2026.09.10: More Is Less

0:00I can't just give you a review without knowing how good you are. Hey, we're recording the podcast. Cut up! Good morning to you, wherever you are because... Errrr! Morning somewhere! Forrest at 10th, 2020. Sixth, my name is Bernie Burns. Sitting right over there on the stink guy right now. It's actually Burns. Say hi to Ashley, everybody. Maybe don't say hi. Maybe just look at her and go... Maybe just keep walking, pal. Let her talk first and see what's up. How am I getting the stink guy? I don't know. It was less of a stink guy and more of like a... A physical face. What was I being a physical bull? Old Miss? It's just one of those mornings. I was just... I got the blue ray of a super girl. I was just watching the little beginning of super girl. It's fun. It's fun. So you're saying that we missed out? I don't know yet. In the theatrical experience. I will say this. It's got the same issue, exactly the same issue. That it's got with Superman.

1:00Or rather, I should say that I have the same issue with super girl. Then I had with Superman. Which is just like, oh man, I've got huge problems. Oh, wait a second. That's right. I'm super girl. I'm super. Much, much, much. Yeah. Then everything gets solved that way. So it's kind of like... It's just like, I know people who love Superman, super girl. The supers. They always talk about how like, yeah, but him being overpowered or whatever is not a big deal. It's like they always have some way to deal with that. But if you like that becomes the entire story. And then what solves the problem is always going back to becoming Superman. Or super girl. Sure. Well, I think, I mean, kryptonite aside, the fact that apparently kryptonite is everywhere and in everything. I feel like the dynamic of Superman's hero dilemmas are different than other heroes dilemmas. This room. Yeah. Right. Because we even bother having different superheroes, otherwise we could just like have one if all the dilemmas are the same.

2:00The superhero dilemma with Superman is like, he is super powered and he could basically be a god. Well, he just wants to be a good guy. Right. Yeah. The big thing with Superman, too, they always do is they threaten the general civilians. That's always a big thing with Superman and they have to protect them. In a case of the James Gunn version, he has to even protect the squirrels and stuff like that. So I like the squirrel. Yeah. Yeah, if they threaten the civilians on Batman, he goes, okay, well, you know, what do you, I don't know these people? It's like, well, the good news about the general world of Batman is that it seems like everyone has a, kind of like a no mortality agreement. Like we don't kill each other. We just like beat each other up like crazy and send each other off to, you know, I don't know, hospitals and stuff. And then, you know, you're back on the street and then we do it again. You think Batman has trouble separating his life as the mass vigilante and the really well off CEO. And like sometimes you're like, oh, Joker's gonna blow up the warehouse.

3:00He's like, you know, we were about to do layoffs anyway. This really gets ahead of it for us. I don't know, they're a competitor to Wayne Enterprise. That is exactly right. So maybe, maybe tonight, I just, I go in right after the explosion. You're gonna blow up which cargo ship? Yeah, okay. You can lose one cargo ship. Oh no, don't do that. I'll make sure to catch you after you do the heinous deed. Yeah, it's like Batman swinging and he goes, you know, actually this could be a hell of a write off. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, must be tough to separate. Must be really tough. Would you imagine the insurance underwriters in Gotham? Like what constitutes like an act of God that's uninsurable? Right normally for us, it would be like, you know, they'll count what like typhoons or hurricanes. They're like, that's an act of God, we're not covering that. In Gotham, it's like every day. Like do you have to like specifically put in clauses? We don't cover Joker's shenanigans.

