Morning Somewhere

HEY, WE'RE RECORDING THE PODCAST. SHUT UP. GOOD morning to you wherever you are because It IS MORNING SOMEWHERE. FOR FEBRUARY 27TH, [music] 2026. My name is Bernie Burns. [music] Sitting right over there, she's got such a rosy view of the future. It's Ashley Burns. Say hi to Ashley, everybody. Look, it's it's all up, right? We're all going up. There was a news story that kept me up last night. There aren't many that keep me up. You know what I mean? Like trying to like think through the ramifications of it and all. And no, it's not Pakistan declaring that they're now in open war with Afghanistan. What? Yeah, Pakistan is like after a series of air strikes uh in recent days, they're now saying what they are in it with uh the conflict is now an open war with Afghanistan, which they're now accusing the Taliban of not focusing on their people and becoming a colony of India, which is not something that was on my radar at all. And obviously there's been a I've very long-standing >> I feel like I've missed a lot. >> Yeah, a series of uh conflicts between Pakistan and India. So, yeah. Yeah, more or less like since Pakistan became Pakistan. >> just another country now saying, "Yeah, we got a war, too. This is our war as well." >> Oh jeez, what a mess. What a mess. And and and here I thought that the whole um Netflix, Paramount, Warner Brothers thing was the big mess. Which by the way, can I just say, Bernie, you called it. Wasn't it what, like 2 days ago you were talking about like how high would the price have to go before Netflix was like, "Uh I don't have it. Like I'm not doing this." But an I don't have it, but I'm fine not having it because you've done enough damage to yourself to get it. >> Hey, hey, hey, good luck. Uh and now uh with the new offer that the Paramount has made for Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers has now declared it uh the superior offer. They gave Netflix 4 days to respond, and like two hours later Netflix responded with like nah. It It would have been nice to have it, but it wasn't like we had to have it. That's what you guys said. >> It like just rub a little salt in Paramount's wounds over there. They were like, "You know, we always thought this would be a nice to have at the right price, but this was never a must-have for us." And meanwhile, [laughter] like Paramount's like fighting for their [ __ ] lives, like leveraging everything they've got to the hilt to try to like get this through. It's absolutely insane. Well, Ashley, I don't want to brag or anything like that, but in my long career in entertainment, I have won several eBay auctions and that [laughter] type. And I You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Have you ever I don't know, do you ever do eBay? You ever done that kind of thing? >> Not really. I should probably do it more, especially as, you know, like virtual antiquing. Um, I should do it more cuz there's a lot of like good antique stuff on on eBay, but no, I mostly leave that to you. I'll like send you a listing. I'll be like, "Babe, these are really cool." There are moments when you're going back and forth with some anonymous person out there, like right as an auction is ending, and you're bidding back and forth, and you get to the line of like, "I'm not going to pay more than this for this thing, right?" You know? And then they they go up a buck. You're like, "I can go up one buck more or whatever." And then you get to the point where they stop bidding, and you're like, "Wait a minute, did I get like Did I do too much here? Like, should I have You almost like You're at a point where there's like 5 minutes left, and you're thinking, "I sure hope they come back and buy this cuz now I don't want it at this price." [laughter] So, I feel like Netflix might have been over stating myself a little bit. I'm just waiting for Apple to come in now and snipe this thing. So, they like show up like 1 second before the auction, and and they go, "33 bucks a share. Boom, done. We got it." >> And And Paramount's like, "Oh, man." Hey, quick tangent here. This story fell completely under my radar, and I felt like it shouldn't have. Did you read that Apple I sent this article to our chat. Apple this month acquired Severance, the show. Yeah. But it was being produced by an outside production company. Obviously, it was showing and distributed on Apple's platform. But then now Apple has made the move to acquire the full rights to the show, and now Apple owns Severance. Yes. Uh I did see that uh when it happened. And it sounds like they've got like really big plans. Like they're there's like get ready for Severance the franchise, right? Uh so, from what I understand, the um the third season of the show is supposed to be filming this summer. They're trying to slightly shorten the gap between seasons. Uh and then with uh with season 4 almost guaranteed to lock, especially because Apple has now just bought it, and they're going to want to get their money's worth, right? Um So, which is interesting to me because I think after the end of season 2, uh based on where the series is at, I was like expecting or like looking forward to like uh potentially even a conclusion with season 3, like a nice strong story arc that like ends when you think it does. Uh and now they might stretch that out a little bit. They're also talking about the possibility of like prequels, spin-offs, or other countries, other I mean, all these kinds of stuff. So, you know, we're looking at Severance now being um uh very different than what it has been so far. >> Right. Right. We were talking yesterday about Game of Thrones, that franchise as well. Prequels have