2026.09.16: What About Second Invention?

0:00Oh, that's nasty. Hey, we're recording the podcast. Cut up. Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is... Morning, somewhere! For September 16th, 2086, my name is... ...Birdy Bird, sitting right over there. She realizes sometimes a wind is not a wind. It's Ashley Bird, saying I didn't have everything. I feel like I know what this is in reference to. I'm going to have trouble getting through. This is going to be a rock, for a segment every minute. It's okay. I will do what I can, because I know what your gag reflex is like. After yesterday's rage quit episode. One of the big news items going around is that there's an Australian athlete who recently competed in a high-rocks event, which is like... Can I ask why I'm on the verge of gagging already? Okay, go ahead. What is the goddamn difference between high rocks and crossfit?

1:01Is high rocks a version of crossfit that's tougher than crossfit? Well, I think crossfit is its own really specific thing. We're like flipping over tires and shit. High rocks is like you'll do a race, but then in segments of the race, you stop and you do a workout or something. There's always rules as to what you can and can't do. People are mad that they can't pour water over their head during a high-rocks competition or the can. They have a rule about that. This is the meme based on this thing that's come up. High rocks is an indoor fitness competition that combines eight kilometers of running and eight functional workout stations. Contestants alternate between running and those functional exercises. Sorry, so it's like a big way. It's like sled push or pull. Farmers carry. Farmers carry. Rohinge, farmers carry it and so on. You do run a kilometer and then you do one of these exercises and then you run a kilometer to another exercise. I'm not making it if you just say this. You're going to be okay. But if you're having breakfast, maybe just fast forward like five minutes.

2:06They just had one of these high-rocks competitions in China and Australian athlete is in hot water with everyone because she continued. She suffered a bowel and continents. So she shit herself. She shit herself. And then continued the race. I've actually seen this happen with things like marathons before where people will they'll be running and they will evacuate their bowels and then they will continue running and finish the race. What makes this a little bit different is that because of the exercises, then she was using the exercise equipment. She's using the exercise equipment and then like leaving shit all over it. Stop, stop, stop, stop. Okay, okay. Anyway, so you get the picture. You get the picture. It's really gross. Anyway, the good news, Bernie, you'll be happy to hear that high-rocks is considering

3:07new rules after this event. Oh, good. They, she ended up winning the women's competition, which I guess you go girl, but also. Come on, come on. That's something's wrong with a person who does that. And other people around them, allowing them to do that. That's part of the problem is that no one had precedent for this. So the officials were like, do we stop this? Can you penalize this person? But there was like nothing in the rule books being like, here's what you do when someone shits all over your family. Oh, God. And then people might say, Bernie, you don't understand what it's like to compete at that level. Like if you're like a high level, I don't. Well, you know, when you need to sometimes crap your pants, like if you're a high-rocks athlete or a cross-fitter or a marathon or a president of the United States, you don't understand Bernie what it's like to go through that. Good. I don't, you shouldn't. There should be some things that are just like, hey, we're going to stop this right now. It's just not good for anybody.

4:07Oh my God. Do you think they could like even introduce a rule that I would take this from Marathon to things as well? We're like, if you need to stop at the Port-A-Potty, stop your clock. I guess, but then people would abuse it or whatever, right? Maybe, maybe, but like I'll grant you or maybe you get like a two minute time credit if you need to like take a dump. That way you don't have like feces all over the place. And apparently this is like the high-rocks news week. When am I not going to be saying that correctly? I assume it's high-rocks, HYROX. Apparently, they bought back controllers or company for $700 million valuation. That's in the news as well as for a business thing. Yeah, there's a lot of criteria. Hyros has reclaimed majority control of its fitness racing brand after its co-founders, bought back a majority stake from in front sports and media. I bet in front sports and media is like, good week. Have a good day, guys. Just have a great time. The deal valued at approximately 600 million euros or around $700 million was completed September 2026, September 8th.