4:02Also too, there must be points when they're getting new coverage on insurance. And it's like, yeah, but what about Joker? It's like, Joker's in prison. It's like, come on dude. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, we've been here before. Does everyone's insurance premiums go down when Batman does like a whole bunch of arrests? Yeah, right, exactly. There was a whole thing about that, that kind of an understated moment in the Fantastic Four movie, where they arrest like all of the villains in the city, which I guess is New York, I guess, but that version of New York. Yeah. And yeah, where it's like right before all the shit really goes down with Galactus, the moment right before that, it's actually really cool because Reed like said, you know what, we're just gonna stop all crime because I'm having a kid now. So I could have done this all long, but now I'm just gonna do it. I was just, I wasn't fully committed, but now I've decided to ban crime. Yeah, I'm gonna ban crime. And you know, if you make it illegal, people will stop doing it. A hundred percent will be like, oh my God, I'm gonna think it. This was illegal the whole time. I thought this was, why didn't anybody tell me? I thought it was more of a great area.

5:03Yeah. Blowing up the cargo ship. I didn't know it was illegally legal. But you're saying that overall super girl seems promising. I'm saying in my two minute review of super girl, let's call it 12 minutes, I'm 12 minutes in. I got the lobo, I'm probably further in than that. Okay. So it's, yeah, I mean, it's just fun, right? I mean, it's like a superhero movie. Just have fun with it, who cares, right? I also got obsession. This is like a head on a swivel kind of a double feature here. Yeah, that would be, that seems like a tonally slightly different perhaps. Which I haven't seen yet. I haven't seen it. So, you know, we'll see. I was in a millennial mode this week. You know what that means? What does millennial? I was doing tasks this week that I had to break out my laptop to do it, you know, I couldn't do it on my mobile phone. That's a millennial thing, apparently. Like there's some tasks that they perform that they can't do on a mobile phone. They have to, it's too important to do it on a mobile device. They have to do it on a laptop. No, I agree. I agree completely.

6:03Like booking airline tickets. There's some like airline tickets or like hotels or things like that. No, that's a laptop job. Right. Your bank is still okay to be mobile now. But I was doing some banking stuff that was important. And it was important. I got the laptop. I had to do it on the laptop. This is a real business, everybody. That's how you know if you're doing like the real work or just messing about. And we missed that. I think my generation missed that because the generation before that was like, no, I need to talk to a person. This is important. I need to talk to a person about this. There's nothing important enough for me to talk to a person about it. Oh God, no. Nothing at all. I need to be in line like, six in line for the guillotine. And they're like, why don't you just call somebody and they'll straighten this out for you? I'd be like, mm-hmm. I'm just saying, sure, that's necessary. I don't, I mean. I don't see. Less painful. They're actually like talking to someone on the phone. I know exactly. And it's like, that's a boomer thing. They got to talk to somebody. And especially when you're like shouting in the phone, you're like, give up operator. I know, jeez. Operator, I'm tired of punching in the numbers.

7:04Just get me to an operator. Also, I worked customer service for a long time. So I think you've seen me do this before. I'm nice to customer service people. I'm really nice. You're great with customers. Even like cold sales call people. I'm like, I'm not like a pushover. They call me for the billionth time in a day, saying, hey, we're gonna, we wanna redo your roof. We're just going around the city of Austin, redoing roofs. And I'm like, no, you got on a mailing list somehow. It's like when on Amazon, you buy a mini fridge, right? And then it goes, oh, this guy really likes mini fridges. And then it starts showing you after you bought this mini fridge, all these other mini fridges that you might like. It makes sense. They think like you're starting a collection, right? Clearly, if you have one mini fridge, you must be in the market for more mini fridges. It's like that with the roof guys. Like you got the roof replaced. And now you get calls all the time and you're like, hey, I love your new roof. How would you like a new roof? I know what you mean though. It's like, yeah, when Amazon, you buy a product that you're never gonna buy more than once every 20 years. And they're like, oh, here's some more ads about these things in general.

