an insane amount of money to then stream exclusively via mixer. Estimates are between 20 and $50 million based on performance. And that everyone kind of narrows in on $30 million as to what this deal was worth for the guy to go and play video games on mixer as opposed to playing video games on Twitch.

10:18All right. So he sees no film. But you know, In the world of streaming, it was a really big deal except then Microsoft decided that mixer wasn't working out. They canceled everything. They shut it down. And so Ninja was free to go back to Twitch and whatever else he wanted to do. Correct me from wrong too. It felt like mixer was on the rise at that point. It did. But one of those things where like someone must have looked at a line item in a budget and went this didn't grow as fast as we wanted it to. Yeah. Over the period of time that we wanted it to. So yeah, it may be on the rise now, but it's too late. Can't kill it. It was like vine but for games, except for the fact that somebody made money from it. That's basically what it works. Someone made money from this one. Right. Right. Right. And I remember now too, we've definitely talked about the story before because this story is hard to research because it's lost into the ether of search engines. Because think about when you go to look up Ninja mixer.

11:19What comes up? It's my fucking blend. I'll be worried about blenders all day long because that's all you're going to find. Yeah, so they're not gone. Libs not gone. They're in bankruptcy. You know, things come back from bankruptcy. It does happen. It is the purpose of bankruptcy is to restructure the business. But we'll see what happens. Once something do that faces the public. Once it gets a stink on it, there's not much you can do about that, right? Yeah. And what they got to do is all the things I read about live was they fell off an investor cliff basically. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? Well, they're basically saying like everyone stopped investing in it, right? Which is they need to raise money in order to pay these contracts and everything else. And then how do you convince someone to go in on something that's an entertainment based product when it has such a stink on it? Who's going to invest in it at that point? Well, also that that indicates that obviously this operation was operating at a loss. So now, even if it becomes majority owned by the players, unless they're going to put their 200, 300 million back into it,

12:21it would still operate at a loss. I've never had to deal with anything. I don't think that's gone to bankruptcy. But then there's all these rules of like who gets paid first and who doesn't get paid and things like that. So I'd imagine that the contracts with the athletes, especially if they become owners, or if they already had equity as part of it, that they're probably first in line to get paid. I would imagine once again, they probably had top shelf lures. They had to go and negotiate as the table. I always think about something though when I was watching college football this last weekend, because I was just watching because I was thinking about I wanted to have my local friends over to watch the Ohio staking, because they have expressed an interest in American football. And of course, I want to try to get them to watch college football, even though it doesn't make any difference to them whatsoever. And I was thinking about how do we explain these things to people who are used to watching soccer? And I was looking to say, for instance, the first downline in the line of scrimmage, and you even asked like how many downs do you get? And I was looking at it, and I was thinking about the first downline, which is the yellow line that appears when you watch a televised game.

13:21And thinking like, oh, that's so cool that that exists. But then I wonder how many people know that we watched football for a really long period of time before we had that technology where they could display that yellow line on your TV screen? You know what I'm talking about the yellow line? I do where they can project it out. And so you can see exactly where it should be. I guess for a period of time, before that, maybe they had what like this, someone would be able to like draw over it and be like, here's where they're going to be. Kind of the way they draw out the plays. No, there was a little like blaze orange like, you know, like high viz orange, tag on the sideline on the ground. That's what you would look at. And maybe there might be a guy with a pole standing there as well, but really that little flag and then they'd have to like move it down. They still do all of that for the players on the field. Right. You mean the players aren't getting the projected yellow line? No, they don't get the projected yellow line. That's not on the field. So let me ask you this question. Just as a trivia question. This would be a good trivia question for pub night. Here we go. You had to guess what year was the first year they displayed the yellow first

14:25online on televised football games? 1975. 1975. That would make sense, right? Because we had illustrators and stuff like that. Did we? Okay. 1998. Wow. Yeah, 1998. So I had been watching football through like most of my like big fan years before we got the first download. I can remember seeing it and thinking, that is so fucking cool. That's the future. You can see the first down line on the TV. That's crazy. And now they put the line of scrimmage and everything else on it. And I really think a lot of televised sports were really influenced by video games, right? Because now you have like pop ups and circles around the players. Oh, yeah. And they show like who's going where all that stuff? Yeah, they definitely use the visual language of video games through a lot of TV broadcasts these days. Hey, speaking of broadcasting and entertainment stuff. Did you watch the trailer? Please tell me you watched the trailer for the new Nathan Fielder Elizabeth Holmes movie. Oh, God. Yes. You did? You watched it because it was in the group chat. I did. I did.

