2025.07.29: Women and Age Unverified People First

And I call it the life-changing magic of not giving a fuck.

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We're recording the podcast!

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

For July 29th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

She's practicing her magic arts.

It's Ashley Burns.

I had Ashley, everybody.

Oh, oh, it's magic.

Are you, you strike me as a person who doesn't give a fuck a lot.

Well, it depends.

Sometimes I give lots of fucks and sometimes I, that takes too much energy.

I saw a video where I really cared a lot when I watched the video, which was, it was two videos back to back.

It was an American Airlines plane flight that the wheels caught on fire, something caught on fire underneath the plane, and it was from outside the plane.

You were watching people come down the slide, and and there was an exceptional amount of time between each person coming down the slide.

Like that's aggravating.

You could count to five.

Did everyone remember to take their high heels off?

Everyone was too busy like completely covered in their carry-on luggage.

Like they had some of these people had so much carry-on luggage around them.

I'm like, how did you even get that on the plane?

How did you get on with that amount?

Right.

There's, there is a restriction going on the plane of like, theoretically, you have your one carry-on and you have your one bag that you can pretend can fit under the seat in front of you, right?

That's still two things.

But it's not like all over you.

I mean, they looked almost like cartoons.

Some of them had like three or four duffel bags on them.

So it sounds to me like someone was practicing

that thing where you wear every layer of clothes you have

because then it doesn't count as luggage.

And some of them, and you could count too, like I was trying to get, the logistics of that is interesting because you could be in that scenario at some point.

Sure enough, you would see a long gap and the person would be coming out with a bag.

Like, people are like, well, I'm right here.

I'm in the aisle.

We're supposed to evacuate, but I'm right next to my bag.

I'm just might as well grab it.

Even as someone who travels all the time, I get that mentality, but I also know just how many times I've been taking a rolling bag down the aisle in a non-emergency situation, and it catches on something or it bangs on something, and it slows me down by like two seconds.

You multiply two seconds by 300 fucking people or whatever.

It's a lot of time.

It's a lot of time when you're evacuating a a plane that is on fire for Christ's sake.

Yeah.

And, you know, I've heard people as well say, like, I've got, I carry medications.

I have all these things.

I'm going to grab them if I'm getting off the plane.

If the plane's on fire, I think we can, once fire and like an actual fire is involved, not like someone misbehaved and now we all have to get off the plane.

Once fire is involved, I think we just get off the plane, right?

Well, also, if you need a medication to stay alive, I would think you would have a way to keep that on you at all times.

Like not just close to you or whatever.

I bet the person who has that life-saving medication in their bag just happens to have their smartphone in their pocket, right?

Like, somehow that made it into their pocket, but their life-saving medication did not.

I will say, I've got a new best friend, right?

And this could help very much with that.

And maybe it could even be a third carryout.

This is a hack for everybody, which is I'm now adopting the youth fashion of wearing like a fanny pack or a bum bag cross-shoulder, right?

So, you have it over one shoulder and under like, under the other.

And so it's like slung across you, but it's really stylish.

It's a look, y'all.

It's a look, but it's a very convenient look because I have all my stuff in front of me.

Like I've got a mama kangaroo pouch, except stylish.

And I've got my phone in it, and I've got my lip gloss, and I've got mints for you.

And I'm sure I've got a snack bar for the kids or something in there.

But trust me, it's stylish.

But the thing is, it's attached to you, right?

One of the things that

I sometimes have trouble with is when you're a a mother and you have a handbag.

That handbag is literally carrying, like, I don't need a carry-on on an airplane because that thing already has everything I need to serve for me and my family to survive for like a week.

Right.

Okay, there's a tent in there.

There is, there's like food, there's supplies, there's supplies of water, there's like everything that you could need is in that bag.

I love that line in the office when they're in a wedding or they're in a church and he taps on the mom's shoulder, Pam's mom's shoulder, and she goes, you're a mom, do you have any snacks?

She goes, yeah, what do you want?

It's a thing.

You just, you have, it's, you come prepared at all times, but that's really heavy.

So when we had a day out the other day, I decided to downsize it to just the, once again, very stylish bag across the shoulder.

And so I had my, the most important things.

I had the phone, I had the life-saving medications and the lip gloss and the mints, of course, because the mints are very important.

Mints are important.

