2025.08.15: Switcheroo

How much did they first pay you to give up on your dreams?

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Get up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it's Morning Software!

For August 15th, 2025, my name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

It sounds a little bit low.

It does sound a little bit low, but it's low.

Are we low?

Does it sound low to us, or is it just the headphones?

Off the fix it.

Fix it in post, baby.

That's right.

We're doing it live.

That's it.

Every time you're on a set, somebody says, fix it and post.

And you're like, I'm going to hate that that guy said that in two months.

I know.

I'm going to hate it.

Well, here's the thing.

We could take 30 seconds and fix it now.

30 seconds, yeah.

Or we could take 30 minutes to figure out.

what the hell and how to fix it in post.

Yeah, maybe.

Or it's like we can use 80 people's time if you're shooting a movie to fix it over the course of like 20 minutes.

Or you can waste one dude's time for like three hours.

That's basically the way it breaks out.

There's a bit in the show, The Franchise.

It's an HBO show about making a superhero movie.

And they're constantly like making all those things.

They're shooting a bunch of movies sort of at the same time.

They're like, well, this one

canonically comes before this one.

And they just decided to kill off, I don't know, the fish people or whatever.

So we're going to need you to remove your fish people that you're shooting right now.

And they go, can we CGI?

We'll CGI in something else later.

Get to the CGI guy.

And he goes, we haven't seen our families for two months.

And they're, and they're, and they're like, but you can do it.

Yeah, right, right.

You know what that's called?

Uh, that's scope creep.

Creep.

I was going to say it's scope creep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the actual term.

Creep.

Yeah.

It's trademarked by Radiohead.

And the guy telling you to do it is usually a creep, too.

So it works out.

Man, today's a crazy day.

Today,

so many things going on.

The lads are all here.

Teddy and his group of lads.

They might come on the Patreon show this weekend.

Oh, that could be chaos.

You might violate one of my rules and have more than one person on.

No, here's what you do.

Make people hate it.

Here's what you do.

I'll put them all on one microphone.

Yeah, no.

And then, really,

if they all share a brain and a mic, is it multiple people?

We're all fishing today.

And there was a question in the subreddit.

Comments from yesterday's episodes.

Somebody asked, what type of fishing do we do?

We do fly fishing for salmon, theoretically, on the river Spey.

So it's a really cool, we learned to fly fish on one of the most renowned rivers for fly fishing in the world.

It's kind of nuts.

I love how lucky we were.

There's the show, The Gentleman, on Netflix,

which

famously features like criminals and rich dudes side by side.

Sometimes they're even the same.

I was going to say they're different.

And there's these two rich dudes who are bonding.

They're like, oh, well, our fathers fished the spade together.

And I was like, I've heard of that river.

I know that river.

Done that.

Like some posh British prick.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we're doing that.

I will say, I've been out there a couple days

so far this time.

I do think, honestly,

I think it's important for people to try to do something.

Some kind of activity that involves some type of communion with the natural world because I think we all talk about stuff like climate change of like, oh, it's a little bit hotter.

I remember, I don't remember ever being this hot before.

People always talk about climate change, like temperature and things like that.

You feel it, right, Ash, when we're out there.

You feel it.

Like there are, we're,

I should preface all this by saying there's a lot of people we know who make a living because of the fishing industry in Scotland.

So a lot of my thoughts on it are pretty tempered.

But I can't help but notice we're like some of the only people people that are new to it, right?

Ash, like you don't run into a lot of new people, it's a lot of people who have been doing it for 40 years themselves.

Yeah, they grew up doing it, they've done it all their lives, they were third generation, raised doing it.

Yeah, their father would take them out, all that stuff.

But we don't run into a lot of young people who are just like, you know what, I'm going to do I'm going to go try fishing.

I'm going to go pick this up.

You don't like, you know, it's like you run into new golfers and stuff like that.

