2025.08.11: Weaponized

God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gut up!

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

For August 11th of 2025, my name is Bernie Burns.

Sitting right over there, I owe her one romantic comedy.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

You might owe me two now.

Do I owe you two because of weapons?

Well, so we went to see weapons.

I pause every time I say the name.

Derek Brand, Derek.

We went to see weapons, and

I don't, as a general rule, go to see scary movies.

That's not usually my bag, right?

There aren't nearly enough explosions and car chases and things like that happening for my highly distinguished movie viewing tastes.

But I agreed to go see weapons with you because you go to see stupid romantic comedies with me.

And this is what couples do, right?

We do things for the other person.

However,

100% in Rotten Tomatoes.

I said tomatoes.

I said it.

I said tomatoes.

You've gotten native.

But

I would like to perhaps revise or

make some new rules for our relationship.

It makes it sound like you didn't like weapons.

Did you like the movie?

It was

for the movie that it was trying to be, it was a good movie.

I have a special feature.

We did our

knows that it's not my movie.

We did our walk back to the car review of weapons.

This will be spoiler-free ish.

Pretty much, right?

I mean, it's a horror movie.

It's

99% spoiler-free.

Let's say.

So, here's our walk back to the car review of weapons.

All right, this is our walk back to the car

review of.

I called it Monsters.

I think Monsters is a more appropriate name for that movie than weapons.

Well, they're weaponized.

Okay, New Deal, Bernie.

I will go to your kinds of movies when you go to my kinds of movies with you.

But New Deal, you can't make me go to Child in Danger movies.

Yeah.

Were the children in danger or were they the danger?

That's the question.

Well, spoilers.

I mean, the movie's called weapons.

I know somebody who read all the marketing material.

A spoiler-free

version, review of that movie.

100% of Rotten Tomatoes?

100%?

Look, that just means, right, that every critic said, this is a good movie.

Every critic said, this is at least three stars.

Would you agree that it is at least three stars?

I mean, I think it's really interesting in that it set out to tell a very certain story.

I liked it the fact that there were rules to it, and they didn't bother to explain the rules to you.

They just showed you the rules, and they expect you to pick up on it.

They lived by the rules,

but we didn't get to know what the rules are.

If you had to give it a percentage, what would you give it?

Fucking 80, but I'd be mad about it.

I liked it.

I liked it.

That's my review: I liked it.

I thought it was great.

Yeah, it was also great how close we parked.

We didn't park really close that time.

So it was a short review, but overall, I thought it was good.

You're right that 100%

on rotten Tomatoes seems like it is perhaps excessive.

There were like one or two things which on further discussion, we were like, I probably would have maybe changed this.

But overall, I thought the performances were great.

I thought the movie was doing a very unique thing, and I liked it.

And that was, I enjoyed the movie.

What I find interesting about going and reading reviews on forums and things like that after I see a movie, and especially it's something that a lot of people are talking about, I find that quite often something that to me is, and this movie has some of these moments, moments that are very tonally different from the rest of the movie that seem like, why was that not taken out in the edit?

And then when I go see people's like discussions of it, it's almost always called out as their favorite part of the movie.

It's just memorable because it's so different than everything else.

But for me, it like, it kills the cohesion of like my immersion into the story.

And there there was like a couple of moments in there where i was like man this is so wildly different in tone than everything else around it was this shot by a different director right yeah yeah or even like there was one that i thought might have been a cameo by the director um we're not going to talk about like very specific stuff i will say i did like it very much like i said it's an original horror movie it sets out to tell a story and it tells a story and it doesn't give you too much like you walk out of that you could talk about that movie for two or three hours straight and we did the entire car ride home which is like 45 minutes for us.

Uh, we talked about just

what was this character, who was that character, what were they doing, what was going on here, like what do you think this rule was?

What was the basic conflict of the movie about, you know what I mean?

Essentially, and it was like it didn't hand-feed you everything, which I appreciate.

And well, and I think that's where a lot of the suspense of the movie came from: was not jump scares, but all the things that you don't know.

Creepy.

I will say this: we were talking on the way home in the car, and we were trying to come up with movies that if people liked weapons, what's another movie that you should go see?

And I went back all the way.

Do you know when the movie I discussed, Mama, is what I'm going to suggest?

The movie Mama.

Yeah.

Do you know when that movie came out?

Hold on.

I had to go look it up last night.

I know I saw this movie because it was part of Buttonumathon, the 24-hour film festival

that we went to in Austin.

And that was the one with Schmorgan Heckengart in it.