I've been drinking a lot of coffee lately.

I think that's what's making the mints so goddamn important.

And it was nice because I had all those things physically attached to me, but

I didn't have to like put it down on the ground when we sat down at a table or something because it's just right there.

It's just a kangaroo pouch.

Yeah,

the other video was sent in by one of our subreddit users, Limpamphibian8592.

Adjective noun, lots of numbers.

And it was a video from inside of a plane where people were trying to be evacuated from the plane because a laptop battery caught on fire.

And people in the subreddit comments were informing me that lithium fumes, when they're burning,

pretty dangerous stuff to be around.

And there's a guy coming back down the aisle to get his bag.

Oh, because he stowed his stuff like three aisles back.

And so now he's going back to get it.

Yeah, yeah.

And he was just like fighting with the flight attendants and stuff like that and arguing with them.

And it's just, it's infuriating to watch it while everyone's trying to get off the plane.

You don't understand.

my cloud backups aren't done.

I'm gonna lose the progress on my PowerPoint.

You ever see when flight attendants go into emergency mode and they just start yelling one thing over and over again, like brace, spray, sprays.

And that's what she's yelling the whole time is like, go forward, go forward, go forward, like over and over and over again.

If you say it enough times, people will listen and do the thing.

You would think so.

Or just, it doesn't apply to me.

And like everyone's like pointing and stuff, like, get this for me, get that for me, whatever.

It's just, that's a situation which I'd be just absolutely infuriated to be in that situation already a stressful situation it can get so much worse which you'd think it would be one of those things where you'd you'd see the people running off the plane and then there's like three or four people just like duking it out on the tarmac

because they're furious didn't see any emotional support animals though interesting okay no no no no like small horses coming down the slide that'll be one of the emotional support turtles i would be trapped behind the person with the dog and the dog is too scared to go down the slide so we have to like talk the dog into going Right, and so I'm like, oh, oh, Muffy, come on.

And that's what I just like collar, belt, throw people off.

Flight attendants should be able to do.

Just grab you and chuck you off the plane.

That's going to be one of those new like fitness tests for a flight attendant.

Can you lift a person and throw them off the plane?

Yeah, yeah.

And it was really interesting to see people who took like five or six seconds to get off, you know, to take their turn on the slide to then run away frantically from the plane once they're off.

And if you have life-saving medication, consider the stylish bum bag.

Asthma medication.

That would be a good example of one you would have to have, especially in that scenario.

Or EpiPen or something like that.

An EpiPen.

Totally get it.

Maybe not an EpiPen.

I don't know what you're going to do.

You're not going to jump off the slide and immediately start chowing down on peanuts or.

What if you're allergic to latex?

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, you got one.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

It is a life-saving medication that you would need within a moment.

So better to have it on you than not.

But asthma was a good one I could see where people would need that for sure.

And speaking of safety and restrictions and what the hell is going on with them.

So the UK continues its rollout of its online safety act.

We've seen this already.

Reddit, Discord, a bunch of other sites have started doing their upload a picture of Norman Reedas to verify that you're over 18 stuff.

And now, guess what, Bernie?

No one could have called this.

No one knew that this was a possibility, but VPNs are on the rise.

Shocking.

And now the UK is like, do we ban VPNs?

This is a thing that they're considering because the VPNs have seen like an 1800% uptick.

They're all right now at the top of like the UK app stores, right?

And everyone's like,

who could have seen this coming?

This is basically every time.

like federal government on any level implements a technology law, there's usually about a $10 a month workaround.

Imagine if that was the case for every law.

Like if you could get around murder for about $10 a month or speed limits, if you pay $10 a month to this company, you can go whatever speed you want to.

Right.

It happens time and time and time again.

Even after we were looking at this, I said, how do we invest in a VPN company?

Like, are there public VPNs?

Right, yeah, are there like publicly traded VPN companies?

Because we knew before this even kicked in, we're like, God, VPNs are just going to go through the freaking roof.

So if we do turn on ads on this podcast podcast later this week, it'll be like five VPNs

in a row.

In a row.

Have you gotten one yet?

Because we live in the UK.

Have you?

I haven't, but I keep waiting for them to come up.

I mean, maybe I have been too boring and haven't been attempting to access adult content or just the camera on my laptop can see my stylish kangaroo pouch and goes, oh, yeah, no one under 18 would do that.

