2025.08.04: War Of The Worst

I looked him straight in the eye and I said my number one goal is to never watch porn again.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

My goal is never to be one again.

Good!

Good morning to you!

Wherever you are!

Morning Setworth!

For August 4th, 2025,

my name is Bernie Burns sitting right over there.

She stepped on my line.

It's Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley.

Well, I think we all have a lot of questions after that intro.

I like that you interrupted me and threw me completely off my flow.

And yet it's still one of the only times I got the date right.

I think I got the date right only.

We're going to just say that you did.

It has been, we're going to be a little punchy today.

It has been a very long weekend, working weekend.

Sort of, we had a good day yesterday where we had the whole morning.

We went to the park with the kids.

That was dope.

That was fun.

It was a good park.

We might just take some time, go to a good park.

We did a little drive.

We took a drive.

And then we went to a called Keith.

That's the name of the town.

I love towns that are just like, my name's Keith.

So I got to warn you, everybody, this

week, especially this week in general, these will probably be shorter episodes, and we might seem just like.

We might seem out of it because, well, we are.

Be like a drive by.

Let's just say there's a lot going on.

We're just like driving by with our windows down, like yelling things at you.

It's a short, hot mess of an episode.

This is my impression of our episodes coming this week.

Cheers, the Trump Days of Stewie.

That's what we're going to sound like all week.

But I made a mistake this weekend where

because

of turning all the dials back up on Rooster Teeth, I've had to go into stuff that I've had to lately.

I've intentionally had to leave it alone until it's ready to go.

But that means all of a sudden I got all these little assets I got to put in all these little different places and things like that.

One of the platforms I had to look at was

X, one of these platforms that I have been very very grateful to be able to ignore for the last six years now at this point.

It's been great, man.

Yeah, it's been great.

It's been great.

I went in there, spent some time in there.

Wow.

It doesn't matter what the topic is at all.

If you click on a post and you start to read the replies, it is anger and mayhem the whole way through there.

I don't know how people can work at that company.

And because they must be awash in that stuff all the time.

And it seems like everyone everywhere is super mad about everything all the time.

Well, and the, the, I don't go on it very much anymore.

I've managed to break the sort of muscle memory that would automatically open it as part of my, I don't know, scroll flow.

I find now if I ever open it, I look at, like, get referenced to a tweet or something, the number one response is always, like, Grok, can you explain this to me?

And just name the platform Grok at this point.

It's, well, it's interesting because didn't didn't Elon Musk try at one point to get out of buying Twitter because he said that the numbers were inflated by bots?

You know what the weird thing was about that too?

Is

that he was going to buy it?

He then said, there's too many bots on this thing.

And then ended up making him like a master bot that runs the whole fucking thing, right?

Yeah.

But then there was, remember?

He was trying to get out of it.

He wasn't going to buy it.

And the people who made the platform go, no, you have to buy it.

It was a really weird sort of turn of events where yeah he was like i'm gonna buy it and they were like we're absolutely not letting you buy this we're we're enacting some poison pill protocol we're gonna make it so you can't buy this and then he's like and then he goes no there's too many bots i'm not gonna buy this and they're like no you have to buy this now you absolutely have to buy this he goes i don't want to buy this there's too many bots they make him buy this and he goes you know what this platform could really use is a bot they must push that to the top right because every reply first reply to every post, it doesn't matter what it is.

Someone could be saying, here's a picture of the sandwich that I had for lunch.

And someone says, at Grock, what kind of sandwich is that?

Or explain what a sandwich is to me.

Define a sandwich.

It's insane.

What counts as a sandwich?

It's insane.

It's just like, and I think probably what they're doing is by pushing those replies to the top is encouraging people.

to then

use use the bot sure yeah use the ai quote unquote ai to tell them what's going on but it's insane how much hand-holding that people need.

It's absolutely insane.

The big thing is, though, when I was a kid, Ashley, things were simple.

You liked Xbox or you liked PlayStation or you liked Star Trek or you liked Star Wars or you liked Elvis or you liked the Beatles.

Right.

The lines in these wars were fairly straightforward.

It was very clear.

It was very clear.