5:09Yeah, but for, yeah, the valuation could have dropped a lot further. It could have been some marketing stuff. Who knows, but goddamn, I had to, I saw the Instagram or one of the social media accounts for HYROX, the official one. Boy, they were threading a needle with their official statement about this. They were saying things like, we admire our athletes for pushing themselves. They're pushing themselves to their limits and stuff like that. And they were like trying to like honor the mentally unstable people that must participate in the shit and enabling them while still saying it's like, well, there's lines and things like that. But they didn't say what the line was or what side of the line they're going to fall on. I have a suggestion for where we put that line. And it's just ahead of, yes, please keep going with like shit all over. Right, right. Just shy of that, right? In looking at this too, the person who literally got feces all over the equipment, they ended up winning. The other people didn't compete at their house.

6:10What a surprise. Do you think they get a trophy? What a fucking surprise. What do they do to they just like have like, you know, people like come out with a cloth and a bunch of like antibacterial spray to like clean the equipment down? I bet my kettlebell time would be off or whatever the fuck they're doing. You know what I mean? If that was like having to figure out how to grip it without touching, not only that, but think about this, right? No, you know what? I'm not going into it. Let's get the hell out. All right. All right. All right. All right. Let's, let's roll with people. Just work out for fuck's sake. And what are we doing? I respect fitness, but let's. Let's fix sports for a second here. Okay. Right? Let's let's keep it on the right side of the line. There seems to be a problem with people are in these endurance events specifically, right? Like the free soloist, those are the absolute lunatics of the sports world. The people who climb up the side of a mountain, right, with no gear whatsoever. Right. You see the pictures of them like sleeping on like a like on a hammock that's just suspended from a cliff? No, they don't have that shit. Ashley, they go up in one go because they literally don't have anything to put them

7:11to the mountain. Oh, right. The free climbers. That's right. Yes. Right. The free solo people who just have basically a bag of chalk and them. Apparently no will to live. That's okay though. Like their lunatics, we all recognize that that seems like a really self-contained problem. Right? Mostly. No one's coming up behind them if you know what I mean. That eventually will solve itself based on just your probability. That'll be fine. These other people though, they're doing these races where they like you can climb over fence. That's okay. You can run up a little hill. That's okay. They'll, they'll, they'll, when they go through the bog and they're like in the electrical wires and she like, oh, you're talking about like the tough mutters. Yeah. That's too, you guys it's too much. It's like, I know you think it makes you look cool. Does the opposite. It's what, don't do that stuff anymore. Just run, just, just go run. That's fun. That's fun. God need the hills. He made them hard enough. Don't put the fucking electrical wires or whatever. The higher off thing is to do it. God. That's God telling you to cut it out. Just slow down nature like, stop. Just, you know what? Take it easy. Oh my God. Take it easy.

8:11Play a little PlayStation. Oh, okay. I'm good. I'm good. By the way, people were asking about this problem I'm having on time zones, but the app actually is on desktop calendar. Yes. So I'm specifically on the iOS Google Calendar app. That's what I'm using. Yes. So the test we ran yesterday, why I was making an appointment, I was making it via the web application. It's a ratio. Is what it is. They're racing American type. And I can't even go to the dealer's and we'll just like sort through and go like negative six GMT or whatever, like sort through it. It doesn't show me in order. It just shows me random shit and tells me to type in something and we'll look at by cities. I don't care anymore. I'm just going to do the math in my head. You moved on to something else to be mad about. Six hour math or eight hour math in my head, whatever. I don't give a shit. Except for two weeks of the year, what it's seven. I'm going to set this appointment for eight AM London time except we've got, we actually have the end of daylight savings time coming up and that's going to, that's always hell on us. So thank you for your help, but no, I'm going to go.

