2025.08.21: Brain Drain

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is Morning Subway!

For August 21st, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns.

Barely sitting right over there.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

I've got to get in my seat.

I started the intro before she was even sitting down.

She goes,

What is going on?

The face you made was really cute.

Like,

ran for your seat.

Hey, everybody.

It is now Thursdays, the 21st of August.

Can you believe it?

We have a special guest coming next week who's going to be on the podcast.

How exciting.

Yeah.

Teaser.

I'm excited.

Let me see what day they're going to be here.

They probably won't be on the podcast even all next week, but they'll be around for a little bit.

We'll talk about them anyway.

Well, we're teasing.

Oh, no.

That might be as early as Tuesday.

We'll see.

We shall see.

Yeah, so second day of school, we're now back in our school routine.

I don't know if everyone else has started school yet, if you've got young ones, or if you're in school yourself, if you're back at it.

One thing I've learned too is like, you forget just how

university is like considered to be the toughest version of school.

But if you look at it on paper, it really doesn't seem like it's all that bad because there's so much time you spend outside of the classroom.

Like a full load, when I went to school at least, considered a full load was 12.

Full time was 12 hours a week.

Right.

Like

12 to 16 seems like the university.

15, yeah.

That's what I associated as like a full load that you could take, but that's like, you know.

five three hour class or what is that so every day you're going for three hours to class that's still for a university level class but when that's that's that's a lot for your brain yeah right but as far as the time commitment in class not as high however the time commitment out of class, like the hours that you're in class don't tell the full story with university.

Whereas at least with like P1, P2, the homework is minimal, right?

Like if you just told someone, though, with a job or someone who was in high school, you got to go to...

15 hours of whatever this week, they could go, cool.

I'm going to knock that out on Monday, right?

And then just have a

rest of the week.

Rest of the week.

I'll have six days to myself to do nothing.

Finn and I, we just finished the game grounded, sort of.

We got the...

That's like the honey, I shrunk the game.

That's it.

Honey, I shrunk the game.

That's exactly what it is.

Honey, I shrunk the player.

Yeah,

it's not really based on honey, I shrunk the kids.

The idea is

you get shrunk and you're smaller than grass and you're fighting ants and stuff.

So it's like, it isn't, but it is.

It totally is.

And you're like in a garden, like in the front yard, and you're dealing with, oh no, giant ants.

Oh, no, giant spiders.

I'm saying, oh no, giant spiders.

They actually really suck.

And it sucks to see a giant spider on your screen.

You know what I don't like?

I don't like the spiders being vilified.

Really?

Okay, spiders perform an important function, which is to catch bugs, which admittedly, if you are a tiny human the size of a bug, yeah, that it's understandable for the spider to get confused because it's just going to go, a bug I don't know.

Interesting.

Maybe we're not vilifying the spiders, actually.

Maybe what we're doing is changing our own perspective

and having empathy for, you know, the aphids and things like that.

So that's what we're doing.

Although we kill about a billion aphids in this, because that's what you eat in the game.

Yeah, I was going to say, I was like, I sorry, no, no sympathy for aphids.

Yeah, I get you.

I totally get it.

I totally get it.

I ran into this thing, though, which I run into a lot.

I kind of touched on it a little bit yesterday with like parents and like, this isn't for you.

This kind of plays into that thematically.

One of my pet peeves now having a kid is I hate when stuff

looks like it's for kids, but it's not.

And I know that we live in an era where a lot of adults like to engage in kids stuff, you know?

You're talking about Disneyland, you're talking about Halloween.

I'm just talking

like adults.

You're like non-naming names?

Not naming names.

I'm not kink shaming anybody this morning.

But I don't like, like, this feels like a kids game, but it's really not.

There's like a lot of scary stuff in it.

And at one point,

you have to interact with a

interface with this object, which is a head in a jar.

And it's just like, come on, does this need to be in a little kid's game?

To be fair, the head in the jar is very cartoony.