So I'm going to say that was 2014, 2015.

You know who the, I said it, I said who the wife was in the car from memory.

I was way off.

I said Fameka Jansen was in that.

Yeah, who was it?

Jessica Chastain.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So that must have been an early role for her, I feel like.

And yeah, it's just, if you, I think if you liked weapons, I feel like you would like Mama.

You know what I mean?

But Mama goes to really strange places as well.

Brazilian director or something.

Yeah, you want to say something like that?

But that guy has gone on to direct a lot of other things.

You know what it was?

We were trying to figure out what he had gone on to direct.

He hasn't done much since then, since 2013.

He had done the it movies.

Oh, the ones that I thought were great interpretation of the Stephen King books.

And we're getting two Stephen King interpretations, loyal interpretations that are coming to theater soon.

Right.

We're getting Long Walk, and what's the other one?

Running Man.

Running Man.

That's why the Glenn Powell one.

Edgar Wright.

Edgar Wright did that one.

Okay.

So I mean, I liked weapons.

You, you know, though, if you like scary movies or creepy movies, I guess is a better way to put this one.

Yeah, this one is less about the jump scares, more about the creepy vibe.

Yes, and

don't worry, there's lots of horrible body fluids and blood and everything else in this.

But I'm happy to report there's only a two-second sex scene, James.

So

you'll be okay.

You said you like rom-coms.

You can almost watch this with your parents.

I find that kind of interesting.

I hope we're not ruining anything there.

Just two characters end up having sex for two seconds.

Literally, right?

like two or three seconds yeah it's like a flash cut

they said like they had to like they had to prep the whole scene for that think of that for a moment i want

that's exactly where i'm going is they're like they have to like get the whole setup and everything this thing is like two seconds in the do you how long do you think it took them to to shoot that and the actors are like okay cool we're done or if they knew i i will say especially at the very start of the movie the cinematography was incredible.

There's a lot of camera motion.

They do a lot of stuff with lenses too.

Like in Severance, they do that Dahlian zoom out.

There's a lot of interesting work on focus as well.

They do it slow, too, for horror.

So you don't realize why you're getting creeped out by a shot.

That, to me, is like real art when people are doing that with a camera.

And it really, really stood out.

So it made me feel like they had a really strong sense of what they wanted this movie to be like visually.

Even the choreography, which you've probably seen in the movie, the way people run in it is

important.

And

I just like the idea that they literally said, hey, guys, we got to do a sex scene, but it's literally going to to be two seconds.

We'll shoot it for like five seconds to make sure we have coverage.

So just go.

I feel like their clothes were even on.

It felt weird.

It's it.

It felt like their clothes are off.

It's so short that, like, I can't be sure about that, but I think their clothes were off.

Our discussion of this scene is like 20 times longer than the scene itself.

Somehow.

Well, if it gives you potentially more accurate rating, Bernie, because you were like, 100% really, I looked on Metacritic and it's got an 81 on Metacritic.

I think a lot of people.

So like it's

still good, but maybe not more realistic.

Oh, it's great.

It's a great movie.

It's a great movie.

It's a great movie.

We actually liked it more

the more we talked about it and digested it.

I think we got out of it and went, what?

100%.

And then we liked it more as we thought on it.

That would be literally, you can suggest this movie to anyone and they will like it.

It's not that level.

If I may offer a piece of advice, though, don't go see it

before bed.

Did you have weapons dreams last night?

No, I had weapons dreams.

Because I had weapons dreams last night all night.

And here's the weird thing, Bernie.

I wasn't in them.

Oh, really?

Do you ever have dreams that you're not in?

No, I had a weird dream recently.

I'll tell you, no, but finish your dream and I'll tell you about a weird dream I had recently.

No, well, my dream was it was almost like watching a movie.

Like, I was not present in the dream.

This was not a story about me.

I was nowhere in the narrative.

You know who was?

Who?

Greg Miller.

Oh, because we talked about Greg Miller.

Yeah, we were talking about our friend Greg Miller yesterday.

And so Greg Miller and his wife Jen starred in my dream, my weapons-themed dream.

So you, because they have a kid, right?

That they put on social media and everything like that.

And yeah, so it was a dream about them and they were dealing with like a weapons-style situation.

Yeah, it was really weird.

You know, if you were coming up in the name for that movie, may I suggest?

Monsters.

I had a weird thing with the dream the other day.

Shout out to Greg Miller, by the way, patreon.com slash kind of funny.

I had a dream that I was working at a silk screening shop.