15:25I actually was going to time myself to see how long it took before I had to just like leave because I can't imagine. You know, you know, I don't do crazy short stuff like stopwatchable time. I know that the like the awkward like forced awkwardness. I have so much trouble with because I'm already awkward. And so anything that's like, let's be even more awkward for funsies. Just, oh my God, I have so much trouble with it. So I did watch it. I actually made it through. I impressed myself with this. It's a minute long. But I think, well, okay, well done to me. But also the whole time I was like, is this the documentary because it feels like a horror for a trailer for a horror film. The big A24 logo at the beginning doesn't help with that either. That's true. And the music the entire time. Yeah. So he's doing a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Isn't she in prison? Yes. From what I understand, this is before she went to prison and he had unfettered, quote unquote, access to her. Before she went away to prison, like there's even a little baby that she had, remember?

16:28I saw the baby in the rocker and I was like, oh, that's fun on the zoom out. You kind of have to go see it. Like we couldn't possibly explain what this is like, but everyone is having such visceral reactions to this trailer. And I'm one of those people. To me, my takeaway is I didn't watch a lot of Nathan for you, but I watched a lot via clips and that kind of thing. It almost feels like a guy who's really intelligent created this character that's like what's the worst aspects of being a really intelligent person. And like going out and like grifting businesses, you know, and things like that. And it's almost like that intelligent guy experiencing his character in real life and coming to turn like the character is like right in front of him. This thing that he has had to mimic. Is it like Frankenstein interviewing his mom? I'm probably looking too far into it, man. They are both like the kings of just like holding a silence until the other one breaks. And it's just so it's a minute long and it's so intense. This is going to be a really quiet documentary.

17:30Is they just stare at each other a lot? Also, who sets up an interview? A one-on-one interview where it's like, okay, you're going to sit on the couch and I'm going to be behind you and you're going to look back over your shoulder at me across the back of the couch. Clearly that was set up. Like for the like intention of then revealing the wide shot, right? It had to be. So there's like a subtle comedic element laid in there. Yeah. But it still feels like a horror movie. It's intense, man. It's intense. It's weird. If you're going to go see that, I wish you the best. I will not go see that. There is a lot to unpack in that minute. It says a minute 18. I was proud that I made it through a minute and 18 seconds. And by the enormous percentage of that time, by the way, is taken up by a truck driving down the street. That was a relief. Right. That's the end when they show you the next title. Yeah, that was the catharsis. You know how to go through something really emotional and then you get the break and you relax a little bit.

18:30A truck driving down the street was that for me. It is so awkward. The whole thing that when they show the actual title of the film, the title doesn't fit on the screen. It's almost like you know when you're a kid and you made a poster board project. You're like, ran out of space on the right side. That doesn't even bother me by the end of this minute and 18. The fact that the words of the title run off the edge of this journey. I didn't even notice that I was so busy just focusing on the truck and relaxing. I was actually waiting to see what it was going to throw me next. Is the truck going somewhere weird? No. Yeah, that's just it. It's really I'm looking forward to it. I'm absolutely not going to watch this. Speaking of which, the Xelmer brothers debuted their film. They debuted it. They debuted it. Reviews Alpha Gang debut, excuse me, at the Telluride Film Festival. So I'm looking forward to that as well. Hopefully after the festival is done, we'll hear some announcements as the who picked it up, knock on wood.

19:30Somebody picks it up and we get to see it in theaters or something like that. And where we will get to see it next. Yeah, and we'll get to see it next. So I'm excited about that. The log line from IMDB about this. If you're not familiar with it is alien invaders in the form of a 1950s biker gang are sent on a mission to conquer Earth. 1957. How can I not like that? Also, by the way, a little connection here. The Xelners, I think, are some of the only people to ever direct a Nathan Fielder project. Because usually he directs all of his own stuff. Well, look at that. He did the thing where they had the awkward relationship thing. I'm a bad friend. I should know the name of this night. I don't want to call it off the top of my head. It was called the purge. Don't say call it purge. I got something like that. The rehearsal? Nope. Nope. Nope. This was a different one. It was like about an awkward relationship. I want to say it had Emma Stone in it, but now I'm just completely spitballing at this point. Well, while you look this up, it makes sense that they're doing this this biker gang movie as a 1950s period piece. Because it's going to be a lot harder to do biker gang films now that the US is banning the import of motorcycles from Canada.