And when you look at him, he's not that scary.

He's not that scary.

He's not that scary.

And it's like, you know, there's the thing about a lot of those games is like, yeah, there is scary stuff in all the games.

You know what scared me as a kid?

The dungeon levels of Super Mario.

Really?

The music was enough for me.

And then

the fireballs going in the circles and like you land and you go, oh, no.

That was enough to scare me.

Okay.

Seriously?

Oh, yeah.

Did you find Bowser to be scary?

Terrifying.

Really?

Well, mostly because I would, on the rare occasions, I would get all the way to the end of the level.

He absolutely decimated me like all the time.

Do you want to reveal anything here where you're like, I can fix him or anything like that?

As you sometimes do on this podcast?

I'm sorry.

I don't think he's like a 400-year-old vampire, so I have no interest.

Thank you.

He's clearly a half turtle, half reptile, half what is he, a dragon turtle?

Yeah, I don't know.

I guess we're waiting for that particular genre to hit the mainstream, and then we'll have like all the sexy half-lizard heroes or anti-heroes.

I'm sorry, morally gray

male main characters.

And then I'll be like, okay, now I'm on board.

Was there not a sexy lizard in Baldur's Gate?

That was a big gooner game.

Can we say that now?

That that's

that was everyone was always like thirsting after everybody in that cave.

That's the fun thing about that, right?

If you're not kink shaman, we're not kink shaman, right?

Whatever you want.

That was the one, I remember it made headlines before it came out because you could, as a druid, I believe, bang a bear.

You could bang a bear?

You could bang a bear because you're a druid and I think you could shapeshift or something like that.

And you could, yeah, you could romance a bear.

And I remember.

We're talking about an actual physical animal, a bear.

A bear.

Not a bear.

Not like the guy that runs the restaurant.

What?

The guy you watch on Instagram who does all the funny like, how you doing there, pal?

Do you know that guy?

Go ahead.

Oh, that guy's awesome.

I don't know his name.

Everybody knows this guy.

He's been in everyone's Instagram for you page at this point.

I mixed up all these platforms.

I'm just going to say in the algorithm.

It's fine.

But no, yeah, that one was, it's a game where whatever romance option you seek, there's probably one for you.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, I got a problem on my hands right now.

What's that?

I've got to go now to another game.

He always be grounded.

That's very exciting.

Now he wants to finish Satisfactory.

Well, before we move on to Satisfactory, I have to tell you, Bernie, you're welcome for me not telling him there's a grounded two.

Yeah, yeah.

Thanks for doing that.

I appreciate it.

You guys roll credits.

I was so tempted to be like, you going to play Grounded 2 next?

But I knew what that would do to him and I knew what that would do to you.

And so instead I just said, great job, bud.

Great job.

Everybody won.

That's it.

I was like, I had to like take those words in both hands and hold them back.

Uh,

Garrus

in Mass Effect.

Oh, yeah.

That's the weirdest ship thirst thing ever to me.

Yeah, like people are like, there's all these characters to romance people.

Comically, I don't get it, but like vibe, Garris had the vibes.

That's what was going on.

Could you

romance Garris?

Oh, yeah.

You could.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

In fact, I feel like in

a lot of games, you can romance romance a lot of people but i feel like there's one that's

you're meant to romance right there's someone that there's someone that like all the developers got together and was like this is the one right like obviously there's no actual canon about who you romance but this is the canon one oh i got you and i i feel like for femme shep garris has got to be canon I feel like everything about that, aside from him being part insect or whatever, is

like leading you in that direction.

Okay, okay, fair enough.

Fair enough.

Well, I went and looked at Satisfactory and saw what our previous progress on the game was.

And we were like at tier three after playing for what felt like dozens of hours of that game.

And I thought, okay, tier three, so what is it out of five?

It's like out of nine or something like that.

So we hadn't even scratched the surface, I feel like, of the game.

And so I thought, you know what?

I do.

Is that why you've been playing it on your own, like in secret?