Do you know?

I have hit it.

Do you know where I hit it?

Where did you you hit it?

I hit it because I was looking at our candidates for moderator on the subreddit.

Congratulations to Floppy Disk Repair and Calvin P for being elected by their fellow community members as the moderators of the subreddit.

And one of the candidates had a not-safe for work profile.

And that's where I ran into it.

I went to go read up on them, you know, make sure that these were people that we wanted to have representing our community on Reddit.

And I went and looked them up, and they had a not-safe work profile.

So it prompted me for my age.

I can't tell you where I've been expecting it to come up because Xbox is, I guess, they're now starting their age verification compliance.

And because we are in the UK, I keep expecting it to come up, but I'm not certain it will because our Xbox accounts are still US-based accounts.

So I'm not 100% sure if we're going to get that.

But basically, now any Xbox player in the UK who has an adult account is going to have have to

verify their age as well.

So I'm waiting for that one to come up.

Maybe because I've been resuming as opposed to logging in or because it's a US-based account, we're not going to have to deal with it, but I'm waiting for it because that's another thing.

It's a weird thing too, because like all the

like what it does on Xbox is apparently it just makes it so your like voice chat and all that stuff is friends only unless you confirm that you are an adult.

Basically, the parental controls that are already there, it uses them.

And that's the thing that's kind of annoying about a lot of this is

parental controls are already a part of just about every platform, right?

Like we're not letting the kids just watch like any sort of YouTube stuff, right?

We can say only this kind of YouTube stuff.

Right.

Or like, you know, we pay attention to what they're watching and we say, no, you can go on Netflix kids.

You don't get to watch grown-up netflix like their parental controls are already a thing yeah we've been through this in different variations over the years in really big markets the problem the uk is going to face is the uk is not the eu right they're not that size it's significant it's about 65 million people but at the same time what you're going to get is

you're going to get these first of all gates that now you have to go through on each one and prove someone will probably be smart and make some kind of universal thing that applies to different websites.

But really, what you're going to see is the big companies are going to go along with it, and there'll be meetings in smaller companies going, Hey, for

users coming from the UK,

we have to put in this like special feature and identify that they're coming from the UK.

And then we got to send them to this like tributary where they have to provide credentials and selfies and things like that.

And someone's just going to go, just turn it off.

Yeah, it's that market share is can, there's no way that that small percentage of market share can make up for the expense outlay that we would have to do to comply.

And it's going to matter to companies like Reddit and YouTube, but there'll be a lot of companies, I mean, anyone outside of the UK who just looks at what is the percentage of traffic they receive from the UK.

And it's like, it's like two or three percent.

They're going to be like, oh, God, no, just shut them off.

Just block it.

Yeah.

We run into that on a regular basis already because of privacy stuff.

Right.

With the GD GDPR stuff, there are a lot of small sites that it's not financially worth it for them to comply with all the GDPR requirements.

Guess how we get around that?

VPN.

But we run it all the time.

And they are blocking the entirety of the EU, which is the same size as the U.S.

market.

A much larger market.

The EU and the UK, I should specify, because now those are two different things.

And they turn all of that off.

So if it's just the UK, you're going to see more and more sites just going, yeah, just

know.

Or if they're really worth it to have come visit our site, they'll probably have a VPN.

So just turn it off.

Right.

Like

everyone already has one now.

Like this is now a VPN-based country.

Right.

Like I said just now, I said some company will be really smart and come up with like a universal way to do that.

That's what VPNs are.

Like, and I can imagine people being in rooms going, look, if this is a real savvy user and a customer that we want to have coming to visit our site, they're probably smart enough to have a VPN.

And if they don't, they're probably a kid or they don't want to spend money to even have a VPN.

Let's not worry about it.

Just shut it off.

Just terminate all traffic from the UK.

Also worth noting, probably the kids are going to be the first ones to figure out all the workarounds.

100%.

It's like pest control.

No offense.

We were all kids.

We've all like been teenagers being like, this is stupid and getting around everything.

And then it becomes whackable.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

You like, you don't like see ants and go like, oh, I stepped on a few ants.

That problem is solved forever.

No, kids have, kids have nothing but time, right?

They have nothing but time.

Time is not an enormously precious resource to kids the way it is to adults.

They figure out how to get around this stuff and they're also smarter and more adaptive.

