2026.08.17: Omega Level Everything

I'm gonna break my monitor, I swear! Hey! We're recording the podcast! Are you ready to rage? Shut up! Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is. Morning somewhere!. 4 August 17th, 2026! My name is Ernie Burns. Nailed the timing on that one. Who always nails the timing? It's Ashley Burns, that's who. Say hi to Ashley, everybody. It's because I studied this professionally. Yeah, you, uh. I think you might be the cool person in this relationship. I'm cluing into that on a regular basis. Wait, what? Why? I think people would rather hang out with you than me. Why do you say that? Because people tell me that. When do they tell you these mean things? Well, no, no, no. They don't tell me that exactly. But they do ask about you a lot. Like, when we're in a group, and you're. We've discussed this before. You're a social batteries go down person. I'm a social batteries go up person. So one is like. One turns into, if I may. You're like, a little bit, as the night goes on, you like, disengage. And then people tend to want to, like, re-engage or please that person. So what you're saying is that I'm treating them mean and keeping them keen. I leave them wanting more? Yes, I don't. I leave them like, oh, that should have stopped like two hours ago. That's how I leave them. Could you just, like, back off a little bit, sir? Right, right. Like, even when my university buddies were here. Previous week, they were just like, where's Ashley? Where's Ashley? I'm like, hey, let's just let. Forget about Ashley. She's anywhere but here. I haven't seen you in, like, six months. Can we focus on me and you? Not on this Ashley I'm hearing so much about. How are you doing? No, I'm good. I'm good. I had a great night of sleep. I'm second-guessing all of my life choices. You know, I might have gone to university if I could get one of these newfangled degrees they're offering. This is the dumbest thing ever. It's fantastic, though. So. There is a university now officially offering a degree in influencer. Hey, just so you know, listening out there, you don't have to engage with this. You can just turn off this podcast right now and go about your week and not know about shit like that there's an influencer degree at the collegiate level in the United States. But if you turn off now, how are you going to know what they announced at D23? How are you going to know how many hours it's going to take you to watch all the Marvel stuff to get cut off for Doomsday? Here's how you'll know. There's about a thousand degreed influencers. They're about to hit the fucking market. They're going to tell you all those things. A degree in influencer. Does it have a more formal name like the Master of the Modern Media Arts or something like that? Yes. They are offering a bachelor's degree in content creation. That's fucking worse. That's so much worse. Go back to influencer. Oh, my God. So this is Arizona State University. They've recently launched this. This new bachelor's degree for content creation. So you can major in influencer. And I don't know. The thing is, I'm actually not against a degree like this because it's not the first time something is like that happened. Like having a degree in social media management. Like that's a thing that I think some universities started offering when companies were like, oh, my God, get me a teenager who can understand Twitter. Right. Like make me the next Burger King. Oh, no, no. How's it going to help? Let me back that up. Make me the next Wendy's. We all want to be Wendy's. Right. We all want to have the snarky brand account on Twitter. That was a real era. It was. It was. And then like everything else on Twitter, the era ended. Right. Right. And now it's like whatever it is now. But there was an actual professional demand for people who specialize in that thing. Now, and one of the interesting things about influencers is it's, I think it's replaced like movie star and astronaut and firefighter. Right. Right. Right. Like the thing that kids aspire to be right now, they aspire to be influencers. And this is maybe kind of offering them a way to, in a professional way, pursue that path. I don't know what they're teaching them. So from your perspective, you're saying that this is a modern aspiration that people have for a career. So it would make sense for a university to offer this as a career path to train people to go into. Yes. However. Can I take a more cynical view on it? Please do. Fucking horseshit the whole way down. The whole way down. It is bullshit universities trying to find a way to milk people. They can't have offer a real curriculum here in this. What the fuck are they going to train them on? That's the thing, right? That's the big however is like, what are you going to teach them? And influencer isn't like you're going to, you know, go out and get a job with Colgate, you know, being like the Colgate influencer. That's not like you're not going to fill out a job application being like I majored in this. At best, they'll teach you. How to use the platforms, you know, how to, uh, you know, they're going to best practices for audience engagement and retention and growth and how to work with brand partnerships. That's like the best case scenario, right? If they're, if they're really reaching for the stars, um, money management and like, like what to do when you start making money on social media, I, that might be a little bit too, uh, too