Here's what I did.

Here's what I did.

I was going to try to, I was going to try to nerf the game.

So what I did was I started a new run and I turned off every setting in that game.

Turned off, there's a mechanic in Grounded and it exists in Satisfactory as well.

Satisfactory, it's power.

In Grounded, it's hunger and thirst.

But it's the same thing.

I mean, that's a thing in just about every kind of survival-y sandboxy game, right?

Is there's, regardless of what they call it, there's a bar that goes down that you have to do something to make go back to the top.

It's a drain mechanic.

You're just constantly, remember the old word problem in school?

Like you're filling a pool with one hose that's like eight gallons a minute, and there's another hose that's draining the pool.

And so you have to like, how, how long until the pool is empty?

And then I always wanted to write in the answer to that question: the first thing I do is shut off the goddamn drain.

Who's going to fill a pool while it's draining?

Don't be stupid.

That's what a video game is with this hunger stuff.

It's like you're doing stuff.

I like to think of it, Bernie, as the self-care bar.

Are you practicing enough self-care in your farming lifestyle?

You're out dawn to dusk.

Are you looking looking after yourself?

The answer to that question is always no.

So I'm going to live my truth.

From this point forward, Ashley, I am done with that.

I am not doing drain mechanics anymore.

It's just something to slow you down.

It's just to make the game seem like it's longer.

So I turned off all the power stuff, and then I thought, fuck it, since I'm turning that off, I'm turning everything off.

You can even turn off like,

you need to have resources to build a building.

So you're just like, it's not quite creative mode because you need like to get the stuff to unlock things and you start to get the resources.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And And to like to make, like, make the little components for stuff and stuff like that.

So the basic core of the game is there, but it's like, nothing can slow me down.

It's still agonizingly slow.

And I went and watched the YouTube video.

I thought, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to cut myself off now.

I'm going to go watch the end of Satisfactory.

I saw some of these people's factories like.

in the peripheral vision while they're watching the ending moment of the game, which takes place in the sky.

And I saw their factories.

I thought, holy shit,

that's like somebody from the country going to New York City for the first time.

Just like looking it up all the buildings, going, oh my God, look what I got.

You know, so I'm not, I'm not doing it.

I got to figure out a way to get around the satisfactory.

You know what I like about those toggles, those sort of like individual game mechanic toggles, is it's like, you basically built yourself easy mode, right?

Or very easy or story mode, whatever you want to call it.

But that you can do that on an individual feature basis is kind of cool, right?

Like I'm sure there are always people out there who are very critical of anyone playing a game on easy, right?

Like, that's not how it's meant to be played.

I've never played

on creative mode.

I've never done it.

I've never done it either.

Yeah.

But there are, you know, there are people out there who's like, you play a game this way on this difficulty or like it doesn't count.

But the thing is, your run of Satisfactory isn't going to affect anyone else.

No.

And if you and Finn get more enjoyment out of like turning off all the busy work elements, awesome.

It's a game.

You know, enjoy it, right?

Play it how you want to play it.

It does warn you as soon as you go into that mode.

It's going to get called advanced gameplay features.

It says, We're going to, you won't be able to change this back, and we're shutting off all the achievements for this run or this session, is what they call it.

Sure, that's pretty normal.

Totally normal.

But also, it's like, I take that threat seriously.

I do.

I'm like, man,

like, normal, most people are like, fuck, don't threaten me with a good time, but I'm actually like, you're like, oh, those achievements.

I can't get any achievements.

People know how awesome I am in this video game.

I always, have you ever gone through anybody else's achievements ever.

No, no, I have not.

But I have occasionally, there are some platforms will have features like, oh, your friends have this unlocked.

And I'm like,

TMI, man, that's private.

Okay.

But I always...

will go through achievements and I always get really annoyed if there's achievements based on completing the game on specific difficulties.

Because then I feel like very pressured, right?

Like, I don't want to play this game on heart.

That is not my idea of a good time.