9:11I'm going to go to the government. What else is going on in the world actually? What are we talking about today? Let's see, PlayStation. Remember the, the, I remember them recently about the PlayStation blackout where people were going to not play for like a week. They weren't going to do anything with their PlayStation. That didn't work. It didn't work. According to Matt Piscatela who's a long time analyst of the industry, it made absolutely, I had no impact whatsoever on their, you like user base on play time, on number of active users, on really anything. You said, he said specifically, quote, there was no significant change at all in player account or engagement in our tracking. If consumer behavior doesn't change and people really don't care, right, they really just genuinely don't care. They're mad that they can make comments places, but if consumer behavior doesn't change, nothing's going to change on the industry side at all. Yeah, like, like, ultimately, I mean comment is just that, right? And I mean comment is not money in their account or not. Right. Spez, the leader executive, I don't know what his actual title is at Reddit was basically

10:16just like, yeah, he's got the thing where he literally says the quiet part out loud, which is like, yeah, people can metal the time. Doesn't make a difference whatsoever. Yeah, he's like, you know what, if they're, if they're still doing the thing, then even if they're mad, they're still doing the thing. And if a guy who runs Reddit says that about Reddit, then what do you think everyone else says about Reddit? Honestly, what do they, I mean, everyone else is just like, it's like, yeah, don't take it seriously. You're just yelling into the void at that point, right? Yeah. I'm not trying to be emotional and they get upset about it. I'm not trying to be critical. I'm just saying like, just trying to save people from wasting their emotions on something like that. I think one of the other things too is when you have something where you're like, all right, for this one week, we're not going to do it. But if it doesn't have like a lot of like actual like critical momentum building and it's only for a week. So it has an end date, then it's not probably going to move the needle because they're going to be like, oh no, all right. See you next week, I guess. Yeah. So the thing is that there is a big revival in physical media. We've talked a lot about it on this podcast and we're seeing it in music like CDs are coming back and people are buying those things as well. So the consumer behavior is changing in that regard where the options are available.

11:19But the thing with the PlayStation is that there will be no discs created for any games on their platform period, not like a small indie developer who can like make a, there's like print their own discs. What would happen even, what would they do with it even, you know, for future, it iterations of the console when there's no place to put that disc right? Right. Just just won't work. Although now you mentioned physical media. I took myself on a thought exercise the other day, which is so Finn has this playlist on Spotify. We call it Finn's favorites. He loves it anytime. He hears a song he likes. He goes, can you add it to my playlist? So he's got this really long playlist of songs that he likes and it's very eclectic. It's like, it's like dubstep and Taylor Swift and and Chapel Rowan and and all like I don't know, Barnes Courtney and all kinds of like different types of music. And and I got thinking about it. And I was like, I want to have some way for him to like play music because he's not at the age yet where, you know, I remember when I was young, I would take like a cassette

12:20tape and I would record something on the radio so that then I can make my own mix tapes, right? And then I could play them back whenever I wanted. I was like, I would like him to be able to play music whenever he wants, but I'm not going to get him a smartphone so that he can listen to Spotify. So I thought, well, we've been doing a lot of this physical media thing. So for doing like CDs or buying individual tracks and backing them up to our server or something, maybe I could have some way to then just like, you know, give, make a machine that has like just music for him that he could plug headphones into and Bernie, I reinvented the MP3 play. I was like, gosh, but say you see, it's like you're meeting his towards an MP3. Yeah, I've done that. Can I introduce you to the iPod? I've done that before. I pitched a project one time at the student television station that I worked at where I was like, you know, we could do, we could do like a stop motion animation, but with live action and with people where like you just pose people and then you take a photo and then you do a new pose and everyone does you get performers. Right. And they just like slightly move between each photo between each photo and then you put

13:23them all together in editing and then you have like stop motion animation, but with live action people and they're like, dude, you just invented film. All that is. We can go out and get a film camera right now. Let's do it. And you know what? Let's just have the move at regular speed and we'll take the pictures really fast. And I could have, you know, we went to the artistic integrity of my idea, but I was like, oh yeah, that's exactly what I did. But you were saying that so this is an interesting thing. Somebody just turned me on to this thing called a side phone. I can't endorse this product because I don't know anything about it. But it's a pretty cool idea. It's one of these modular phones. But it's like most of the modular phones, they almost look like like Legos that you're plugging together or something like this. This is, I'll show you this phone right here, right? It's like a little slab phone. Okay. And it's got a keyboard at the bottom, a number pad. But then what is, you can take the number pad part of it off and you can put on the, it's almost like different face plates that give you a different function. No, I'm, I've just pulled it up and it's interesting. I've actually got like one of the bits that you can put on the front, I guess, like one