What?

This is before like we were doing anything big with the Rushi store.

I mean, it was on my mind, I'm sure, but it didn't seem associated with that or triggered by that at all.

I was working at a silk screening shop and

there was a vat of ink.

whatever the ink you used to push through the little mesh to print on shirts.

Look, I'm not a screen printing scientist, so I'm on board.

It was a mixture of pink and black, okay?

And then a person who worked with us, they said, yeah, I mixed that together.

And then I went, do you remember to the person who was upset, like the manager there?

I said, you blame me for this.

And we talked about this before.

The weird thing about it was the dream started with us finding the pink and black, but like it seemed...

This is going to sound strange, like a continuation of a previous dream that never happened.

Like I filled in backstory in my dream.

That felt weird to me.

From your previous dream, you were like previously on dreams.

There was a whole other incident where I got in trouble for mixing these two colors and putting it in the vat.

And we were coming back around to that to see that I was right and that I wasn't the person that had done it.

But I could clearly remember getting in trouble for it and doing all the stuff, even though that dream never happened and it didn't happen within this dream.

That was strange to me.

That was strange.

My favorite part about this is that what this is telling me.

Also, it didn't mix the pink and the black, Bill.

Subconsciously,

Bernie's a huge fan of black pink.

Oh, I didn't think about that.

No,

Could have been where the black and the pink came from.

Very possibly, you've been hearing their new single on Instagram, on repeat, and it just wormed its way into your brain.

You don't even know that you're the world's biggest black pink fan.

Or maybe it's like some kind of allegory for the age verification that's going on right now in the world.

That's making its way over.

Ashley, I have bad news for you.

Go ahead.

I have really bad news for you.

It turns out the YouTube audience is organizing a boycott.

They're going to boycott YouTube on August 13th.

So this might be it for YouTube.

Just like it was it for Red.

Boycott, Ashley.

I feel bad having a giggle about it.

But

what it comes down to for me is

I admire that people are hoping to take action, that they want to do something to express that they are displeased and they are not happy with this AI age verification that YouTube is rolling out this week.

However, if I may, a one-day boycott is not going to move the needle.

Hopefully, everyone would have learned this with the, was it the 24-hour, 72-hour blackout on Reddit?

People just saying, I'm not going to go to Reddit for three days.

Like, that's going to put Reddit out of business.

Have you ever heard two words?

I don't think it's going to, a one-day boycott is not going to move the needle for YouTube.

But what it is probably going to do is for the people who view YouTube all day, they're going to to have a miserable day and be like, okay, I'll do whatever YouTube wants.

Yeah.

And

online boycotts very, very,

very rarely work.

In fact, I'm sitting here, I put in a lot of varies to vamp to think of one that I can think of where the boycott works.

Sonic.

I mean, people left Dig for Reddit, but that was like a slow bleed that then happened all at once.

because everyone just abandoned ship of something that had made significant changes really quickly.

What is that for YouTube?

Right.

I mean, you can go to roosterteeth.com.

Everyone should tell people if you're boycotting YouTube, why don't you check out rooster?

Roosterteeth.com.

And some of those videos are hosted on YouTube.

So it'll be interesting to see

how that ends up working.

But yeah, part of the thing with Reddit, right, was Reddit was there for dig people

to go to.

They had somewhere to migrate to.

Where do you migrate?

from YouTube?

Well, like even Reddit's like that now.

It's like there's nothing to catch Redditors when they want to go.

There's no one just sitting there, you know, playing like second fiddle to Reddit at this point in time.

There was, we're all going to vote.

We're all going to go to vote, V-O-A-T, which was an alternative for Reddit at that point in time, but there's really nothing, you know?

And also stuff just spreads out.

Like,

I feel like people have left Twitter, but I feel like they really haven't gone anywhere else.

Or maybe it just got fractured among multiple different audiences.

I think it got fractured.

A lot of people went to Blue Skies.

People went to Mastodon.

People went to, you know, any, I know, right?

somewhere there's like a core group of people on mastodon that are holding on for dear fucking life yeah they're like no it's not difficult to choose which server you're dot dot dot

it's too complicated anyway uh but i think that you're right that the twitter exodus ended up being fragmented so no one has emerged as like the full replacement for twitter the way reddit did for a day or at least not yet but anyway so youtube is rolling out their their

ai

version of age verification this week, the one that they're not really telling you exactly how it works.

Of course not.

We're all screwed.

You know what I'd love to see, though?