And it's just like, which weirdly, we're actually doing our part because we're like introducing the lads to fishing weird too yeah yeah that group like when we had them out uh fishing for the first time the big group of 10 i think on that first one because jd uh was here as well they they came out and took photographs for a magazine like a fishing magazine they ended up in the fishing magazine yeah they did and uh it's it's just uh you know we have a place where there's a what's called a fishing beat was historically tied to it so we have in the records for the place we have like what they used to pull out of the river.

And they used to pull out of the river, like out of this one fishing beat, which is one section on one side of the river.

There was one point in time when they pulled about a thousand fish in a month out of that one fishing location.

And now that's like just under what the entire river does.

So it's, and that was, you know, 40 years to span, maybe 50 between those two data points.

But, you know, I just think it's important because it's like you can talk about stuff anecdotally and you hear stuff about it.

And I said this before when the podcast first started.

I think one of the greatest tricks ever pulled is they somehow convinced the people

in America who use the outdoors all the time as their primary source of entertainment and recreation.

They convinced those people.

That protecting the environment is not in their best interest.

Like they can, I'm talking about the people on the right in America, the country guys who go out and go fishing and go hunting and go hiking and go camping and drag their trailer around with them so they can go and have a base of operations to go do stuff in the outdoors.

I'm talking about those people.

And somehow they convinced those people that if they do anything to protect the environment, they're a fucking pussy.

How did they do that?

Weird.

It's weird.

It does seem kind of backwards.

Yeah.

Let me clue you guys into something.

The professor of gender studies at Stanford University, they're not in a deer blind at 5 a.m motherfuckers that's you guys while you're rolling coal you dumbasses they convinced you to work in your own worst interests how did they convince you to do that and i think about that every time i'm out in the river i think about every single time like it's like why not why not have all these regulations on what people can drive on a fucking highway in the city why don't you want that make the fucking people who are commuting to their goddamn cubicle farms make those fuckers drive electric cars make them get on trains make them get on buses while you get to go and fucking drive your winnebago out in the country you know on the weekend why do you care like why are you fighting against that shit it doesn't make any sense right you can sign up for the new volkswagen subscription to make your car more powerful that's another nightmare oh my god this is i i didn't believe this was real when I read the headline.

I assumed it was one of those like onion articles or something just just meant to make you mad, right?

And just poke at the absurdity of things.

But it's real.

It's real.

Volkswagen is now moving

horsepower behind a subscription.

I mean, we saw this coming, I guess, where we should have seen this one coming a mile away since it was it, was it BMW or someone who locked like seat heaters behind a subscription?

Where it's like, it's there.

It's in the car.

The functionality is there and it works, but you have to pay a subscription if you want to use it.

Well, now Volkswagen

is.

They're listing their ID3 Pro and Pro S.

They're listed on their configurator as having 201 BHP.

I assume that stands for British horsepower.

I don't know, maybe British horses are stronger or weaker.

BHP, anyway, okay.

But if you pay a subscription fee, you can unlock the car's full potential of 228 British horsepower.

All right, this is from AskanyDifference.com, Ashley.

Key takeaways.

HP horsepower is a unit of measurement for power commonly used to describe the output of engines and motors.

BHP, brake horsepower, is a specific measure of an engine's power without any power losses from auxiliary components such as the alternate or gearbox and is determined through a controlled test.

So it sounds like this is a good idea.

So it's measuring it from the engine as opposed to the wheels.

It's pure horsepower.

You don't have anything else, any other garbage like mixed in there as well.

I like,

that's a shame that's not British.

It'd be like, oi, you're going down the street.

Oi!

Oi, lads!

Okay, Bernie, do you want to know

how much it's going to cost you to unlock the additional

27 horsepower?

I'm sorry, brake horsepower.

It's going to cost you £16.50 per month.

Okay, so that's about, let's call it 20 bones.

That's a Netflix subscription to unlock the extra 27 brake horsepower in your Volkswagen.

What the fuck?

Yeah, but let's call it, let's do the math on it really fast.

So if you're paying 20 bucks a month, you're paying 240 bucks a year.

Over the course of four years, years, you're paying about a thousand bucks, right?