done very well with Game of Thrones, right? So far, they're doing great. >> And I was saying yesterday that George R. R. Martin is he was working on something else, like a new book or something. You know what it was? It was a play. There's now a play that's based on Game of Thrones right before the events of Game of Thrones. And that that's what it is that he's working on. >> stage play. >> Yeah, he's working on a stage play for that. Oh, okay. Well, you know, I get it. Anything to keep busy, right? Clearly, there's a huge appetite for this stuff. The Knight of Seven The Seven Kingdoms, everyone keeps telling us we have to watch this show, and it's like I looked at it, I I it's like six or eight episodes or something. It's like, "Ah, I can do that with you. Let's let's let's watch Let's watch the show." >> Well, one of the major selling points of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is also like one of the stupidest thing that's that's that could be happening on the internet, but is also so typical. Um So, the TV show Breaking Bad it had an episode right towards the end called Ozymandias. It's had >> Incredible episode of television. >> It it it even as like I watched Breaking Bad very casually, um was not like a huge huge fan of the show, but that was an incredible episode of television. Um it's had a like a 10 user rating on IMDb since it aired. It's been like the best episode of television as agreed by everyone since it aired um up until now. Right. Uh there was um an episode that came out of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. >> know anything about the actual episode though. >> know anything about the actual episode, but it's called something like In the Name of the Mother. Um that's the name of the episode. And uh this episode came out and was had absolutely incredible ratings. It was like looking like a 10 on IMDb. And it seems like the Ozymandias stans decided that that they couldn't let this happen and started review bombing this episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Not realizing that that can go both ways. >> Right. >> So, the >> weird. >> I know. So, the Breaking Bad fans and the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms fans are now taking turns review bombing each others favorite episodes. >> Right. And I think we're already at the point now where it's like when people talk about bad reviews or good reviews or whatever, everyone's like now has this language to be like, "Ah, it doesn't matter what the audience does, right?" Cuz stupid stuff like this happens. >> Right, because the audience pulls these stunts. Yeah. But, I think it's worth noting that if you've been on the fence about checking out Knight of the Seven Kingdoms because oh, I don't know, uh Game of Thrones ended kind of like a wet fart and uh the second season >> [laughter] >> of House of the Dragon was a bunch of people like moping around in castles and doing absolutely nothing for an entire season. Um if those put you off, at least like think of Ozymandias. There is an episode of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms that has been considered by fans to be on par with Ozymandias. And that's that like that's the marketing for me. Big deal. You know, you bring this up about the last season of Game of Thrones. A few months ago, I also made the call that I think a big moment for generative AI and a turning point could for it could be if someone like just a fan completely remade season 8 of Game of Thrones. And there was this seed dance video that I was showing to you. It was a fight scene between Agent Smith and Neo from The Matrix. And it looked I mean, it looked like it could have been out of one of the movies. And I showed it to you because the top comment on it was Now do the season 8 of Game of Thrones. Redo season 8 of Game of Thrones. >> hundred upvotes in a very small forum. Yeah, they're all like And everyone like in that was like, "Yeah, this is the generative AI I can get on board with." You know, and so what we really need to do is get that guy who wrote 300,000 word sequel for for the Kingkiller Chronicles. Get Get him on board with it. Just Just [ __ ] the whole thing. >> But with AI, right? He already So like how many nested layers of this is there going to be? >> Of course. >> But back to this Netflix and Warner Brothers thing. It's now it's interesting because they're saying that Netflix is out and that Warner has won. Don't forget they already declared Netflix the winner at one point, too, right? And there was even announcements made by Netflix saying, "We're proud to announce our acquisition of Warner Brothers." >> Right. Um and it's to the point where I believe Warner Brothers is going to have to pay like a breakup fee with Netflix because they'd already made this agreement with Netflix. And so Paramount has agreed to pay Netflix the the breakup amount. It's like $2 billion or something like that. So Netflix is making $2 billion Right. by not buying >> earnest money >> Warner Brothers at this point. >> Yeah, which is a significant portion of what they were offering, right? Cuz they were offering somewhere in the neighborhood of like 75 to 80 billion? Yeah, I think it yeah, somewhere in that neighborhood is what the the total valuation was. And so they're like, well, we're not spending, you know, 75 billion, but we are getting 2 billion, which is So that's nice. And there's a lot of concerns about this. You have concerns cuz I know people at Warner Brothers, there's a lot of overlap between what Paramount does and what Warner Brothers does and like the facilities and business units and everything else that they have. There