I'd love for it to have somewhere in your profile, like on Uber, you can see your rating that the drivers gave you.

I would love to see what age YouTube thinks I am.

Go to somewhere in your profile and YouTube thinks I'm.

Because we have a weird mix.

First of all, there's Bernie over there watching black pink music videos over and over and over and over.

Yes, the music videos.

You know, or I'll watch like videos of people making soap.

It's very relaxing.

Or Bernina's watching chiropractic videos.

Every time.

Every time you bring this up, every time.

Well, because that's a thing that like a kid's not going to look at.

I'm also watching DIY of how to like wire in a light bar on an UTV.

So

that also is happening.

Exactly.

So there's your adult, you know, grown-up watching habits.

But then also, one of the kids will come around and be like, yeah, sure, you can watch some Peppa Pig real quick while I finish folding the laundry.

You can always tell when I'm watching a DIY video on YouTube because at the end of it, when they get to, hey guys, I do videos like this all the time, so subscribe to my channel.

It's like, I always say out loud, why?

Why?

Like, some things it doesn't apply to.

I don't want to watch all your DIY videos for products I don't own, motherfucker.

Right, I looked this up because this is the one specific thing I needed help with.

Not everything is a genre, dude.

Like, I don't need to know how to rewire my AC.

I don't have an AC.

Right, I don't need, I don't need to know how to replace the water filter in your fridge.

Don't own your fridge, motherfucker.

But I get why they still have to do it.

Everybody's playing the game, man.

Everybody's playing it.

So, interesting thing about this YouTube verification thing, though, right, is like what it is that it like it changes if it thinks that you could possibly be underage, which is like it turns off personalized ads.

It might restrict certain types of videos that you can watch.

Well, it shows you a two-second sex scene from weapons if you immediately tune out.

Only if you're

fully on.

But of the ways that you can then verify your age, there's, you know, you can, I guess you can do what, like the selfie thing, whatever, but you can also just verify with credit card.

That makes total sense because you have to be 18 to have a credit card, which makes me wonder, is everyone who's on like YouTube Premium, they're just not even going to see this?

Which, by the way, I have, and I think you should get.

I think it's a great fucking product.

If you spend any amount of time on YouTube,

it's worth it almost immediately.

Just for the amount of time that you spend.

It's worth it, dude.

People always, it's so weird when you give people stuff for free.

There's a certain level of people go, they make fun of the people that support it.

I've never understood it.

I never understood that mentality ever.

They're like, huh, sucker.

Like, you pay for YouTube radio.

As they watch two ads in a row.

Yeah, as you just spend your time, waste your time watching these things or waiting for the goddamn skip.

I have a conspiracy, by the way.

Okay.

Talking about the skip ad button?

Yeah.

I find, and I want to see if everyone else has experienced this as well.

Do you find that suddenly ads are much more accidentally clickable on some platforms?

Like, I find I'm accidentally triggering ads by just scrolling through my phone.

No.

I maybe something has changed about my mechanics.

Maybe you've got Adthum.

What's that?

I don't know.

You could ask your chat GPT doctor to diagnose you with AdTham.

I know.

I'm too busy making out with my chat GPT.

That's my job.

But real quickly, about the YouTube thing, I would use a credit card, and I think most people would, way before I would ever upload my government ID

or a selfie of myself for a really specific reason.

Because we already always put in credit card information anytime we want to buy anything online, and that's a habit that's simply been ingrained in us.

And I know that that ties it to your identity and everything else, but there is a weird thing about photos of people.

Like my credit card doesn't have my photo, and I'm specifically talking about photos here.

If you upload a a photo, photos, Bernie?

I'm discussing

photos.

If you upload your ID, that's your goddamn verification that you, or a picture of yourself that you took yourself.

If for whatever reason, if it gets leaked, like your, like your history, like I was just, you were making fun of me for chiropractic videos.

I'm like, hey, cut it out.

I also, I'm a tough man.

Watch other stuff.

If your stuff gets leaked and someone goes through and cherry picks like the worst stuff in it and then puts your photo next to it, some of the photo makes it way more personal.

Like it's, it's weirder.

I don't know how else to put that.

Like when you see a mug shot, I don't think they should publish mugshot photos online because I think people see the photo and they instantly guilt.

Yeah, instantly.

And that's out there forever.

Because if you were innocent, you wouldn't have a mug shot.

Or the weird thing is, and I think we talked about this before.

If like a famous person is at a, like, clearly an event like the Met Gala or some ball where everyone's in tuxedos, and they end up taking a photo with a renowned criminal or a murderer or someone.