8:05It's like my roof for you. You can use them at the point. I bought the thing so you can stop showing me ads about the thing because I bought the thing. Why don't you show me fun fridge magnets instead? Just like, just change the tone. Take a one step further. People turn right around and buy refrigerator magnets. Sure, why not? That doesn't seem like something that you buy. They're just things that turn up. Right, like when you buy a printer, you buy printer paper, but you don't necessarily like, oh, shit, we got a new fridge. We need to get a new set of magnets for it. Is that even a thing anymore? Not really. I feel like a lot of fridges are no longer magnetic. Well, or also, I feel like the mobile phone replaced like all like, the stuff you're gonna pin to the fridge to remember, you just make a note, somewhere in a text file in your phone and then lose it forever. Right, or display it on your fridge display when you're not looking inside your fridge through your fridge display or trying to get rid of the ads on your fridge display. Yeah, oh, you solved that problem. You saved us money. We looked up the model of our TV or LG TV. It is not the super spy version and then also you disabled all the network stuff.

9:05I did, I did. I went through, first of all, I kicked that bitch off the network. So we no longer have a smart TV. It's a dumb TV. I'm a bitch. But that's fine, because all we wanted was the TV anyway. And then once it was kicked off the network, I also went in and disabled all the things like went through and like revoked any agreements for data sharing and all that stuff. So it is both neutered and in quarantine. And it's gonna remain that way. Okay, okay, great. But the advice. It could be collecting data and become a repository and then like in the future when the apocalypse has happened in our house is sitting vacant and someone comes in and finds a TV, they can plug it in and go like, they talked about what? I thought this TV. No worries. Oh, they're in the market for a refrigerator. Should we talk about some current events? Well, we're talking about devices. We're talking about the Apple stuff. We should. We should Apple had their sort of big ottomant announcement for the iPhones.

10:06They announced both the new series of like the iPhone 18 and the pro and the max. And then the worst kept secret is the iPhone Duo, which is the foldable version of the iPhone. This is their first foldable model. We had remembered Microsoft put out like a Windows phone. Wasn't it also called the Duo? It was called the Surface Duo. It was a foldable. I tried to move over to Android and I bought a Surface Duo. So I really don't, I'm not in the market for a Duo phone myself, a foldable phone. I like the idea, but I'm gonna wait on this one. To brand. First of all, because it's to brand and baseline. Yeah. So it's which is a lot, but the old so. It's also no, it's in line though with other products at that same category. Like for Samsung and stuff like that. It's it was it's the price that was expected to be. It's still to grand. I get what you're saying. It's still to grand. But it also for me has a problem. One of the problems is that we don't know yet

11:06if this is going to have a creasing issue or if being Apple, who is usually not like first to the party but when they get to the party, they do it well. That's my hope too. Yeah. Well, it remains to be seen though. How long it takes for any creasing issues to start on the phones since they're not out yet. So that's one thing is I'd like to see what's the timeline on that. And the other thing is it does have a second screen. It has a screen on the outside. And it's like like it was 5.8 inches, something like that. So it's kind of like a full, small iPhone screen. So for me, it's actually got the weakness of two of both things as the creasing of a foldable phone. But I'm still going to feel like I have to protect the screen on the outside, which is what I was hoping to kind of not do. If you have just like a little display that will show you the weather and if you've got a missed call or a text message or something, cool. But I didn't need a full screen on the outside. I want to see what the battery life is on these things. You know what I mean? It's like it just feels like with that many screens

12:07and displays, I'm just going to be charging this thing like five times a day. But I'm sure they covered that in testing, right? Yeah, well, supposedly, but also they give you very, I think, optimistic measurements because they've said that it'll be 44 hours of video play back on the outside screen or 24 hours if you use the big screen. And that's video playback. Well, the nice thing about the size of the thing it allows them to put a much bigger battery in it too. It does. And they're also going, this is an interesting one, ESim only, which could impact some people in our neck of the woods. I think the US iPhones have been ESim only for a couple of generations now, which impacted me a while ago, because I had to, I had a physical sim and then I had to figure out how to get myself to an ESim plan and it was a nightmare. But a lot of people, at least where we are, like having the physical sim slot, because if you travel, you go somewhere and you can just like pick up a, like a, pays you go SIM card and that's not going to be possible.