I'm not in for the self-flagellation.

Okay.

Gotcha.

But I feel I like to get the achievements.

I love the good 100%.

And now I'm never going to get it because I'm not going to do that thing.

And now I'm mad about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I get it.

I get what you mean.

And it's like, I also think too, it's like you get the achievement, you're like, oh, I did this thing.

It's amazing.

I almost never go back and revisit it.

And I've also had no one ever try to tell me like I had an achievement or like somebody went through my achievements and like proved me right.

I could just say I have seven days survivor or whatever.

You know what I mean?

I could say that.

No one's one's going to go double check that on my behalf, right?

Someone might.

Someone might

feel like there are some specific achievements that if you're like, you're like, I had the achievement and you don't think you're going to be like, bro, that's stolen Valor.

Yeah, right.

That's a good point.

That's a really good point.

And I might not have heard it because I've never tried to do that before.

And people who check it are going, oh man, I need to do it.

I don't get the attaboy, but if I'm going to do it at some point in the future,

that's it.

You're going to steal a little Valor ad one day?

I'm going to make my achievements more searchable now.

Like, people will go look at my achievements.

At some point in the future, I'm going to lie about one achievement.

Good luck catching me, y'all.

Or I'm going to tell the truth and I expect an atta boy.

Yeah.

Like

the time I finished Limbo by only dying five times.

You streamed that.

I streamed that.

In fact, I remember that.

That's the only thing I've ever streamed.

Yeah, I remember that was a big deal as well because we had an issue with, was it a microphone or something or headphones?

And in the middle of the stream, we ordered something on Amazon.

It was because we were in Austin and there's an Amazon warehouse just outside of Austin.

It has, there's some things you can get this like two-hour delivery on.

And so while we're playing through the game, we ordered, I think it was headphones or something.

And

they turned up while we were still streaming and got them in and solved the tech issue.

And to make it even more confusing, the name of that one-hour delivery service in Austin for Amazon was called Amazon Prime.

That doesn't make it confusing as hell.

Our old friends at Warner Brothers had probably the craziest streak for naming stuff because everyone was making fun of the HBO Max to Max, back to HBO Max now thing.

Don't forget before that, they had HBO Go and HBO now.

Oh, yeah.

And like one of those was kind of a streaming service and one of them was streaming, but it was an extension of their cable service and they didn't have the same things.

And it wasn't clear to me.

One account didn't count for the other account.

That was awful.

HBO Go was not the mobile one.

HBO Now was the mobile one, even though, like, Ray was so confusing.

To this day, I don't know which was which.

Somebody at Xbox high up has a bet with somebody at HBO that they can come up with the dumbest names for their products.

Like the least understandable, most opaque branding of all time.

Our new console is called the Xbox Series.

Series.

You know, like, it took years to even figure out that that's what it was called, right?

Because there's the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S.

So they're the Xbox Series.

They never announced, like, and now the Xbox Series.

Did they announce pricing for the new Xbox handhelds?

I thought I saw something about that.

Let me look that up.

I think they might have, and I think it's expensive.

I thought there was one that was like a version of it that was like $900, I want to say, USD, adjusted for inflation since last Tuesday.

But I do want to talk about something that happened in current current events.

We had a passing, and it's someone that you probably have seen before, but might not have known their names.

Rhode Island judge Frank Caprio, whose empathy in court earned him fame online, dies at 88.

Frank Caprio, you've probably seen him in these viral videos where like somebody got a parking ticket or a parking fine, it's 50 bucks, and they were trying to go get a job and they don't have money to pay for it.

And then it's just, I don't know why it was like so much time he spent with with people and displaying that empathy and why they were recording and releasing all that stuff.

But I think at the end of the day, I love when people in power show empathy.

I don't think that's ever a waste of time.

I don't think that's a platitude.

I think people seeing that happen raises the expectation for people in power.

And I think it's a great thing.

And I think it's a really sad thing that he passed away.