ambitious for this program. I don't know. All the truly valuable, hard stuff you could learn in a business school, like sales, right? And management and things like that. And even like personal finance, like you're talking about. That's all. So what's the influencer part of it? What's selfie one-on-one or something, you know? Yeah, I don't know. Because there's, there's so many types of influencers. You can't really teach like one specific kind of content creation, right? Um, so I wonder if they would spend time like studying like different, different sorts, uh, and saying like, you can model yourself. After this, you can model yourself after this. You can model your stuff after this. I, once again, I don't know. Is Arizona state like a university that you would trust for this sort of thing? I would trust that they would make that degree. It's got a reputation as being kind of a party school. That's where Scatabo is from. Remember Scatabo? Yeah, he's from, uh, ASU, but, uh, Sun Devils, uh, the, uh. So, so is this why you're against this as you actually just don't like their college football program or what? No, no, no. I don't care what university is the university of Texas. It was offering this. I'd say this is bullshit. They're trying to milk like money. I don't think they're providing any value and they're going to charge a shitload of people. University is already a massively declining value, right? Let's be honest. And so now there's an entire generation that got basically who feel they got tricked into going to university. And then the university degrees that they paid so much for and studied so hard for have not guaranteed them the, um, the job security and career future that they were feel they were promised. Right. People at that age were trapped into feeling that they had to go, right? It was became almost mandatory to go to higher education and go get a bachelor's degree. And now it's like one of the few avenues they have to not go into university and carve their own path would be this stuff. It's not like an offer a degree. What do you, what do you, you get the diploma? First of all, how would you like to go to college for five years, study mechanical engineering, and then you're at your graduation ceremony. Like walking across the stage behind the guy who majored in content creation. Or like you go to Washington. Watch all the, the influencer department from the college of communications, like go across the stage. That would take like 45 hours, you know, just from all the stop and get the right photo and everything. Goddamn. What a nightmare. But when they get their degree, right. And they have their degree in content creation or influencing or whatever you want to call it. What do they do with it? Where do they go? That's, that's a, that's a real trick, isn't it? Like that's a big catch is that, uh, having been through the, um, the meat grinder of internet content creation, um, and, and making things and trying to break through it. On the internet, you, no matter how good you are at it, you can never guarantee success. No way. There's no way. And YouTube's already like raising the floor for when they're going to monetize. They're like, they're like doubling the requirements for new creators before they can monetize their stuff. Imagine if they required a four year degree. Can you imagine? You're going to need, before you can monetize your YouTube channel, you're going to need to send us in, um, a scan of your diploma. Wait until there is a phone call. Fucking influencer scandal because they faked their, their bachelor's degree, their academic credentials that have an academic scandal for a fucking influencer. Oh my God. Unbelievable. I just don't, I don't see the value in it. Yeah. I think I can see why a university would do this in attempting to reflect modern aspirations. I think it's a trick in that no matter how educated you get about it, you can never guarantee that you're going to be able to make a living doing this. Also, it changes every 14 seconds. Like somebody at Google or Amazon for Twitch, they, you know, they flip a dip switch somewhere in the algorithm and suddenly everything you're, you do and everything that worked five minutes ago doesn't work anymore and you got to pivot constantly. How are you going to teach that? Maybe like every five years you have to go back for a refresher course in like the, in like the new platforms. I would be happy if this thing kind of thing killed all the Instagram reels, which tell you how to make an Instagram reel of those you get in those now. Like I've, I've had a couple of those and I, and they try, I do my best. When I get a reel that I'm like, to scroll past it fast enough that my algorithm goes, Oh, all right. I won't do that again. Yeah. Like, Whoa, I guess she's got strong feelings about this one. We'll go in a different direction. Yeah. We're going to, we're going to find more family vacation spots. She likes to sit on those ones for a while. I think if you're going to like put people through a content creation program curriculum, it should be just in the film school or in media, like how to make stories and do stuff. and stuff like that. And then people can apply those learnings to the personality side of things. of things that tell a story because everyone's like making up a fake life anyway right they're telling the story right about themselves from their perspective nothing you see is honest it's all