13:07I want it in a convenience store. That said, if you're paying $2,000 for a phone, that's probably not top of mind free. There's also a lot of, you're okay with the roaming chart. Like travel plans now. Like the one that I had was if you, like if someone calls my Austin number, which I still have here in the UK, if they call me and I answer, it's nothing, right? If I decide to send an SMS message, not over data, essentially, what's app and I message don't count? If I send an SMS message or I make an outbound call, then it counts as me using the phone that day and then it's like a $5 charge for that day. Yeah, so. And then I go and go nuts with it. Plans have improved. So I can see why, but if you're on like a page, you go a plan or something like that that only comes with a physical SIM card, then you can't use this phone. I feel like what's happened. Not the audience, probably. Feel like they're topping out on that watch. I keep waiting for more features. Literally, I just, I didn't watch the whole presentation, but they do the clips like presenting the new duo

14:08and stuff like that. The short little video that they make. I watched those on YouTube and the Apple Watch one was basically said to me, it's like, Hey, this thing tracks your heartbeat now, but better. Yeah, right. Where it was. That's the major takeaway I had as well is it already tracked your heartbeat, but now it's better. It made me feel bad about it. So this thing can't track my heart rate because I've been relying on this thing for like 10 years to track my heart. Right. It can. It just sucks, but do you want a good one? Get them. That was kind of the sales pitch. It felt like for this. And it felt like they're going to have more robust like health apps and things like that. But they're also going to extend those to some of the existing models, not all the way back to the beginning of the line, but some of the ones that are on the market right now. Yes, and they're also touting. I think some of the AI integration capabilities, like it could be running Shazam at all times. So you don't have to pick up, pick it up, and go tap the Shazam button to figure out what music is on. It'll just tell you what music is around you. Or some accessibility things like,

15:09oh, there's an alarm going off near you, or like, baby's crying, things like that, which could be nice accessibility quality of life things or those who maybe have more difficulty hearing. So all that, great, okay, cool, fine. But it doesn't apply to me. So I think, I don't think I need anything from this round of iPhone announcements. Did they announce this like Siri recap thing or did they kind of keep that in their pocket? Because all the insider and rumor sites we're talking about now, where the new watch will listen to you all day. Yes, and it will like recap your conversations. I don't want that. I don't want that either. I genuinely don't want that. And I hope you can turn that kind of thing off. If you get that, you know what I mean? I imagine you can, but they are, they're touting the roll out of Siri AI. But one thing I found interesting is the Siri AI roll out. Is that even legal in every state? Because if you're recording conversations. Because the single party versus like, was it single party versus two party? Yeah, conversation rules for when you can record

16:10and when you can't. Like I know Texas is a one party state. Like you can secretly record people, you know, for your own like defense or something like that in court, where some other states you have to have the consent of both parties. Well, so what you're saying is that your watch's voice conversation recordings may not be admissible in court. But how, how weird is it going to be when people like check their watch after they have a conversation to find out what they just talked about? Oh yeah, right. Are we going to do this whole thing now of like, we hate the fact that everything can be recorded on glasses. At least you can see when someone's got the glasses on. Anybody who's got a watch now can be recorded. Yeah, just recording your entire conversation. Is that different? I mean, I guess your face is intonate. I guess not, but it's like you know, you can be passing and have a conversation. God knows when I'm out in public, people are having like incredibly private conversations around me all the time, especially at full volume on their goddamn phones all the time. Yeah, sometimes it's like, lalalala, I don't want to hear this.