was I think less with that with Netflix. That overlap creates redundancy, and then of course now they're in a position where it seems like they're leveraged to the gills to get this deal done. So I would expect major cuts. >> Yeah, in fact, that was one of Netflix's major defenses of their deal initially was arguing that the Netflix business and the Warner Brothers business have historically been so different that they don't have a lot of overlap in the way their business is function. But that with with Paramount and Warner Brothers, that's two of the like big five legacy studios merging that have so many parallels, you can expect enormous cuts in in staffing and everything across the board as those two companies merge for efficiency. Right. And so their their big argument was, well, we'll be keeping all the businesses running as per usual. They're going to cut everything that they can. Especially now that it's gotten so much more expensive for them, right? Is they'll they'll be even more incentivized to do that. But everyone was like, no, the theater experience. And so, you know, >> Just sell a few shows to Apple, you know, they >> [laughter] >> they seem to be in buy high mode at the moment. >> Maybe, we'll see. We'll see. I mean, they acquired severance for what, 70 something million dollars? And Bernie, we don't deal in M's anymore. Well, it's interesting that's 70 million for the acquisition of it when it's 20 million dollars per episode, right? You know, it's like, yeah. I mean, the valuation is not what your outflow is or anything, but it's still at the same time just interesting those two numbers go hand-in-hand. The other thing that's interesting to me, too, is like Netflix made about 2 billion on the 75 billion that they were offering, which they didn't even have to come up with. You know, that's in like the 3 to 4% range right there. The shift in the overall deal from 30% to 31%. That was about a 3% increase, and that was what killed the whole Netflix deal. When Paramount went from $30 per share to $31 per share. It's just interesting cuz that that number just seems to be like keep coming up over and over again, you know, that 3%. What's interesting, and this is the story that I was trying to think through the ramifications of last night. I don't know if this company is on many people's radar, but Jack Dorsey uh >> He's the guy who made Twitter, right? >> who made Twitter. By the way, before we get too far away from it, trivia question. Little trivia, here's your trivia for the day. Who directed the Breaking Bad episode entitled Ozymandias? >> Ben Stiller. No. [laughter] No. Rian Johnson. Really? >> Yeah. I think it was I think it was the last thing that he directed before he directed Last Jedi. Wow. >> went on to the onion series, whatever it's called, the Knives Out series. Oh, yeah, the the Glass Onion or whatever it's Yeah, it's it's Knives It's like Knives Out, a Glass Onion movie. I don't know at this point. You You know what I'm talking about. >> knowledge is clearly very narrow. >> [laughter] >> But uh Jack Dorsey, who is uh famous for being a co-founder of Twitter, uh founder of Square, and founder of now Blue Sky. Even though he's like a 3% owner, about a little under, of uh Twitter, of X, he still held He just rolled his uh ownership into Elon Musk's private company. >> a like a minor stake. Yeah. Three uh like 2.5% I think is the actual number. But uh Square is a payment processing service essentially. Like if you've ever been to a convention before and you see like a person who's got a booth selling t-shirts and they have a little terminal and they have or they can do it on their iPhone, you probably have interacted with Square in that regard. That's probably >> a restaurant. Food truck. You know, something like that, you know? So, Square made a big decision yesterday. Jack Dorsey made a decision. It's he put out a letter that said it's all on him and he made the decision where they reduced laid off 40% of their approximately 10,000 employees. They went down by almost half. >> That's a huge percentage. It's enormous. >> 40% is a big cut. It is enormous and it's interesting just in the, you know, connected tissue here between uh Jack Dorsey and Twitter. Like when Elon Musk famously uh reduced staff by 50% and that was seen as crazy. Like can a CEO even do something like that? But he laid off 40%. What is remarkable about this particular layoff is that he was very open and transparent about why he did it. He even said in his letter to the company that the company is not performing poorly. Uh gross profitability is doing very well. Overall profitability is doing uh much better all the time. The company has a great trajectory. It's doing well. But he laid off 40% of the staff because of the intelligence tools that they've started to use internally and how they reward flatter smaller teams, meaning like AI tools and technology and everything that they're doing today. The striking thing about this was then the market hasn't opened in the in the US. Uh you know, we're in the UK time zone. And after I was trading, the stock price for Block is the overall name of the company. Block soared by about 25%. Man, you know what though, the stock market loves a good layoff. This is insane though, because that is an incredible increase in valuation. We just talked about how 3% of the change of the offer the for the valuation killed the entire Netflix deal, which is what everyone was talking about. Here is something now that everybody across every industry is looking at like the market cap for this company just went up 25% in like an hour and a half because they laid off 40%, over 4,000 