curated it's like it's like first person to the nth degree that's what it is it's it's like the ultimate first person pov storytelling that's what all the instagram influencers are nobody's doing all that shit then you're always they're getting up out of their bed and like going for the walk on the beach and then going to the little town and getting the coffee and all that stuff you think everyone's doing that every single day of their life anytime someone's like i get up at 4 30 in the morning i'm like no you fucking dope bitch and then i'm off i go we've seen like they have this like really happy thing when you're in any kind of vacation spot they do this really the pose and near the landmark or whatever they're all happy i don't know what the name for it is but i always love to see when someone's taking the photos they're all happy enjoying like holding their coffee in the way that nobody ever holds their coffee like they're posing with it and then as soon as they're done taking the photos they're like the mood like you can watch their body language everything droops right and then they go look at the thing they switch off they look at the photos to make sure they're okay like look through a thousand fucking photos anyway i might not have a high opinion of this anyway well it's certainly not a high opinion of the bachelor's degree's ability to guarantee you a successful future in this field yeah right it should only be master's level that's it wait till there's a phd doctor of content creation oh my god i mean there's gonna be somebody be the first one in that there there will be we don't know that that's not the case already like someone who's like studied something else and they've gone and written a dissertation about you know about influencers or like the like how they uh impact other people or like how they affect i don't know societal change or whatever well i think the asu degree in content creation will set the record for time between when it was created and when it was replaced by a computer like it'll be six months right and right that you could have had the degree they won't even finish their first year right and they'll all be replaced by ai bots at that point well i guess if they don't finish their first year they can at least switch majors what's that yeah they can switch majors to what business computer convention transferring i want to go to computer i'm majoring in computer thank you listen these are these are highly coveted careers i get it they are highly coveted i don't but i don't have to accept that i really don't i don't have to accept that i know and there'll be people say like this is what you do and what you have done for two decades again this is all earned every bit of this you've earned the grump this is fine this isn't the guy sitting in the corner going sour grapes i just i learned to hate this in the trenches motherfuckers you were born to it right i wasn't the world is better you were you you simply adopted the influencer i was born there is sometimes you wake up in a cold sweat so it's like did i help invent some of this stuff like was i part of the problem you know it's funny too because it's this youtube thing that actually is going on where they're raising the floor like isn't are they something like doubling the amount yeah let me look up the new requirements the milestones that a new person has to hit before they are eligible for the partner program yeah it's um here we go years ago we tried to start a union right it was hank green and i casey neistat some other people it was really hank's thing uh tried to start a union and the big thing there that i wanted to do was i wanted to uh my main goal was to get youtube to require people to join the union the way that like union productions do so that people could get like health care and things like that not so important to people outside the u.s but that was one of my goals for people in the union the u.s you know what i mean and even stuff like 401k and things like that because that's the kind of things that unions do everyone associates them with you know managing or negotiating rates and things like that which it is helpful for collective bargaining but then also it's like you know a lot of people i know who are in sag after the screen actors guild that's where they get their health insurance you know and where they have any kind of semblance of a real retirement program or something like that they get those benefits for the union there's not really that stuff out there and they're certainly not for people who are on youtube all right so here here are the new uh requirements for the the youtube partner program effective the february 1st 2027 new applicants are going to need a thousand subscribers and either 8 000 public watch hours or 20 million shorts views which doubles the current thresholds um for ad ad and revenue sharing oh wow 20 million is a lot isn't it yeah 20 million have you do you think that you've got 20 million collective like like on all your collective to put it in perspective there is not a single video besides the angry birds trailer on the roosterteeth channel that has more than 20 million views those aren't shorts they are the long form whatever like pure videos real videos i don't know what you would call those but uh there isn't a single one besides that one angry birds one that went viral that's got 25 million views on that one video you know so just to put that in perspective