Now people are arguing.

They are arguing about which...

Superman is better and why this Superman should die and how mathematically the current Superman can't beat the last Superman.

And good.

And people are mad about different versions of the same goddamn thing.

It's crazy.

Even like, have you seen the debate about Fantastic Four, whether it's a hit or not?

Yeah, yeah, I did because you sent me,

you sent me a link to an article that was saying, oh, Fantastic Four is braced for this huge second weekend drop, like 66% drop, something like that.

Meanwhile, the headline that I had read was, Fantastic Four

keeps its number one spot at the top of the box office and crosses 394 million globally.

So the headline I read made it sound like Fantastic Four is doing great.

The headline you read made it sound like Fantastic Four is an absolute nightmare.

Yeah, that was on Friday that I sent that out because it was just like, oh, wow, it had a 66% drop.

Which, by the way, once you read the article, it was like, so did the last few Marvel movies.

Although Thunderbolts had slightly less because they had that big spoiler reveal after their opening weekend.

So they think that helped.

Did that help or did that just tell everyone and go, okay, now I've seen it.

Okay.

Make sure I've got everything I needed.

For Fantastic Four, they should have said updated it to five

baby or whatever.

But, you know, yeah, so I, it's,

you kind of see whatever people want it to be, right?

The lines in the war aren't nearly as clear anymore.

And listen, I don't think I'm clicking on angry stuff.

I just, it could be the most innocuous thing, like talking about box office for a goddamn Marvel movie.

and then you click on it and then you get the eck rock what does four mean you know and then you have a bunch of people just screaming at each other and like telling each other people each other to leave the country because they like the current version of superman the fuck out of here Jason uh

uh oftentimes a guest host on this podcast he wrote me and goes what was all the woke stuff they were talking about with superman i just saw it what were they even talking about i don't even know i don't even know who knows i i'm at this point i sort of intentionally tune out a lot of that conversation because i'm going to, you know what?

I'm just going to sit down and I'm going to like Superman.

I'm going to like a movie about Superman doing Superman stuff.

And I'm not going to make it the cornerstone of my identity, okay?

I already have K-pop demon hunters for that.

While we're talking about percentage drops and things like that, there is a ranking now, a score for a current production that makes me want to see it.

So bad.

Ashley, I sent you a link.

Okay.

That is the Rotten Tomatoes link to the new Ice Cube War of the Worlds.

We talked about this very briefly.

We did.

We did.

This is the one that's an Amazon Prime show.

Oh, my God.

It has a.

Oh, my God.

It has a 0%.

0%.

And it's.

And Rotten Tomatoes.

And it's a 12% popcorn meter.

Bernie, I need to see this.

I know, right?

I knew you would.

I knew you would.

I need to see this.

So we should do a watch party this week.

I don't want to have time.

I'm not going to have any time to watch anything this week, but there's like, there's a line, right?

There's got to be a line.

There's the Madam Webb line, which is like, to, I'm not going to bother myself with this.

And then there's this, which is, I must watch this immediately.

It's really interesting you bring that up because apparently now War of the Worlds has taken the crown from Madam Webb on Letterboxd as the lowest rated movie on there or production, whatever you want to call it.

I've got to see it.

Can we just call everything movies, right?

Film movie, sure.

We used to call it, see, that was the problem.

We used to call stuff films, but nothing's on film anymore.

A lot of stuff is

rejected on film.

I feel like now film

is that's a specific term for people who

think of movies as like they need to be in art form, that sort of thing.

They like film.

They're really into film.

Me, I'm into movies.

Yeah.

Which is which is a distinction, I think.

Do you ever use the term features?

Does that mean anything to you?

No.

I know it's a feature production and that means it's a full-length feature production and it's a movie.

So walk me through the glossary here.

So movie means it's like you sit down and watch one iteration and it's a movie.

Yeah, well, I feel like it's the full length, right?

It's the, you know, 90 minutes to four hours or however long we're doing at any given time.

But it's like, it's one thing, right?

It's not multiple episodes of a thing in order to.

Encapsulate it.

Yes.

Okay.

That doesn't count like the second movie in a...

three-part trilogy, though.