people. And then that within hours they they soared by 25%. Everyone's going to be looking at that. >> Here's the thing though, is like let's say every company cuts 40% of people. They're like, we we don't need we only need 60% of people to get the same amount of work done, right? The problem is where do all those people go? If every company is laying off 40% of their people, where do those 40% go? Right? And if they then have to like if they're having trouble finding new jobs, etc., have to, you know, tighten the belt, cut the budget, not do things. If you have a consumer-facing company, which like Square is like the middleman for consumer-facing companies with like like restaurants, conventions, food trucks, all that stuff. Like any sort of on-the-go payment processing. If people don't have the money for paying for stuff, like so they're they're cutting back like all those luxuries, like those cuz a lot of those like small places that you would spend with Square, um tend to be like nice-to-haves, not must-haves, right? Like you know, while we're talking Netflix's mindset. And so those would be some of the first things that you would cut back on, right? And you're going to have to focus on like groceries and rent and utilities and that's about it. Your fun money is now gone and you're going to be just struggling to make ends meet with the basics and none of those basics are using square. What you're talking about is you're talking about who is tending the garden. No one is tending the garden. No one is tending No one is tending the garden. >> their plant and no one is tending the garden actually. No one's concerned about that. Do you think Do you think normally that would be the government and that's what regulations do and things like that. There's none of that going on. There's none of that going on. >> No. It It seems like there there's no looking at the the garden at all happening. >> Another way to put it was I had a knew a guy who worked in the video game industry and he was it was he was exiting and it was not fun. And he said that the company was really good and he had a golden goose situation with the developers and they he said that the company's really good about taking care of the eggs. And not really good about taking care of the goose, right? And classic fable. But then he like refers to himself as the goose in that situation, you know? >> But it's like it is this. It's like it If people are worried about their plant, they're not worried about the garden overall. >> Well, I mean and this this >> people feel like the garden will sort itself out, you know? >> I guess so. >> market will will just It'll figure it out and it'll be great. We just want to make sure we're there when it does. I guess so, but this this letter is so weird too cuz he's talking like If this is the letter that he's sending to employees saying things like we're doing better than ever, we're just getting rid of you because we can, it's like a weird note to send to the to the employees you're laying off, right? >> This is the third paragraph in it. He says we're not making this decision This is from his letter to the company. We're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow. We continue to serve more and more customers and profitability is improving, but something has changed. We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with a smaller and flatter team are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company and that is accelerating rapidly. But the short version of that is that the short version of that is the company's doing great. It's doing better than ever. We don't have to get rid of you because we're struggling. We're just choosing to. And I think what he's saying is that other companies are going to make these cuts to come and the and the stock market has greatly rewarded him and I I would I would assume, this is a big assumption, but fairly easy one to make, that he is more greatly rewarded by anything that the stock market does to the valuation of his company than he is by like any incentive within the company itself on based on salary or performance or something like that. Sure. I would guess that. And there's a lot of other people in a lot of other companies who are in that exact same position and they see something like this and a 25% increase one day in a in a well-established company like Block at this point, it's it it's something that a lot of people are going to be paying attention to. He let me just I think this one is compelling to read as well. He said, "I had two options, cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter." "Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale." I think that's true. "To focus and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. I'd rather take a hard clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. A smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way on our own terms instead of constantly reacting to market pressures." I just think it's really interesting and I'm I'm I'm I'm concerned about the garden and I think you are as well, you know? And I think also it's like you we're seeing people there seems to be this big push back from most people against these AI tools and at the end of the day I don't know how much that push is affecting anyone at all except the people who are engaging in the push. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like they're holding themselves back from these tools and it they're still going to be affected by all this stuff anyway. >> Yeah, the the people who don't care don't care. Uh and unfortunately a lot of the people that don't care um are making a lot of the big decisions. >> I don't think you're going to see a lot of small businesses, you know, working at like the farmers market turning off their Square payment processing service in protest of this. You know what I mean? It's just it's too hard of a decision for a small business to make. So it's uh it's just uh it's interesting times. So like to relate it to this podcast is we don't put ads on this podcast, right? I was thinking about this last night. We don't put ads on this podcast. That's a choice we made. But I think I said in one of the early podcasts, I would never I'm not saying this to say like you shouldn't put ads on your stuff. If you have something that's out there, monetize the [ __ ] out of it. Make money from it. We're in a position where we can choose not to do that. At the same time, I fully recognize we're we're fighting a battle that is long since lost, right? The day that's a that's such an old-school internet discussion of whether or not content should have ads on it. Like that that was 1999. >> ship has sailed. >> 2002. It was a big deal when we started in 2003, but it's it's important to me. And so I'm in a position where I can do it, but at the same time I wouldn't hold anybody else to that same standard. And I think we're in that same thing, too. It's like a lot of people are really fighting this battle. And it's just I would I would have just talked to them about reevaluating like how much they're leaving on the table themselves. I'm not encouraging anyone to do it, but also be honest with it. It's like I would hate to for people to feel like they have to fight some kind of moral battle that's already left the battlefield, you know? Right. It's more like um if you don't want to use AI, don't use AI because you don't want to use AI. I don't know how much individual measures at this point are going to um make the companies reevaluate their direction. And I'm just I'm the perspective of the axe Which is like I feel like such a cynical take, but I that's kind of how I'm feeling today. Maybe I'll feel different on Monday. Yeah, well this is kind of a tough thing [clears throat] because you see like someone making a decision to cut half half just about half of the employees in their company. It's even here too. I'll read you what he said to those employees in particular. But watching them do that and then watching the the overall investment market reward that in such a huge fashion, dramatic fashion. It's crazy. What he said was first off, if you're one of the people affected you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week per year of tenure. So somebody who worked there for 10 years will get 30 weeks of severance. Six months of health care, your corporate devices and $5,000 to put towards whatever you need to help you in this transition. I'm pretty sure it's a San Francisco based company. So $5,000 is going to get you like a hoagie that you're going to pay for with Square. What was your relocation fee to move to San Francisco? Wasn't that 10 grand that they gave you? Um to those of you leaving I'm grateful for you and I'm sorry to put you through this. You built what this company is today. That's a fact that I'll honor forever. I think or at least until the severance runs out or pay the mortgage with the honor. Uh take honor payments. This decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. You will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. What I hope could come from this is him talking about like the slow bleed, you know, versus the all at once like rip the band-aid off is maybe this will become a canary in the mine shaft to a lot of people on a like mass level. I just don't know that people have the energy or the focus left to concentrate on anything at this point in time. But maybe this will be kind of thing of like this is clearly, I think, clearly going to happen again and again. Like we're going to watch this play out so many times in the next year or two years. It's going to be a bloodbath. It's going to be a bloodbath. And unless people do something dramatic quickly, I don't know what we can do to stop it. Well, and the the trick is it's it can't be just like It has to be a lot of people doing something dramatically in concert. And that's really difficult. >> And even if you're okay, you're going to have you're going to have a lot of people in your life who aren't okay and are going to need help with that. And I just The garden is Yeah, the garden needs a gardener. Yeah. >> [laughter] >> Now hiring gardeners. Maybe maybe this is why Apple bought Severance so they can make sure everyone has Severance. Right. They can have Now you'll get three seasons of Severance where some [laughter] people only get 30 weeks. They get 20 weeks plus one year of service. God, crazy times. Really crazy times. >> Crazy times. But shepherding us through those crazy times are Zachary Dickens and Sunshine 770. Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/morningsomewhere and roosterteeth.com. >> like we should have had a lighthearted thing at the end there, but this is just It's just It It's interesting too that he did this on a Thursday and not on a Friday after [music] hours like some other things we've talked about. >> That's true. Well, you know what? I guess if you need a pick-me-up, apparently watch Night of the Seven Kingdoms. There you go. And you can watch what Depending on what time of day you watch it, it'll be the highest-rated episode of television >> [laughter] >> ever in history. All right, everybody. That does it for us today, February 27th, 2026. We will be back talking to you Monday. We hope you will be here [music] as well. Bye, everybody.