they're going with an aggregate there but it takes a while to amass 20 million views can't take that for granted yeah so they're they're basically like doubling the floor um the the the low bar that you have to meet um before you can begin earning money what if you have a degree so get can you short circuit that yeah um you can get you can have the requirements back to where they were if you get a degree from asu right it'll be listen that's gonna go other places now i'm sure it's not gonna be just asu you just were the fucking morons that did it first so congratulations on that does it pay you retroactively that's what i wonder too so when you hit the 20 million threshold on the short no no i like i would i'm i'm gonna say no um i haven't asked mr youtube um if that's gonna be the case but i'm gonna say no because uh it doesn't do that for the partner program already right they don't go back and pay you for all the views that you got they should they should but they're not gonna you know they should they should go back and write like the people that were making huge videos before the partner program even existed go back and write them a big check i think ask a ninja is owed a massive check by google not really even by google because google acquired the company youtube that was the company that hosted the ask a ninja videos and that was before they had a partner program i've always felt like they deserved a big fat check write the ninjas a check guys write the fucking ninja check give them you know what give them an honorary degree while we're at it if asu came to you and was like we're gonna give you an honorary degree at influencer would you take it 100 i would take that yes i would i would do that and i would just for the chance to make the speech you're gonna like hang that on your wall behind your desk so that everyone knows that you're an official influencer i would be in the middle of the stage they'd be handing my diploma i'd have my selfie cam on going hey guys what's up get the degree finally decided to go to college and then i would protest i would like take off my robe and i'd have a shirt that says pay ask a program just take money and throw it into the shadows the ninja they'll catch it that's where the ninja is that that's what they do in the shadows all right what else is going to get me off this topic back to disney all right so um d23 was this weekend so they basically laid out a bunch of announcements um one of the big ones that i imagine you will care about um is that they announced uh not all but a lot of the cast for x-men um so uh they've announced let's see that one of the big ones adam driver is going to be mr sinister right that was the switcheroo announcement that i was talking about on the sponsor chat this weekend that he was like i'm gonna be this and then he was like just kidding i'm mr by the way i'm gonna be this as he said i'm going to be magneto right who who they also oh no they announced the casting for professor x they haven't announced a magneto and so everyone started cheering like crazy and then he didn't even say he was mr sinister he said he was nathaniel whatever the right like the real name or whatever of mr sinister of mr sinister and then it was like you could hear a pin drop like why would they let him do that that was a pre-recorded segment somebody should have said like like everyone had all the opportunities to be like i don't think this is gonna play you're rug pulling the biggest villain in x-men you know that seems that seems weird to do that for your announcement i guess and that went about how i would have expected it would have gone that announcement going that way are you excited for new x-men sure sure i mean i'm i'm excited um about the cast so they've announced uh in addition to characters that we've already announced so they've announced already been introduced to but spider-man is still in the spoiler window is it uh spider-man brand new day is probably still in the spoiler window for us why what do you want to say oh because of okay no i got you in addition to some characters that uh we've already kind of been introduced to they announced kit connor is going to play cyclops christopher abbott is going to play um professor x maya boyd is playing storm samara weaving is playing emma frost um indian avarette is playing rogue and then of course adam driver as mr sinister so they're going to be playing so so not like the full cast but like they're putting the team together what about wolverine that's what i'm curious about it's gonna be hugh jackman all the way down he's 90 i know right no i i i don't know what they'll do with that they might just like not have him in it as if they if you know give it maybe give them a little time to rest as a character before they bring him in for a new generation possibly sure give them time to rest like they did with uh robert dunny jr the uh yeah i i am excited about the x-men i love the x-men i grew up reading the x-men and i'm excited about the x-men i grew up reading the x-men and i'm excited about the x-men and i'm i was thinking about this the other day in general the mutant characters in uh the marvel universe it seems like those are the most prone to suddenly becoming way overpowered like there's always like for a lot of the mutants there's a moment where they like reinterpret the character in a way that like blows their like magneto for instance he's a guy who controlled