No, you can look, but that's also, it comes out and it is its own episode, right?

Like it's its own film.

It tells a story and then you move on to the next story in the film.

If it bombed, then you would just never know what happened.

Right.

Unless it bombs hard enough and then I'm definitely going to see it.

I guess they just got away with Han Solo and that was it.

Okay.

And then what do you call like a digital series?

You just call it a series?

I call it a series.

Series and movies.

That's our word.

Yeah.

Whether the series is a streaming series or from broadcast television network, they're still series to me.

Okay, what about this one?

Because correct me if I'm wrong, you've got the Rotten Tomatoes entry up in front of you.

Is War of the Worlds not a movie on a digital platform?

Like it's a digital movie.

It is.

It's a movie.

Okay, it's a movie.

It's a movie.

So these are all movies.

Yes.

Okay.

So this is a movie.

This is an hour and 29-minute runtime movie.

Can I say something to you?

There's all these photos on the web this weekend, people going fucking ape shit about the new Spider-Man costume.

Has this made its way into your feed?

Sort of, but what made its way into my feed, this, I swear, it was watching us, right?

The algorithm was watching us.

It was watching us make fun of the 20-second title reveal for the Masters of the Universe movie, which is just

the saying Masters of the Universe in a bunch of languages for 20 seconds.

That's a complete story.

That becomes it.

Is that a movie?

I've watched it.

The Masters of the Universe title movie.

It definitely had an end.

But so

then I got

what came up in my feed, I guess, was an eight second

teaser video for a Spider-Man suit.

It was like, it's a brand new day or something.

That was the text that went with the link.

And I was like, ooh, watch, this is like so exciting.

We're going to have like a reveal teaser, whatever.

I watched it and it was just a couple close-ups of the Spider-Man suit.

And I was like, what the fuck is this?

And I sent it to you because I was so mad about it.

Like, is that...

Is eight seconds of a Spider-Man suit,

including, by the way, that eight seconds, I think, included the

date line for when the movie's going to be out.

Is that worse than 20 seconds of a movie title?

No, the movie title's weirder.

Because if you had to click on a picture of the suit to see the suit movie, then maybe.

But you have to click on the actual title of the movie to see the title reveal.

The title reveal.

It's just like, what is the point of that goddamn thing?

Yeah, so I guess everyone is now going apeshit over.

What about Spider-Man's suit for the new movie?

What's your impression of the new suit?

Having seen it now and it's like, oh my God, new Spider-Man suit.

What's your impression?

It looks like Spider-Man.

It looks like Spider-Man.

Look, Spider-Man Die-Harsharas.

Am I not understanding the nuance of a Spider-Man suit?

Look, Spider-Man Diehara is will can hate me for this and that's fine, but I'm I love Spider-Man.

I think Spider-Man's a great character.

I enjoy Spider-Man via the movies.

Not the, you know, I, I don't read the Spider-Man comics and all that.

So my exposure to Spider-Man is pretty movie-based or Spidey and his amazing friends on Disney Plus, because that's what Finn watches.

It's Spider-Man.

If I can be like, that's Spider-Man, then I'm not going to be like, oh, well, this was clearly the ultimate Spider-Man suit, and that means this for the movie.

I have no clue about that.

I just go, I go, it looks like Spider-Man and it looks cool.

I can tell the logo is different.

I can tell it's not the shiny, like, one that Tony Stark made for him in Endgame.

But it might as well to me be the exact same suit he wore in Homecoming.

You know, it's not the original, like, goofy one he makes in his closet or whatever.

But like, it, it looks like a Spider-Man suit to me.

And everyone's happily freaking out about the suit and how cool the suit is.

I do recognize the logo on the chest is a little bit different, but overall, I'm just like, it's lost on me.

The nuance is a little bit different.

Right.

I'm like, Spider-Man.

Like, Spider-Man, do a flip.

That's, that's me over there, okay?

Benedict Cummerbatch recently was in the news because he was talking about how he never wanted to waste food again or go back into the

Marvel system of getting in shape to play a Marvel character.

And I was thinking, Ben did it Cumberbatch?

Was Doctor Strange like a ripped?