Okay.

If you had to sign up for that package when you got it,

I don't like the subscription stuff, but I have bought enough cars in my life to where when you go to add shit on, you're like, oh, look, the fucking baseline for this thing is like $30,000 for this car.

That's amazing.

And then you add in anything you would want in a car.

You want seat belts?

You want seats?

Would you like a radio?

Would you like our human package, which allows humans to fit in the cockpit?

Everything costs an enormous amount of of money.

It's always the entertainment package that's always the ridiculously overpriced thing.

It's a stereo and not a great one.

It's like sometimes $4,000.

And you get the nice LCD, the like state-of-the-art entertainment and control system.

It's like, oh, with the L C D from the late 90s, which is about 20 years behind everything else.

The one that looks like it should be a touchscreen, but isn't.

Right.

We have a car that is a 2018 and it was at the, I mean, touch screens were everywhere by that point in time.

It was, but it was was like, it was like as the transition was just really gaining a lot of steam, right?

So they, they, what they did was they bolted what looks like a tablet screen just onto the dashboard, right?

It's not even, it's not even fully like integrated.

It kind of like sticks out a little bit.

And that thing looks like you should be touching it.

You should be tippy-tapping on that all day long.

And instead, they're like, can I offer you a dial?

It has Apple CarPlay.

It has literally your iPhone interface

staring you in the fucking gob and you can't tap on anything.

You have to scroll with this wheel through everything.

When we go through Audible, because we played a lot in the car on road trips, we literally have to scroll through every title we've got on Audible.

One of the worst offender for that, in my opinion, is like Spotify.

Spotify.

Because it'll go down like every song you've ever listened to, every playlist you've ever been exposed to.

You have to scroll through all of them to get to the sidebar to change apps.

It's just, it's a nightmare.

It's a nightmare.

Now, perhaps if we paid £16.50 per month, they would just, we would find out that that is in fact a touchscreen.

So I guess really the economics of it, which is worse, and there's always been stupid shit in automobile, like the amount the packages cost when you add them on.

Or like, do you want to change out your rims?

And they're, I never understand this.

We have a car that when we bought it, it just came with these rims.

And I'm sure we paid more for them.

As far as I'm concerned, Rims are made for scratching.

Why do you want a lower profile tire?

I don't understand it.

Like, it's, I mean, we're talking like the tire itself.

If you look at the sidewall of it, it's like an inch, an inch and a half.

And I guess people think that's a good look.

It looks sporty.

We're in the middle of fucking nowhere, dude.

That just catches gravel.

I know.

And we get like, you know what, though?

I want a goddamn big white wall like radial tire.

That's what I

know.

It occurs to me though, Bernie, we...

We are accustomed to getting loads and loads of gravel.

Just like somehow they get like in the wheel and it just like screeches until, I don't know, the stone grinds itself down just because there's a lot of gravel on our road when's the last time you remember that happening it's been a while it's been a while did something happen when we weren't looking either to our road or to our car because it's i actually don't remember that's one of the most annoying things about the car and now that i'm actually thinking about the thing i don't remember the last time that happened i'll tell you what happened we picked up all the goddamn gravel on the road over time now there's nothing left gravel in the world you should have seen the the metrics on gravel on our road 30 years ago it's so much

higher than now did you secretly like pick up an anti-gravel subscription yeah i'm paying a little bit extra for less gravel but it's just it's so weird by the way they also do the thing that you love which is if you want to buy a lifetime subscription for the extra 27 horsepower you're going to get a deal on it bernie yeah go ahead it's uh 649 pounds 649 pounds so we got to go for what was it initially 15 pounds yeah i think you you decided.

Yeah.

So it's what, like a 50% discount on however many years you calculated that out.

Yeah, okay.

I mean, that's at least that option exists, right?

It's not just forever behind a subscription.

I think it was BMW.

People revolted against it.

And let's continue that momentum, fellas, out there.

Let's not pay subscriptions for all the shit on this.

Here's the question.