So R.I.P.

to Judge Frank Caprio, you will be missed.

One of the greatest examples that I always think back to when I think of people who are in a position of power or authority showing a great amount of empathy is always Mr.

Rogers when he went before Congress and argued for the funding of PBS.

Right.

And

I always remember that, I think it's on YouTube.

We'll put it in the LinkedIn because it's absolutely worth watching when they're just like, why should we fund this?

Like, why should we give any of this money?

This is so bizarre.

It's thinking about the exact same thing.

This is so bizarre.

Well, it's, you know, sometimes you see certain people, and they're all very different types of people on different walks of life, but they have, like, there's something about them that puts them all in the same group, like Jenna Ortega and Sabrina Carpenter.

You're right, yeah.

Which, by the way, I was right.

The audience backed me up on that.

You were.

People were like, yeah, I put them in the same group, too.

You were right.

They're all Disney girls.

Yeah.

But I wasn't going off of that.

I just knew that there was a, there was a, I knew there was a pairing.

I saw the pattern without recognizing the pattern.

Right.

So this is like similarly very different walks of life, but this judge showing empathy and like great amounts of empathy, to the point where he would go viral is, to me, similar to the amount of empathy that Mr.

Rogers was known for having.

Well, also, too, the guy who he's testifying in front of in Congress, I guess it's the head of some subcommittee.

I don't know the guy's name.

He actually reminds me of Judge Caprio a little bit.

He's basically saying, why is this important to Mr.

Rogers, the head of this subcommittee?

And Mr.

Rogers goes on for like 10, it's an old clip.

It's black and white.

We got to post it in the LinkedIn.

there.

We will.

If you have like 10, 15 minutes, it's a fantastic watch and fantastic to listen to.

He's like, why should we fund this?

You know, Mr.

Rogers, why is this important?

And then Mr.

Rogers goes on and talks about, you know, showing kindness and demonstrating morals to kids.

And just he goes and talks for, I think like five minutes almost, interrupted, and Congress just listening to him.

And there's just dead silence.

And the guy goes,

Well, I think you got your money.

And it was like, it's a really great moment.

I love, I love moments like that when people in power can show empathy for people.

You know what I mean?

And reach out and show kindness.

I just love it.

I feel like, once again, it feels like something we're seeing less and less of these days, but maybe I'm just getting away.

Well, I mean, no, it is a very timely thing to revisit because PBS did just lose funding and announced that they're largely shutting down operations because they don't have the funding to continue.

Right.

You know, good point.

Good point.

Very timely.

This is a

fascinating thing to go back and watch.

We know a lot of people that went to go work for PBS after grocery teeth, you know, because they had a lot of production experience.

in the city of Austin and the city of Austin had a big PBS presence as well.

We know quite a few people that went off there and then, of course, all the funding gets cut.

Damn, what a double whammy.

Yeah.

Back-to-back years of that shit, man.

Speaking of double whammies, I found what you were talking about with the Xbox handheld prices.

They haven't been officially announced yet, but they were leaked.

And so the Xbox Ally is is leaked reportedly to cost $549.99 in the US.

And the Ally X will cost $900.

$900.

$8.99.99.

So it's a steal.

$8,900.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then all those prices don't include tax in the U.S.

Of course.

Which is a weird thing.

I used to not think it was a weird thing.

Now I suddenly think it's a weird thing.

So, yeah, well, because we are used to it, right?

It's one of those things you're like, if you're used to it,

that's a mental calculation that you're always running in the background anyway.

And until that calculation stops, you don't even realize that you are running it necessarily.

But yeah, so that's pretty expensive for what they're going for.

That said, the X is supposed to be wildly powerful.

So that's good.

Oh, that's great.

Okay.

Well, before we go, I got to do an airport run with these lads.

We're losing them today.

They're off to the airport.

So I'm driving them to get on a plane and fly away to all these different destinations

on their next great adventure.

But I wanted to say, too, there's an interesting article if you're interested in AI stuff, because we talk a lot about it.