metal so he's like uh you x-men you i'm gonna wrap you up in an iron bar and stuff like that nope then he can control the entire earth yeah and it's like it's like oh also you're blowing up the x-men iron in it so guess what but then they even go like jean gray she's telepathic she's telekinetic but then suddenly she do whatever the hell she wants she's gonna bend reality right in the scarlet witch scarlet witch was like she could she could her hex power i think would just make bad luck happen scarlet witch is an x-men she's a mutant yeah she's she's from she's a magneto's daughter did you know that in the comics no oh yeah yeah so uh magneto they kind of reference it in one of the x-men movies with quicksilver that uh when it's uh michael fassbender the quicksilver character like references that her mom knew a guy a lot like him or something at one point they just kind of reference that okay and even ice man like ice man is a snowman who shoots snowballs and rides around an ice slide right nope he can like suck away all the energy in the universe and he's actually one of the most powerful mutants to ever exist what and like cyclops what is cyclops's power he got laser eyes exactly cyclops has laser eyes and he has the goggles that he has to control it with because if he opens his eyes he can't control the laser eyes right nope that's not what cyclops's power is what's cyclops's power cyclops's power is charisma his eye you got an influencer degree he got it from asu cyclops's power is that his eyes when he opens them are a portal to a different dimension that is filled with punches or or something this is not this is real look it up look it up hold on and they like everyone's got to have this creep of power in the auto complete cyclops's eyes are portals but they're portals to like a dimension that's filled with punch or kicks cyclops's eyes are often described as portals to a dimension of pure kinetic energy known as the punch dimension why why can't it just be laser so anything coming out so basically um the that dimension just leaks punch straight into our dimension and that's how he's blowing stuff up anything that he looks at gets punched when he opens his eyes you get hit with a universe-sized punch that's what happens i'm not gonna lie i'm kind of digging it it wasn't enough to just be lasers they always have to scale them i don't know why like iron man is iron man he has a suit you know and uh you know he has a suit and sometimes he adds to like oh no he got a rocket launcher nope this guy's got punch eyes they always scale up the mutants well but um x-men's not coming until well after doomsday which they also spent some of d23 talking about um and i saw a fun thing um if uh for example you want to make sure you are fully like up to date and refreshed on everything marvel and you want to watch all the marvel stuff that they've put out before doomsday comes out you can do that it is achievable you need to start now and it's going to take two hours a day two hours a day yeah there's like there's like 300 hours or so to catch up on so you need to get started now and you need to really be committed if you want to watch all the marvel stuff 300 hours so two hours a day i've got to watch for a 150 days uh yes if yes yeah does that mean there's 150 moves are they counting all the series as well that's all the of course that's all the series right it's 150 that's a lot and that's like including like the netflix series uh hold on let me look at the thing and see if that includes like agents of shield and all that stuff you gotta watch that secret invasion have they retconned that thing yet the secret not not yet they got to not yet but i i imagine that um it hasn't been retconned i think it's basically just been fully ignored i wonder too if like everybody cast in that it's just will never be in another marvel thing ever again they're just like we will never acknowledge you ever we can't take the time to explain this you know then we already have 300 hours of content all right so i think you're gonna get off light here um it doesn't look like agents of shield um is included here but all of the marvel uh sorry all the netflix era marvel shows are included okay because some of those characters have started showing up more mcu central well the you're not gonna watch anything you're gonna be like i'm too tired to watch doomsday you're halfway to an asu uh content creator i got a degree in marvel you get the place out of your freshman and sophomore year good for you the nice thing is when you get your diploma they um they give you eyes with the power of punch exactly the power to punch anything from a whole universe why would it be a better power to just send people to the universe of punch and then they're getting right like imagine imagine someone looks at you and you get sucked through the eyes into you into a universe where you're just getting punched forever that'll be the next evolution of cyclops who he'll have that ability at some point to pull someone in to the punch universe send them to punch that's what his butthole is they um they did announce some other stuff um some new uh like follow-ups to a lot of their popular franchises there's like frozen three they're doing another zootopia moving they're doing uh wait they're doing another one that fast yeah that's kind of cool look that's a big franchise zootopia is doing like good money for uh for disney so they're you're gonna keep