I mean, look, this whole like Norman Ritas workaround thing took, what, hours maximum?

And it's just like, just the first of what I'm sure will be many memeable workarounds for all these kinds of things.

It took almost no time.

And just think about the way that conversation works between two kids versus an adult, which is, hey, you can use death stranding, the photo mode on death stranding, to get around this selfie age verification.

Another kid goes, really?

I got to get death stranding.

An adult, they're like, What is death stranding?

Yeah, right.

What do those words even mean altogether?

Like, they can't even,

even when you tell them what the workaround is, they don't go, ah, fuck, I didn't think about that.

They're like, I have no clue.

Death standing?

That sounds like something we should ban as well

for the kids.

That's another thing, too,

that

has changed a lot in the last, I'd say, 10 to 15 years.

It seemed like we were all pretty much on the same page.

The privacy GDPR stuff is one thing because tech companies were going nuts with what they were collecting from people.

And that was a new thing.

Still are technically, but we'll, we'll, anyway.

It does seem like we're taking major step backs in the way that we think media influences people.

And I got to think that's because of the rise of social media and how we're just in media 24 hours a day.

Because like when I was growing up, it was violent media.

and do movies like Taxi Driver and Pulp Fiction.

These are violent films.

They're going to make kids violent.

The explicit language in the music is going to make kids violent.

Remember the like parental advisory?

Because there's bad language on this cassette tape and it's going to, it's going to corrupt your kids.

But now it's like.

It's in the conversation all the time again, where it's like, you would say, like, should we ban GTA because it's violent and it's going to make kids who play GTA violent or Call of Duty, like the no-Russian level.

Is that going to make it violent?

And people would go to bat and say, no, violent media doesn't make people violent.

And it's like, well, what about sexual violence?

Like, oh, absolutely.

That should, we should ban all that stuff.

Like, there's a whole thing right now on Steam where the people protested and went to the credit card providers.

Yeah, yeah.

That was, um, so that was an Australian group called Collective Shout.

Uh, and they said they were specifically campaigning about rape and incest games on Steam and HIO.

Uh, And Steam wasn't doing anything.

So they went to like Visa and MasterCard and campaigned there.

And as a result of the campaigning, then the payment processors leaned on Steam.

H.I.O.

ended up banning all not safe for work stuff.

Steam has enacted a bunch of new policies about adult content, things like that.

And people are upset about the new restrictions and policies in place.

I want to be very clear about this.

I'm not going to defend rape and incest.

Thank you.

Thank you for making this disclaimer.

I don't think that those need any sort of defense.

But what's interesting is that

sort of all adult content is getting caught up in the conversation as a result of this pressure campaign.

This is a very high-level discussion about media, not about anything specific, because I think another example that is used a lot these days is we have someone on the podcast who wants to talk about a civilization of people that live underground, that built pyramids or live in the moon and are viewing us from the moon and things like that?

And then there's people who say, you shouldn't talk about this stuff because it leads to fascism or racism down the road at some point.

Not for me, but other people.

Other people, it'll lead to like fascism and racism.

It's like a person living in the moon, that's based on lunacy.

Excuse me, Bernie, it's based on lunarcy.

Exactly.

The etymology of the term.

That's a good point.

You get what we're talking about.

I hear it, it's like it used to be a simple conversation,

much simpler conversation about that media doesn't lead to action, right?

That art imitates life.

Life doesn't imitate art.

But now, because, like I said, we're so awash in media.

It's like the lines are not clear at all anymore.

So this age verification thing is like, it's all part of that discussion.

And people might be really frustrated by that.

But then people should also analyze the way that they tell other people, this media should not be allowed, right?

Oh, this stuff's totally fine, but this stuff definitely shouldn't be allowed.

Either media influences people or it doesn't influence people.

For instance, in the Xbox debate, if someone were to say, hey, Xbox is banning all violent games, people would say they shouldn't do that.

Yet if I turned around and said it a different way, if I said Xbox shouldn't be giving violence a platform,

that's a way that somebody would say that when they're really saying that that should be banned.

I actually have, I think, a much better solution than than pressuring the payment processors for adult content on steam and that is if it's adult content it doesn't fall under your like is my games library private are my reviews private and so on no that's public right if you're gonna have like some weird weird crazy not safe for work adult game and you're like leaving a thumbs up on it Everyone can see that.