MIT just released a report saying that 95%

of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.

And by failing, they mean they're failing to generate rapid profits, essentially.

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, this is from AOL.

About 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration.

The vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P ⁇ L, it's profit loss.

The research based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

Very interesting.

Well, that's interesting that you bring that up as well, because I saw something on the Telegraph that basically said there are warning signs this AI bubble could be eminently bursting.

And I thought about it and I didn't realize, or I guess I hadn't thought about AI as a bubble, but it does show a lot of similarities to the dot-com bubble, right?

It's disgusting amounts of money being thrown around and funding these new growth things.

And while the, you know, obviously the dot-com bubble burst and changed the landscape of the web for a while, there were a few that came out that managed to make it through the dot-com, right?

And a lot of those are still enormous companies, but there were a lot of them that were there and they were big and they were doing great and they get all the money.

It's going to be crazy.

They have a slide in their break room and all this stuff.

And then it was gone.

It's weird though to talk about it like a bubble because I feel like we live in the legacy of the dot-com era.

We're in the dot-com future.

That's where we live.

So it's weird that we talk about it like it's a thing that fails.

Well, but the thing is, it was a bubble.

It did burst.

And that changed the way, like its overall trajectory and how it was developed.

And I'm not saying that if the AI bubble bursts, AI will go away.

Correct.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen.

I think it's here and it's something that people are going to have to figure out either like guardrails restrictions um you know i don't know ethics like rules that sort of thing but um i do think that we are looking at a bubble scenario that can then break and then they figure out what ai is in like in the following lens which sounds like dire financial predictions, but also that's a point at which you could make some personal moves yourself to get involved with something.

Although there will be at that time, people saying all these horrible things about it being a fad fad and it's done and it's over.

I give an example besides dot com that probably hits close to home for a lot of people that listen to this podcast is that there was Pac-Man Fever in the early 80s and the arcades were the biggest thing in the world and the Atari was this massive selling thing.

In 1982, the video game industry drew down 95%, the crash of 1982 for video games.

And that was like, that was it.

Video games were like a pet rock is what they were calling them.

And it was over and it was done.

And it's hard to imagine a world in which we didn't have video games.

It's now one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world, if not the biggest by dollars.

But inarguably changed the landscape of the industry, especially at the time, burst that bubble, and then they built something else out of the, in the, in the post-bubble world.

A 95% drop in anything should probably kill it.

Should probably kill it.

95%'s a lot of percentage.

Whatever it is.

But there were times, there were companies like Amazon that dropped 90% in a year.

Look, your hunger bar gets down to 5%.

You're worrying, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I always look at the investment case.

I was just thinking about a health part.

It's, you know, Amazon at some point went from like, I looked at one point, it was like $110 a share, and then it went down over the course of the dot-com crash.

It went down to like $10 a share.

And the person who bought it at $110,

that could be the worst story of your life.

My investment dropped by...

90-ish%

over the course of a year and a half.

And then the person who bought it at 10, it's a great story.

At the end of the day, 20, 30 years later, if you bought it at 10 or you bought it at 110, you're doing just fine.

You're doing just fine.

You're doing just fine.

So it's a, what they say in economics sometimes is zoom out.

Yeah, zoom out.

Not economics, sorry.

Investment.

Investment, right.

Two different things.

And when start people start using the word, well, historically.

When people get really excited, when people start making predictions about like, this thing's going to go to a million, you know, and this thing's going to be a quadrillion industry, you know, is this going to be the first quintillion company or something, whatever?

When they start talking like that, then you should start to worry, You know, when everyone, when that index moves, the needle moves towards greed and away from fear.

That's when you really should start to watch it.

Historically, historically.

All right, Ash.

Keep an eye on your hunger bar.

Who is doubling down for us today?

All right.

A big thanks to Jason Robinson and Sam Weber for doubling down and sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

All right, well, that does it for us today,

August 21st, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.