Did they, or did they complain about it loudly and then pay for the subscription anyway because they wanted the performers?

First car I ever got for myself, I leased the whole car and I was like, look at this.

And I was like, really excited about the level of car I got.

Of course, I bought way more than a car than I needed.

And somebody goes, how'd you afford this?

It's like, it's great.

Like, I leased it.

It's only this amount.

And they're like, you're a fucking idiot.

And then at the end of it, it works out in some cases.

Like, there is a case in which leasing makes sense.

But for me, as a guy starting out, personally, I think

cars are one of the first things where that initial payment, like you've got to come up with buying a car and you've got nothing to

no asset in the automotive vector.

So you have to like save up cash or money, buy into the system.

But then when you go to get your next car, you've got a car to trade in.

You have an asset that's already built in that thing.

Works with a lot of different things in personal finance, like all the different classes.

Like house is a big one that people are missing out on now.

Like when you buy into a house for the first time, it's astronomically expensive.

Later on, you've got a house to sell.

to move to a different house.

Right.

So you've, you've already got, you now got an asset that you've been paying on over a period of time.

Most of that, admittedly, probably going to interest because, man, all that financing sucks.

But you do have like an asset that you're already working with.

Your startup costs are high.

That's what I'm getting at here.

And with a lease, you know, it's all startup costs, right?

Then you're done at the end.

You're like, oh, I made no progress on, you know, on this asset class at all.

Now I've got to go buy another car and start at this point.

Yeah, I'm so excited that I made the monthly payment every single month and I have nothing.

I took great care of this car, did all the maintenance on it to give it back to you.

Something seems wrong here.

Just on paper, it seems wrong.

But there are cases in which it makes sense.

I recognize that for leasing.

I just was not one of those people that it made sense for.

You know, there's an interesting thing, too, where, you know, we talk about like the, like, the subscription fees and like all these things that like people who have like loads and loads of money, they probably don't not gonna think twice about it, right?

They're like, yeah, throw on the live type subscription, whatever.

Give me that extra 27 horsepower.

Um, but there's a, there was an interesting thing I saw recently in the news, and that was that I guess there are some countries in Europe who

do their fines based on net,

like on like wealth.

Percentage of wealth or income.

Percentage of wealth or like yeah, it's an actual fine.

Overall value instead of it being flat for everyone, which as we always famously said, then it's just the cost of doing business if you're wealthy.

Like things

with a fine means it's legal for rich people.

There we go.

Yeah.

And so a driver just got fined $100,000 for speeding

on a Swiss street.

He was, let's see, here we go.

He was

clocked going 27 kilometers per hour, 17 miles per hour over the speed limit in Luson.

And he's facing a 90,000 Swiss franc fine as a result.

So it comes out to about $110,000 because it's based on his wealth and his assets.

Yeah.

We learned recently with privacy stuff that they're not regulated by the EU in that regard.

So we, and their own, are they just not in the EU at all?

Man, I don't know.

There are some countries I feel like there's sort of like a couple of EUs.

There's like the sort of governmental EU with the regulations and the laws that everyone follows.

And then there's also like a trade block that in some countries are part of the trade block, but they're not part of the government.

I don't know.

Which is also different than the currency somehow as well.

It's a complicated organization.

Right.

Well, I mean, remember, the UK was in the EU and still had its own currency.

That's what I'm saying.

It's like they were in the economic block, but they weren't in the currency block, which you could go hand in hand.

It doesn't necessarily go hand in hand.

We got our eye on you, you

know.

But I guess

watch out for Germany, France, Austria, and most of the Nordic countries are also scaling fines.

And I'm like, you know what?

I'm on board with it.

Because then it's an actual punitive measure, right?

Like if you give someone...

I like the point system on licenses.

Although there's been times here here in the UK

where I have heard about someone getting one basic traffic offense, which is essentially like they were speeding while they had their mobile phone in their hand, which is probably those two things went together.

Like, they crept over the speed limit because they were like updating their Spotify or whatever, uh, or they were

scrolling through all of the playlists they'd ever listened to.