it going i guess they announced a bluey movie a new season of ahsoka good that thing's good that bluey makes a lot of money dude look it's bluey makes a lot of money because everyone loves bluey yeah right uh adults like grown-ups the parents who watch bluey with their kids love it as much as the kids do because it's like they they get a completely different layer to the story which i've always been fascinated by right because there are things that change over time but not that much right like what we teach kids like be nice share yeah now there's stuff like screen time and stuff like that but you can let go of the episodes that tell kids not to smoke in the coal mine and stuff like that you know because those aren't relevant anymore but why are we always making new kid shows you know because everything is new to a kid like why don't kids watch sesame street why don't they watch electric company why don't they watch you know whatever came in the 90s bernie you know the answer to this mtv news what they watch in the 90s it's a it's it's to sell them the new toys yeah i get it but then the old people are still trying to sell their toys too right no they stopped making them they're onto the new toys oh it's using the sesame street people moved over to bluey is that what you're saying maybe i mean i do think that uh that there's fewer kids watching sesame street now they're watching bluey instead right right like it's a generational shift there's there's always something for that like the that hooks the generation there was there's been the wiggles um there's been blues clues there's been the blues there's been like you know all these different shows and they're all still there right you can still go and watch that's what i'm wondering you know why not just go watch those but they're actually they can be harder to find because they're older yeah but yeah it's like who's who's which streaming service has a licensing for them right now like didn't hbo end up with sesame street for a while maybe they did yeah you know you know put that like right up next to like all of their like sex in the city and stuff you'd be like hey hey kiddo don't watch this one instead here with like marvel i mean they're they're one step away from the punch dimension on the d23 stage bluey and his family better watch out dangerous place for kids to be yeah they um they showed off a little bit of a new incredibles movie uh what else did they show um oh they showed some uh uh kingdom hearts is getting a series i already i think i've mentioned that to you before which is very exciting ryan gosling's new star wars movie showed off a little bit of that coco too people are really excited about ryan gosling's jacket oh yeah is that you think that's gonna do like a nice merch tie-in i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know uh yeah because when he wears a jacket in his movies and a lot of people buy that jacket they'll release the jacket i'm sure of course i knew a lot of not a lot of people i knew some people who bought the drive jacket and they all like do they think they were super cool no i think they regretted it pretty quickly like it looks good on screen but not necessarily when you're wearing it out to like the taco bell well it's because when you're in the taco bell you're not driving fast enough i mean what to look cool you're not a degreed influencer you can't pull that off i feel like you started me on a super cynical note today and now it's like i'm trying i'm trying to get out of the tailspin that's it's fine you i understand you can't shake the grump that's okay that's just so silly i just think i i feel like you they're they're more so than making fun of the influencers i feel like they're just bilking money out of people you know well universities that's what they're that's their business right is like they get money when students enroll and so we're gonna make this thing that the students want regardless of whether it's actually gonna stand in good stead for the rest of their life because we need students to enroll i like the i like the university of texas right i don't think they helped me enormously when i was there i learned a lot about how to operate independently because there was 55 000 students there there was nobody like making sure i was doing okay yeah you're not having like one-on-one career planning making sure that like you're you're setting all the right stuff for your interests and that it's going to be sustainable or like professionally applicable so when they came back and they were like do you want an association i'm like no i i don't want to pay you any more money like just for fun now now i'm not even getting anything from it now i'm just going to pay you for the heck of it right remember the time we used to pay us a bunch of money do you want to keep doing that wasn't that a fun time that worked out really great let's keep that that going i'm very cynical about that the money the money aspect of the educational system especially beyond high school i'm very cynical about would you would you say that you're having a cramp about it i'm fine well you know i would like to offer influencer degrees today to hannah fisher and malibu ca thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com somewhere and roosterteeth.com speech speech speech all right that does it for us today august 17th 2026 we will be back talk tomorrow we hope you will be here as well bye everybody