Do you think of like,

didn't you see his muscle suit?

Seriously, I mean, it was like, of all the people to talk about that.

Actually, from what I understand, there was a lot more nuance to what he was saying because he did have to build a lot of strength because of the wire work he did.

Okay, for me.

You had to build a lot of like core strength and I guess limb strength in order to be able to hold your body

so that it didn't look like you're hanging off a bunch of wires as you're floating in the air.

So he's in an interview saying, I don't ever want to be strong.

Is that what he said?

I think he said that it was great, but that he felt like he was eating enormous amounts of food and he felt to a degree kind of wasteful about it.

But he also in that interview was like, oh, it was great.

So do you want to see War of the Worlds this week?

Oh my God, I have to see this movie.

I have to see it just

to see it, just to understand.

It honestly, it probably, because it's a zero, I'm going to like it so much more because my expectations are going to be like a bunch of people.

They're going to be on the floor, right?

Right.

Yeah.

And I love that.

I love when I can go in and just, I don't need to expect it to be good and I'll enjoy whatever I get out of it.

It's going to be awesome.

Is 0% means nobody liked it or there's nothing redeeming?

Well, that's the tricky thing about the tomato meter is it means that no one said it's a great movie.

No one said it's a zero.

Okay.

Right.

But the way the tomato meter works

for the critical rating, whatever, is I think like if it doesn't hit a certain threshold for a review, like I don't know, three out of five stars, then it's basically a zero.

Now we're going to fight about that, about how we rank movies and things.

How are we going to keep fighting?

I'll fight you.

I'm going to get on my ninja sword, except I can't.

Because we're in the UK, Bernie.

No more ninja swords.

Yes, our ninja swords were banned this last week.

Yeah, so there's like...

But I missed the deadline to turn in my ninja sword.

Yeah,

I didn't realize this was happening until I saw UK Ninja Sword ban begins as 1,000 weapons are surrendered in a knife crime crackdown, which first of all, I feel like the swords themselves would be really offended if you called them knives.

Right.

All right, don't do that.

Well, do you remember what the ban for knives was before this one?

I know that we, yes, I know that machetes were involved.

But you remember what they were called?

No.

They were called zombie.

Oh, that's right.

So they banned the zombie knives.

Now they got the ninja knives.

It's like sorcerers.

Watch out.

They're coming.

Wizards are next.

I'm coming for you.

We're coming for wands.

They're coming for the vampire stakes at some point.

But yeah, so

I guess the crackdown on bladed weapons continues to expand in the UK.

And so a bunch of people went and turned in their ninja swords.

Do you get something for turning it in?

Are you just being a good Samaritan?

Let's see.

You're being part of the solution.

And let me ask you this while you're looking that up.

Does this affect the ability for K-poppers to fight demons?

Do they use ninja swords?

Well, I don't know.

I don't know how that works because they summon Bernie.

They summon their blades from the Hanmoon, right?

So their blades are sort of like ethereal, right?

They just like, they don't have a blade and then they've got their blades.

If the blades then vanish again, there's really nothing to turn in.

At Grok, what is

Hanmun?

Like, by the way, that movie, that movie is not suffering a box office drop.

I have to tell you, it like hit a new peak viewing in like its fifth week.

It's headed for the top 10 of all time on Netflix.

It is now the number one animated film on Netflix of all time.

So I'm just saying, remember when I told everyone, like when it came out, I was like, if you haven't heard about K-pop demon hunters, you're going to be hearing about K-pop demon hunters.

Yeah.

I was right.

I don't know what a ninja sword is.

Do you know what a ninja sword is?

Aren't they using, aren't they referring to a samurai sword?

Or a katana?

I have to assume so, but maybe ninja sword is this specific variety that you get from like a mall kiosk.

Go ahead.

Oh, we'll see.

Okay.

That's it.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, I know zombie machetes don't have a specific classification.

A mall ninja sword.

Oh, do you want to hear about funny classifications while we're talking about banning stuff?

Let's please.

So

this turns out funny.

It starts off kind of, ugh, but it gets funny, trust me.

So the UK, this is one of those things where we're talking about censorship again, right?