I'm making excuses a little bit, but there's a lot of justifiable reasons why we, you, a camera would catch you with your phone in your your hand.

That could happen.

But then they lost their license because those two offenses with the speeding and with the, you know, what do they call that distracted driving or whatever.

Yeah.

So it was like, it was like one, one event.

Yeah.

And they lost their license.

Yeah, but everything sort of like multiplied or, you know, added up.

They don't, they don't fuck around here.

And I think a lot of that stuff, I think a lot of that is a byproduct of having national health care.

It's like, if it's everyone's problem to pay for the person that causes an accident, pay for everyone's health care, then they come down really hard on that and things like,

you know, vices that like smoking that can affect your health.

Like you look at a pack of cigarettes in the UK, it's mortifying.

It's all, it's a really, it's terrifying.

Like they go so far to try to convince you, like, this is a bad idea.

This is going to fucking kill you.

You know, same, similar thing.

There's a much higher tax on alcohol, things like that.

Sugar.

Sugar

because

you're right.

They, they, with the socialized health care, right, that means that the, like, your vices are everyone's problem.

But on the flip side of that, vaccination rates are really high.

You know, people have a basic level of health care.

You know, infant mortality is down, things like that compared to other countries.

So there's lots of good things as well.

But I can't help but think that some of the regulations they have in place are just a natural byproduct of having a national health care system.

Of course.

We just re-upped our visa.

We just applied, I should say, to re-up our visa.

Fingers crossed.

And we had to pay our five-year NHS fee because we have to pay into the NHS because we're not citizens.

We're immigrants on a visa.

And that's

a lot of money.

Right.

Free health care ain't free.

Free health care ain't free.

You know, while we were, I was looking this up because this is from memory and I didn't want to talk about it from memory.

But one of the things we were, when I was talking about like the people, the conservatives in America should understand conservation better than anyone.

Did you know that white-tailed deer almost went extinct in the U.S.?

I remember something about that.

Like it was decades and decades ago.

It was a huge issue, right?

And then they made significant conservation efforts, brought the populations back to the point where they're a menace.

And so they were like, let's, let's, now let's repopulate wolves.

It can be done.

Like it could, like, the population of white-tailed deer in the U.S.

had declined by 99% from its max peak.

That's a lot.

That's a, that's a big decline.

Huge.

But they put in conservation efforts to save them.

And like you said, they got to be so numerous, they were like a pest.

In fact, I think probably not white-tailed deer specifically, but deer.

It's one of these weird trivia questions.

They are the most dangerous animal in the United States

because deer kill more people every year than any other animal.

You don't realize it, but they're coming for you.

They're coming right for us.

They look all cute and they look all innocent and then they're just coming for it straight through the windshield.

See, somebody didn't pay their anti-deer subscription fee, the Volkswagen.

So, Brittany, what the tale of the deer tells me, though, is we just need to get some banners going, get some slogans, is we need to

make the salmon a pest again.

Right, right.

We got, we got to change the language around climate change, right?

Now we got to convince conservatives to say, yeah, that's right, you fucking hippies, get on that fucking bus.

Take your fucking train, you losers.

We're going to pack you guys all in a car together.

You guys got to all ride together.

Yeah, that's what we got to convince people.

It's somehow punitive to make these fucking liberals driving these mass transit things.

I'm on board.

All right.

Well, we got about a billion things to do today, not the least of which is we're going fishing and I'm overseeing our fiber installation today, which is very exciting.

So, you can look forward to Ashley doing all of her lovely video game streams, hopefully very soon.

Look, I'm going to do some tests.

I'm going to be like, watch this, 720p.

Nah, now we're at 1080, baby.

I'm not going to go roll cold down the road here in a second.

We got to balance it out.

All right.

Well, before we go, I'd like to say a big thank you to C.J.

Pullen and Roman H.

Smith.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning summer.

Patrons for this podcast always have the best names.

They have great names.

Great

All right.

Well, that does it for us this week ending August 15th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you on Monday.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.