Okay.

First of all, I want to know if anyone on my friends list is like leaving a big old thumbs up.

I'm going to go to their review and be like, you have 800 hours played in this game, right?

I think the problem is going to take care of itself.

I was having lunch with some colleagues, and I mentioned the research I've been doing on Shane.

Well, if I may, Bernie, I'd actually like to end on a much more unified note.

And you may be looking, Bernie, at the next Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I have invented something that is going to unify everyone.

I'm a genius, absolute genius.

Is it a VPN?

No, no, very close.

It's called the Broca.

Broca?

The Broca.

Okay.

It's a Broke.

Is it a guy

who sells stocks in New Jersey?

The Broca.

No, so I've.

I got a Broca.

I've been recently working out in the morning, right?

Doing my pumps, doing my cardio, working out in the morning, getting it done early in the day.

And then I come in and I'm in the kitchen, and I have a dilemma on my hands.

I'm supposed to have protein within 30 minutes of working out, but it's still early in the morning.

And what I really want is a coffee

okay i'm trying what's the cuff i got the bro on this i think it's the protein

so what i started doing is probably the same advention that like every gym rat has ever made which is i make myself a coffee and then i pour a scoop of chocolate protein powder into the coffee mix it all up pour in a nice little almond milk as a treat And I've got myself a broca.

It's a bro mocha.

A bro mocha.

Like, okay, it's a mocha.

That's what I got.

I was trying to,

I was racking my brain trying to figure it out.

I've been obsessed with this drink for the last like three, four days.

It's incredible.

You know, you can have it over ice and it is a delight.

I have been dying to try something

that I read about online, which seems like it makes perfect sense.

And I'm just waiting for the opportunity to try it.

It's called a nappuccino.

Have you heard of this?

Sort of.

Okay.

So it's when you're tired in the middle of the day, right?

Okay.

But then when you you go to take a nap in the middle of the day, there's like the, this is a risk.

I'm either going to take like a 40-minute nap or I'm going to take an eight-hour nap.

And then I'm off for like a week after that, right?

Something's going to happen.

Naps are a risk.

So what you do is you make yourself an espresso shot or a cup of coffee.

All right.

You down it fast and then you go to sleep.

Like as soon as you down it.

You just knock it back and lay down.

Like if I said you take a 20 minute nap, does that sound like a rewarding experience for you in the middle of the day to take a 20 minute nap?

No, that sounds incredibly stressful it sounds horrible right so the theory behind this is you take a shot of espresso you go to sleep and then it takes about 20 minutes for the caffeine to work and so then when you metabolize that you wake up and you feel fantastic and people swear by this i don't know man that sounds really stressful that sounds like i'm gonna i'm gonna knock this thing back i'm gonna lay down and then i'm going to start counting how much sleep i can get if i fall asleep right this minute and i'll be like okay i've got 18 minutes i'll get 18 minutes and then I'm going to stress myself out to the point where then the caffeine kicks in.

Oh, great.

Now I got zero nap.

I feel, but then you're, but you're at the caffeine, you're fine.

But I hear exactly what you're saying.

But have you ever done that calculation for a nap?

Or are you just like, I can't stay awake any longer.

I'm going to go take a nap.

No, I've done that calculation for a nap.

Really?

I'm like, yeah, it's like.

Do you take calculated naps?

I do.

Well, because I'm like, I've got to get like kid up from her nap at this time.

And so I've got like, you know, kid's going to get out of school at this time.

So I need to make sure that I'm up by this time.

Right.

So I can see my window of opportunity shrinking.

Here's the way naps work for me.

I like sit down somewhere or like, I'm going to, I'm going to lay in the bed for a second.

That's a good decision.

I'm going to do that.

Or you're going to like sit in a chair on a train.

You, it's super powerful.

And I'll just close my eyes for a second.

I close my eyes for a second.

I open them.

I have a huge long beard down to my knees.

And like dogs have evolved to be the dominant species and they're outside in the log knocking on the window.

That's how naps work for me.

So, I'm going to try this and see if it works because I think that's preferable to that.

All right, well, we'll schedule a napuccino for you and we'll report back.

Um, but I want to say a big thank you to uh to today's Unified sponsors, Bradley Tackett, and Jerry Ward.

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

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

July 29th, 2025, we will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.