14:24of the slabs that you can replace the keypad with is almost like the dial, like an iPod dial. The wheel, yeah. And there's one that's more like a keyboard. Yep. And so you just like, let me think of that. Like pull them off and put them on as you need. No, that's an interesting idea because then if we just had it like Wi-Fi only so that it, you know, isn't, it isn't just like a regular phone. And maybe that's the, maybe that's a modern solution to our problem. The interesting thing about it to me is that it's $299 US. Okay. Which is like, you know, for, we were just talking about smartphones being whatever, 1,300 bucks or whatever for the most recent Apple phones, you know, the slab phones. There are alternatives out there, right? Works on T-Mobile. A side phone requires a physical SIM card. That's kind of interesting unto itself. Designed storage is a 64 gigabytes, not including the OS. I wonder what that means. Does that mean the OS? Does that mean some of it's going to be taken away for the OS or?

15:26Or does it have a separate hard drive for the OS? Right. It's got a separate little chip and it's just on there or something. The OS is on that. I don't know. Okay. But they can go to sidephone.com to check out all the specs on this device if you're interested in something like that. Anyway, I thought it was a cheek. One of the ones like this, one of the face plates you can get is like, looks like an NES D-pad. Oh, that's a cool thing. For it as well. I guess if you want to play games on there as well. The little face plates, this one at least is the classic keypad, the Sundial dial, which looks like the old iPod dial. It's called a Sundial? That's what they called it. I'm sure they can't call it iPod-style dial. And then the mini controller keypad, which looks like an NES-style D-pad, those are all 29 bucks each. So for the different functionality. I think the wheel for the iPod actually wasn't originally an Apple idea. Wasn't it something like Xerox? I'm going to see if I can look this up. Xerox. Yeah. They used to Xerox labs and bell labs had a lot of stuff they made and then just like gave

16:28to the rest of the world that people appropriated. I think you might be thinking about like the mouse. Oh, it was. Well, you know, the iPod wheel, the mouse. Yeah, you know, controls by Apple and things like that. Like one of the things that came out of those labs was Ethernet, just like, oh, we'll just give this to the rest of the world. Right. Well, and on the one hand, I get it because you're like the more of the world that has Ethernet, the better this ends up for us. Well, sure. Yeah. If everyone gets more connected, then Xerox will definitely take off for IBM. We'll dominate. We'll get there. Wasn't, but then you also get some companies that will fall behind because they don't do new stuff. Like, what was the, where you grew up in Rochester is, was that Kodak? Kodak is Xerox. Kodak is Xerox. Okay. Those were two of the major companies in Rochester, New York. And didn't Kodak refuse to do digital cameras for a really long time? They had a digital camera. And they were like, this is not the way things should be done. So we're not going to do it.

17:28And then Kodak is not known for cameras. Well, it is tough when something comes across your desk and you're like, this is cool, but it also affects literally the entire rest of our business, right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So I can understand why they wouldn't do something like that. But if you think about two like, with the rise of the digital age, what two companies could be more in the crosshairs of being affected by that, then Kodak who makes film cameras and Xerox who makes copiers break. Like those two companies would be greatly affected by the digital revolution. And they were. They were greatly affected by it. All right. But apparently the click wheel was invented by a Japanese inventor. This is back in like, you know, decades ago, Apple had to pay him $3.3 million for patent violations. No. So they didn't buy the idea from him. They violated his patent and had to pay him. Yeah. That's classic. Yeah. Classic. Price to do business. What do they want to cost for them to license it from them?