17:10The last thing I need is for like my phone or my watch to also hear it and then remind me about what you said. Yeah, yeah, I imagine it's going to get the same blowback as that, but maybe it won't. So it's one party consent or all party consent or the two things. But what's admissible in court versus like what people will record for private use is completely different things. Yeah, yeah. So are you excited about anything like the baseline phones, what they call them now calling them, the slab phones, which I like that name slab. You want a slab? It's about 1,300 bucks for one of these iPhone 18 pro slash pro Mac. I mean, they're, they're stair stepping improvements. There's nothing in them that I feel like I need. The big thing for them is they're quote, built from the ground up for Siri AI, which I also don't care about. So I don't think I need anything from this round of announcements. I'm not going to get this generation of the duo. I don't need a new regular phone. I don't think I'm going to do a new watch. They did announce a new round of just like regular air pods. They did not talk about the AirPods pro that are the ones that are rumored

18:13to have a camera in them for AI integration, which I also don't want. So I think I'm set. Yeah, I think I'm okay too. But it's like, it's a testament to how good the products are now, too. It's like, it's got to be a big leap forward. And the duo is that it's a completely new product, you know, for Apple, at least. No, it's, it's cool, but I'm going to wait. Yeah, but the whole like in my head, how much does a phone cost? Like in your head, right? Not $2,000. Right. Right off the top of your head. What does a phone cost? $800. Yeah, $800. Yeah, $800. That's what it was in my head to. $800. But it's another mark of inflation, right? Is that now it's like 1300. We're getting into the mid 1000s for phones, which for a device that you use way more than you probably should be using. We're talking hours every single day that doesn't seem like an egregious amount of money to spend. Well, Apple is going to do its best to try to adjust your internal metric for what a phone cost because along with announcing all their new stuff, did you see they announced a $100 price increase on the older models? No, really, well, everything's going up because they got to put AI in the new devices,

19:13right? It's not, well, it's not just that. It's that, but yes, it is AI related. It's related to the storage and memory crisis. So instead of like, hey, we announced all this new stuff. Is that part of the, I don't know. So it is, it is. But so the, so all our older stuff is finally dropping in price now. Nope, even the older stuff going up in price. Weird. Another weird inflation indicator. This is a story that came out last week. I'll just read you the headline here. Spider-Man brand new day has nearly made as much as Star Wars, the Force Awakens, despite selling 35 million fewer tickets. This is how inflation has reshaped cinema. This is an article from TV fandom, which I saw, but it was in a lot of different places. 35 million fewer tickets. That's a lot of tickets. That's a lot of tickets. That's a lot of tickets. It shows how. Hold on, hold on. Yeah, that's a lot of tickets. There's a lot of tickets. But it's made me so much money. But now it costs so much more to go see movies.

20:14Let me ask you this, because this was in the opening paragraph of this article. What do you think the average price to go see a movie was when Titanic was out? Five dollars. Yeah, you're right. Four, fifty to five dollars. Nice. Was the price. Yeah. How much money those movies made back then when they were starting it like one third of the ticket costs now that it costs to go see a movie. But they're just showing how like we're breaking all these records. Fewer people are going to see them. Yeah, exactly. Less people are going to see the movies. Yeah, exactly. That's weird. Yeah. Do they count, do you think they count like special popcorn buckets in like the overall box office or is that, is that separate? Does that fall under like, merch revenue? I have no idea. I don't know what it's called. Talking about prices increasing as well, unusual whales, which is one of the Twitter accounts that I like to follow. But now they're on Instagram so I can just get their like summary of their tweets without having to go to Twitter. Oh, is that the best? Fifteen, actually, fifteen US colleges now cost more than one hundred thousand dollars

21:16per year. And for international friends, college, same in the US, same thing as university. Top on the list was Harvey Mudd College. I don't know where that is, but do you think they did they misspell Harvard? No, no, no, university of Southern California, USC, some people know it. University of Chicago, Duke, Smith College, Washington University, Vassar, Wesleyan, NYU, Georgetown. I've never heard of a lot of these. No, no, Yale and Harvard aren't even on this list. Yeah, but they're like, like, whole gate university. They have their own university. No, it's not the same thing. It might be from the Colgate, college. You can imagine being a hundred thousand dollars a year per year. Per year. And as I understand it as well, that cost is like tuition, fees, food and housing, books, all that stuff is sort of included in the cost expectation for what it is to go to a single year at one of these universities. That is insane. Yeah, it says here include. How is that not just a list of the Ivy Leagues?