20:30The curse. Sorry. Thank you. It had to be something. But the, so the US is now banning the import of motorcycles, alcohol and some other stuff from Canada as the, as this like trade dispute continues to build. Great. And now I'm sitting here curious about what motorcycles are made in Canada. But it's either way the full ban on importing certain goods is interesting. I noticed I didn't see lumber here on the list, which is interesting. They're like, oh, this stuff that like we really can't function without. Yeah, those somehow didn't make it on the ban list, which is weird. So I've found in the Reddit comments about the US ban of everything including Canadian motorcycles. Somebody saying, I guess a Canadian saying we make motorcycles. It's for us. Here, you can go buy them. And then they had a list to Williams motorcycles, havoc motorcycles. And then some three wheel motorcycles, which I guess are big deal.

21:31But they said most of these motorcycles are over $70,000. What is a $70,000? I'm going to be lost in the weeds on motorcycles today. How do you get to $70,000 of the motorcycle? Yeah, like everything that I'm looking up here says that Canada specializes in like the three wheel motorcycles. Yeah, that's true. The three wheelers, the trikes, which this seems like such a weird niche thing. They're like, you can't bring in alcohol or dairy or trikes. I also read this article that saying that US is falling really far behind on robot moors because of the robot motor ban as well. Yes, because they're not allowing any robots in from China, right? But we would picture then like Rumbas, that's like a big issue with like the vacuums. Guess what? Also, you're an outdoor grass vacuums. Yeah, well, at least they're better than the UK. The UK yesterday apparently just banned exporting of people from the UK. Because the entire like air traffic controlling system went down or what,

22:31something flight related went down in the UK. Yeah, there was an air traffic control glitch. I think they're still investigating. But basically for a period of time yesterday morning, all outbound flights from a number of the major UK airports were completely shut down. So like if you were in the UK, you ain't leaving. I know five people, five people who got stranded yesterday. Five people? One of them I've talked about before is coming to visit us in Scotland. And he had his flight was cancelled on his way to the airport in Austin. And then he got rescheduled for later today, I guess. Well, yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of like cascading timing issues. They ended up canceling. It looks like the problems are still continuing. They cancelled nearly 2,000 flights in total. Tens of thousands of passengers have been affected. So it's like, this is an ongoing issue. It is improving. But as you know, as anything when like you get like a blockage or a backup,

23:31it takes a long time to clear it. Is it true what I heard from the source of this? Have they confirmed who did this? Who? Did you hear it was the Russians? I did hear that there's speculation. The Russians? Yeah. The Russia could be behind it. But I think they're still investigating. You know, there was all this talk that Russia was going to do something to test the resolve of NATO. Not like they haven't done it already, but they were going to make a direct effort to disrupt a NATO nation. It was all this like weird like speculation is what could happen to see if NATO would actually respond to a Russian disruption of an actual NATO member. Ukraine is not, you know, but obviously it affects a lot of things around Ukraine. Poland occasionally gets like a missile crossing their borders or something like that. But there was all this talk they were going to do it. So maybe this could have been that thing. Maybe, but if so, it seems like a very like indirect way to attack. Right.

24:31Especially if they're not standing up and like, Hey, guess what? We just fucked you guys up. We inconvenienced all your holidays. Which to be fair, if you are attacking British people who are tempted to go on holiday, for them that is basically a declaration of war. Yeah. You don't fuck with holiday in the UK. No, you do not. I also like to, it's like there's all these rules to protect consumers in the UK. So I'll see how, mirror how hard I had to work the money out of our airline that they owe us. Yes. By the rules here. You were, like they have very specific rules, but also the companies will do everything they can to get around those rules. You, it took you weeks of going back and forth with them and like they wanted this and they wanted that. And then they rejected it, but they wouldn't tell you why. There's got to be some psychology around like when you fill out a form or something and then you turn in the form and you filled in everything and they go, no, wrong. And then they don't tell you what's wrong with it. And then you have to fight them to figure that's got to be a methodology to get people to quit, right?

25:31Well, I'm sure they've got like, they've done studies and they have the exact numbers on what percentage of people are going to drop off out of frustration and just give up after a certain point. I'm like the Elizabeth Holmes of online forms. I can just stare it down. Like, oh no, we're going to, I'm sticking with this. I can do the Stan Saltae. And maybe I'm the Nathan Fielder of that. Maybe I'm the Elizabeth Holmes. Maybe you're both. Maybe you're both. Right. The creator versus the creator. I'm not even blowing by the way, the Nathan Fielder created Elizabeth Holmes. I'm just saying he envisioned a character that would be like this person. He has to deal with this actual real version of this. Actually, who is joining us at the ticket counter to rebook our flights? All right. Well, I best of luck with your travels to William Jeskey and Patrick. Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com slash morning somewhere and Richard T's docking. Hey, that does it for us today Wednesday September 9th, 2026. We will be back talking tomorrow.

26:32We hope you will be here as well. Bye everybody.