So the UK now has proposed a ban on barely legal porn.

And it's one of those things where as a person.

in the court of public opinion, you hear barely legal porn, you go, ugh.

But from a legal standpoint, barely legal just means legal.

That's what that means, right?

And so, and people are saying this, saying, well, it's, it's by its name, it is legal, but they describe it as barely legal to make it titillating.

And yeah, you can all go, and I do, go, uh, when you hear that, but the government doesn't really get to go

on stuff like that.

So what are they banning?

They're banning legal porn.

Legal porn.

So they're changing then what is a lot, like what they're changing what's legal.

It's just going to move the line, right?

And then so then the next thing closest to that will be the tip.

It will be barely legal.

Yeah, exactly right.

They try to push or whatever.

But this kind of already happened once before.

And I got to read this Jezebel article to you because it's ridiculous.

It's one of these unintended consequences, one of these like

side effects that can happen when you do something.

And this is from an Australian ban where they tried to do something similar.

They had an act.

As you know, they were one of the first people to ban social media for teens.

That's we first started talking about this.

With Australia, yeah.

And in fact, they just

rolled out, they included YouTube in their new ban.

Well, I should say relevant too.

Like China just said they have completely banned OnlyFans, specifically because it is, I'm paraphrasing here, a Western cultural disease.

And so, but that doesn't really, like, we don't talk about that kind of thing because it doesn't really apply to us.

Australia is kind of more relevant, I think, to our culture.

And they banned barely legal porn in the past.

They did it in the late 2000s.

Were they, uh, were they barely, how, how old were the teens, Bernie?

Oh, I was five.

Were they like, were we talking like 18?

It was 2019.

It was five.

So this was a, this was a barely legal teens.

It was 2019.

It was legal, but it was barely legal.

It was 2019.

So they banned this.

And then one of the unintended consequences of that is that porn actresses who had a size

a cup size breasts could no longer get work because

then they might look young.

Okay, first of all, I feel like we need to explain to everyone that that's not how boobs work, right?

They don't continue to, they're not like noses.

They don't continue growing as you age, right?

That's not a thing.

You can't look at someone and go, oh, they're young because boob's small.

Yeah, but you get how they would get to that point, right?

I do.

I absolutely see how that would, like, it doesn't make any sense, but I see why that's a thing.

So, this is from the Jezebel article, which goes all the way back to 2010.

That's how far back this goes.

So my dates were even wrong.

The problem is in how the decisions are made, using what kinds of information.

Australian sex party spokesman Fyoda Patton claims, we are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size.

It may be an unintended consequence of the senator's actions, but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines as of late.

How largely responsible would you say?

Would you say like, are they like D-responsible, like double D-responsible?

I just like you're trying to like make everybody like have this censorship to make, you know, society more puritanical.

And all you ended up doing was turning all of Australian into like big boob gooners.

It's the only

consequence of this stuff.

Because when you stop, you know what I mean?

It's like, it's like everything in censorship.

You kind of try to pull that pendulum back your direction, but then you don't realize that the pendulum just keeps going past you.

And you're like, like, oh, and wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We're going too far.

Not this stuff, but you lose control of it.

Right.

You may not have realized how much momentum that pendulum had going.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When it was swinging back your direction.

Took a lot of work to get it coming back this way, but it also takes a lot of work to get it to stop as well.

Is that why?

Is that why the like long socks are making a comeback?

We're getting puritanical about everything.

Right.

It's got to cover those ankles.

We're all now doing age verification everywhere.

It's like now I have to have Norman Reedas with a bigger than eight cup-sized boobs for my age verification, I guess.

Maybe I can use Grok.

We'll bring everything back around.

I can use Grok to make my Norman Ritas fake age verification photo have bigger than eight cup sized boobs.

Right.

You just got to make everything really clear.

It's ridiculous.

Otherwise, it won't fool the algorithm.

The algorithm will see right through it, Ash.

All right.

Well, I want to say a big thank you to our fully legal supporters, Martendo64 and Aaron Carlson.

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

Their name is Martendo?

Martendo.

I love it.

I love it.

All right.

Well, that does it for us today, August 4th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.