22:19How is this list, this list and not all the like Ivy Leagues that you associate with being like the who-who-who expensive ones? Don't know. Rich people don't like to pay for stuff though, right? Yes, so that's not how you get rich. I'm the leaguers, but like, no, we gotta keep this low, man. Come on. We'll just exclude everybody and keep our prices low. I mean, Harvard has the biggest endowment of any university so they could subsidize their own incoming students. According to a quick Google, it's actually sitting around a meager $57 billion endowment. I mean, Ashley, can you imagine dumping $100,000 a year into your undergraduate education only to get out and realize I just sunk all this money into that and all the jobs have left now in Gonday. Not only that, in addition to the, let's say, $400,000 in counting, it's going to cost me to pay for my university, an additional $2,000 for a fund. But what we're talking about, things that cost a lot of money, Bernie. Nicholas Cage bought a lovely house on the coast in Malibu in 2024.

23:23Largest El Nino ever now. They're saying they're not giving huge warnings that El Nino is going to be off the fucking chart at this point. Well, El Nino has come early for Nicholas Cage as sinkhole just opened right outside his house. It's like a 30 foot across sinkhole. And if you look at the pictures, here's his house, and then it's like fuck you, Nicholas Cage in particular, there's just a hole in front of your house now. Is it a real sinkhole? It is a sinkhole. It's like his, the street just sank into the ground and melted away. It's not a metaphorical sinkhole where he was just paying for his kids under that bridge education. No, that's why he ended up needing to do a bunch of extra movies in the first place, right? But no, I think what I'm seeing though is we'll put in the linked some articles to this in their photos as well. Thing is, when I say this house is on the coast, it's like largely built over the water, it's like a dock. It's a dock with a house on it. And so coming almost right up to the street.

24:24So what I'm actually seeing is really solid construction on the house because what I think this sinkhole seems like is coastal erosion, except there's a wall in the way of it actually just washing away and now being ocean. So he basically is on a pillar. So he'll be like Celia and he can declare his own nation at the point. He's going to be sovereign. Ooh, that's interesting. Once the actual like LA ground disconnects from you, can you say at that point what I was saying, the last little bit, the last little connection falls away and into the ocean go, now my own country. Now I'm new Luxembourg right now. I think Nicholas Cage could run his own country just slightly off the coast of California. I'd be on board with that. Can you imagine he has to have like a little, a little bridge across the sinkhole and there's got to be customs officer at the other end. He has to like immigrate every day on his way to work. You think Nicholas Cage just looks at his own like reporting of how often people talk about his financial situation go, why me?

25:25Like why, why over and over again with Nicholas Cage, a guy exactly like everyone has stuff. Why do we just talk about me? It seems like his finances are reported on constantly and some disaster he's got. Like with some personal investment he's made or something like that. Well to be fair, this is a motherfucking sinkhole. Make a whole movie about that. Wasn't that whole, the whole premise of that? The unbearable weight of massive talent or whatever it was. Yeah, he had to take the job. Well, so maybe that's part of it, right? Is like maybe he plays into then the conversation about it. Maybe so. If that movie's not tacit permission to discuss, you know, Nicholas Cage finances, I don't know what is. Well, Ashley, who is going to join us today and help filling in the Nicholas Cage sinkhole? Alright, I want to say a big thank you to Nicholas Cage's new round of investors, Cody N. and Eric Jones. Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com slash morning somewhere at roosterteeth.com. Grab your shovels, pals. Alright, that does it for us today. September 10th, 2026. We'll be back tonight tomorrow. We hope you will be here as well. Bye everybody.