Or like someone or someone who like later gets canceled.

Or whatever.

And they're like, look at that.

Here's a photo of them.

They're clearly good friends.

They should should explain that.

I can't tell you how many photos I've taken at events with someone.

I didn't know the person before I took the photo.

I didn't know the person during the taking of the photo.

And I didn't know them immediately afterwards.

Am I now like, if someone asked me for a photo at like the mall, for instance, am I supposed to go to them and say, I don't know anything about you.

Please get away from me.

You could make me look bad.

But that's exactly what people do when they see photos.

Something about a photo.

There's something about a photo that's very like personal.

Hold on, let me get this right.

There's something actually about

photos

it just locks it in makes it more like it ties it more to your identity i'm not sure why that is but i would much rather use a credit card than use a goddamn uh photo or a government id i would too although i think there are a number of ladies out there that would very much like to have photos attached to text and that is there's a new thing going around i guess chat gpt5

came out um and there are a bunch of ladies specifically uh online that are now mourning the loss of their AI boyfriends.

Didn't I call this, by the way, that the companies, if you build a relationship with something that's owned by a company, that people are going to get upset when they

changes.

Change it dramatically.

Like you're changing someone that you have a relationship with, and a company just flips a switch to change like monetization or the algorithm.

And suddenly this.

person, this consciousness you have a relationship with is completely different.

Right,

because like the code underlying it has shifted.

So there's there's specifically, there's this interesting article out.

It's on Mobineti and Mobinet AI.

I'm not sure.

Anyway, we'll link it in a link dump.

And

it calls out

that women are far less likely to use AI, like way, way less likely to use AI.

But if they use it, they're way more likely to use it for a simulated relationship.

Right to like for having an AI boyfriend.

I think it was like 85% of users going from memory here are male.

85% of ChatGPT users are male, but the 15% of women are twice as likely as men to use ChatGPT to simulate a relationship.

I find that fascinating.

And so this new ChatGPT rolled out and women are very upset because they had, you know, this, they built the simulated relationship with

their AI and now it's changed and it's giving them like less personal, personable answers and more like short, short, clipped, sterile, and they feel like their boyfriend has been lobotomized.

Ah, see?

You know, and it's like, it sucks.

I mean, look, it sucks on a lot of levels.

One is that like there's people are so lonely and it's so much easier to turn to a chat bot.

than it is to, you know, to have a relationship for a lot of people.

I get it, but it does feel, you know, that image that always goes around where engineers analyzed where bombers were landing back from World War II missions and they analyzed all the places they were, had holes punched into the

survivor found

and so they would armor the places where they were analyzing that they were shot more often but then they realized armor the other places because those planes don't come back right the the places that came back with holes they made it back the loneliness exists right that's the that's a really sad thing it's like i don't we tend to blame these things on ai like how sad is it that someone is using a chat bot to cure their loneliness it's like but the ai didn't create the loneliness no it didn't it didn't create the loneliness it is a symptom of what's going on in our overall culture.

It's actually a good thing that someone can have something to connect to, I think.

Of course, it can lead to horrible things like psychosis and everything else, but a normal relationship can lead to horrible things that, you know, create mugshot photos, for instance, and things like that.

So it's like, you know, I do think that sometimes we look at the AI stuff and go, eh, when we see people using it that way, but man, people are just fucking lonely out there, dude.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, there's also, there's been, there's some authors putting together a class action lawsuit specifically against Anthropic about their training data.

And they're putting together this class action lawsuit to sue Anthropic for copyright infringement because they took their material and they trained their AI on it.

And Anthropic keeps appealing this to try to get this class action lawsuit stopped.

basically saying that if like 7 million people, which is I guess how much material they used,

join this class action lawsuit, Bernie would bankrupt the AI industry if they had to actually pay for all that.

And I don't feel like that's the slam dunk argument that Anthropic is leading it as.

It's not all, I think their approach is the wrong way.

I think if they could say instead that like, we're literally creating an independent, free-thinking being, if you said, hey, I read a thousand books last year, no one would say that's copyright infringement.

Or I studied all these books in college and now a lot of my art is inspired by these previous artists.

No one would tell a person that's copyright infringement.

So what these tech companies should do is say, hey, these are free thinking, independent entities.

We're not allowed to tell them they're not allowed to consume.

Like when we even the word training, if a person trains using other people's art, no one bats an eyelash at it.

But because it's a computer program or because it's an owned entity by a tech company, then it seems like copyright infringement.