18:28Like, if they just like bought it, bought the patent from him outright. I don't know. It's hard for me to do calculations in like 2000. Hold on. He got the patent in 1998. They violated the patent in 2004 with the release of the click wheel. So what would that be in like $2,000? $3.3 was a lot of million. A lot of millions in 2004. I was an expensive thing for Apple to get out the door. It was also a big swing for them, right? Because it was such a new thing. And at the time, I was like, what, like, what are you talking about? You guys make computers and silly colors. It violated one of the core agreements of that company because Apple Computer was once sued by a company called Apple Music or Apple Records. That's the Beatles label that they started. And I think the settlement they reached is that Apple would never go into the music business anyway. So we can't possibly. So about that. Yeah. And then when they started literally Apple Music in the iPod, they had to pay a bunch of

19:30money to Apple Records. I think I don't know how that worked out. You know, between Apple and the Beatles, I don't care who got money and who didn't. Right. Like I think they all got money. I think yes. I think you can even tell at this point, it's like one little rounding error that would change all of our lives. Yeah. I think they worked out just fine. And elsewhere in video game stuff is we now have a price for the steam frame. So Valve's new VR endeavor. Are you have you been following that? Are you interested in that at all? No, did they discontinue the Vive? I don't know if they discontinued it per se. They are doing a new swing at it. So perhaps this one is I believe standalone one of the things with the Vive. I remember it says you had one of the you had like the original Vive and it had the what they call them the lighthouses where you had to set a tower up in each corner of the room. And they were fucking weird too. Like they had gyroscopes in them that when they were on, you weren't supposed to move them or bump them. And there's one thing we know about VR gameplay. You bump into shit. You bump stuff because you can't see the stuff. Yeah.

20:30And you had to set up these like we had the giant tripods to set up and then I got the meta quest which was just scan the room probably sent all the data to Facebook but whatever. Didn't need any lighthouses or whatever they were called. The LG's like we're like fuck you LG and we're like, Hey, Meta do you want to see the inside of my house? But I just hope those like companies go to war with each other like it scans a room finds an LG TV and then disable it. Sends like some kind of tone that we can't hear to the microphone that's been untrusted. You turn on your VR headset and every like non-meta electronic in the house just blows. You have this corporate warfare going on in your TV room. Man, this is really inconvenient. But after I got the, yeah, the meta quest, honestly, I never look back. I can even acknowledge that the vibe is probably a superior experience. But the meta quest is easy and I'm not just like going to dedicate my living room to my VR environment. It's something I need to be able to put away and take out when I want to. Well, the good news is that the frame does that. It is more standalone.

21:30I think it can do streaming from your PC, wireless streaming from your PC to the headset so you don't have to set up as much stuff. And it's made so that it can do its own detections. But the price is going to be a sticking point. How much did you pay for your quest? Do you have any idea? I'm going to say like $6.4, $50 to $500. But by bought a year ago, who knows what the fuck it cost? That's true. The steam frame is coming in at $1,060. That sounds like vibe territory to me, man. But that might be, let me look up really quickly on Amazon. What you can buy a quest for? Yeah, if you can even get a quest, how much does that cost for a package to be? Yeah, so it is, I think, higher than people were hoping it was going to be, but not necessarily higher than people expected it to be based on the price of where the steam machine, for example, ended up pricing out because of all of the memory shortages that we've been talking about, agnasium. The MetaQuest 3 512 gigabytes is currently available for $599.

22:33So that does make this steam frame a tougher sell when you can be like, what does this do that this other one doesn't do for half the price? Could you be a bigger part of the problem if you buy a MetaQuest on Amazon? How many megacorps can I pay today? And I got a delivered via Uber to my Airbnb. And I calculated all of that with my chat GPT account, Jesus. Yeah, that would be, ultimately, be part of the problem. You can't complain about everything, but you're buying Meta products on Amazon. Well, let's just line up things to complain about. I'm sure we'll find something on Amazon. You can do it. But, Spes, won't listen to you. It's going to take all the time. It's just a mean comment. All right, Ashley. Well, who is participating in our boycott of high-rocks events going forward for the rest of time? All right. I want to say a shout out to our clean athletes, Cameron Van Gogh, and Jacob Toreau. Thank you so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com, slash morning somewhere, and ruchitute.com.

23:34Totally different meaning. All right. Well, that does it for us today. September 16th, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow. We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.