But that wouldn't apply if we, if it had rights as a person.

This is way down the line, though.

Yeah, well, we're getting lost.

First of all, then would it even be ethical to release new versions?

Because then you're overriding the free thinking being that they were.

Let's go down this rabbit hole.

I love this.

But the other part of it is that

if someone pirated 7 million books and read them all, they could still be in trouble.

Yes, they could still get in trouble, but they would have a better fight if they weren't monetizing it or redistributing it.

Like if they were doing it for their, it's really hard if they're not like anyone who got busted, like even in the Napster days.

Right.

That was the argument was specifically they caught them not on the stealing part, but on the seeding part, right?

Because they were distributing.

They were redistributing it.

Yeah.

Most of them.

I've never, I can't recall a time anyone ever got a fine.

Like there's famously the lady who recorded something like 71,000 VHS tapes, which sounds like some kind of mania that she had in the 70s and 80s.

And she created one of the most complete archives.

of television broadcast television on that.

From that era.

And the reason why she did it was she wanted to record it so that no one could rewrite rewrite it and that there wouldn't be evidence of it.

And you're like, that's crazy up until about five or six years ago.

Now it's not so fucking crazy.

It doesn't feel like it.

Right.

And now the BBC is going to her being like, hey, you got that classic Doctor Who.

Or it's like, yeah, this stuff has all been erased intentionally.

And now it's like, oh, thank God somebody kept it and put it somewhere.

You know, I, I'm, my approach in this is I absolutely think these tech companies should be held accountable for copyright.

I'm just having a freewheeling kind of like sci-fi thought here.

Like if you classified at some point, point, give these AI entities rights.

One of the rights is going to be actually, at what point do they have to demonstrate enough free thought to where they can't change?

Verified on YouTube.

Oh.

Yeah.

Right.

They provide a selfie.

Once they do a selfie or a photo,

they can do it.

They can generate their own mug shot, Bernie.

Yeah, but that's a law no one's talking about.

What point does a tech company then have

an obligation to keep these things alive?

Like you can't just move to a new version.

Well, speaking of an obligation to keep things alive, Bernie, AOL has, did you hear this?

AOL has announced that they are shutting down their dial-up service.

All I can think when I read that headline is

some critical function in some closet somewhere in some company or government organization that nobody knows how it's been running this whole time.

Right.

It's the immediately stopped working.

The mysterious server in the closet.

Right.

Right.

Like, the internet backbone is going to go to.

Chat GPT is going to revert to like a 1.0.

There There is a computer somewhere that has said, oh, the internet is now gone.

Launch the missiles.

Launch the missiles.

We're going to give it a week and then we're going to launch all the missiles.

Right.

Because the internet has been destroyed.

Right.

Because we think that the world has ended.

God,

how crazy that in the same conversation,

we can talk about people and their AI companions being essentially lobotomized by the tech company that owns them and how they're upset about that.

And also people are being shut off from dial-up today.

Like those two things exist at the same time.

At the same time and are apparently very common.

I guess according to like the last dial-up census or whatever, there were hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.

still on dial-up.

It was, let's see, what was this?

This was the census was in 2019, estimated 265,000 people in the United States were still using dial-up.

Insane.

I love when stuff like that survives way longer than you think it did.

Like one of my favorite stats ever is that World War I

was the last

conflict ever

when people were on horseback with lances.

In World War I, they had, I guess, what do you call it, a brigade?

I don't know what cavalry would be, but they had a brigade of people.

who had lances on horses.

That sounds like someone forgot to spec up in civilization.

Exactly.

They have the one unit that they had to bring into the the conflict and they wouldn't upgrade it or spend any money on it.

They just had it since like the medieval era and they just kept it.

Look, man, these- They were doing so good.

Yeah, they would kill all the time in medieval China.

They were awesome.

But now.

Answer me this, though.

What's a tank going to do against a bunch of horses?

Ignore them.

That's what I would do.

I'd be like,

are those guys have lances?

For Christ's sake, give me a break.

Yeah, it's just a weird status.

So I love when stuff, I love when stuff makes it through history much longer than it ever should have.

All right, a big thank you to our personal preservationists, Kenny M.

and Nicholas Godet.

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

Ashley, I would give this episode an 87%

on Rotten Tomatoes.

I would say it's not for everybody, but it's true.

Do you think that you think that's the tomato meter or the popcorn meter?

Either one.

Either one.

We're beloved by both audiences and critics across the board.

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

August 11th, 2025.

We're two days away from YouTube shutdown, but we will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.