2025.07.15: Elmo's Racist Weekend

Ash, I'm so glad he was you.

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gut up!

Good

morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

for July 15th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

I miss her so much.

It's Ashley to say hi to Ashley, everybody.

You're missing me, but your aim is getting better.

I do, missing.

What is that from?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I thought I'd try a boomer joke.

How was it?

Oh, it sounded like you were doing like a Christopher Walking impression.

Kind of that too, but unintentionally, sure.

Look, I'm here.

What this comes down to is I've been hanging out with like little kids and my brain has melted.

Yeah, how are you doing, dude?

Like, what are you doing with your time off, Ashley, from the daily grind of the Morning Somewhere podcast?

It's that, look, I, when you work, like, are interacting exclusively with kids, it's just very different.

And it's oddly mentally very intensive because you're always focused on how you're going to shape this future person and what this could mean.

And maybe this is like one of those weird formative moments where like they'll remember this moment forever or, you know,

they'll forget it in 30 seconds.

You just never know.

So there's like, my, my brain is just not working.

It doesn't help that I decided decided to do something really fun for the kids.

And we had a camp out in the garden.

We set up tents.

It was a, it technically was kind of a glamping situation.

What separates a camping situation from a glamping situation?

Well, it was a camp out, but it was glamping a little bit.

I'm no longer in the season of life where I enjoy sleeping entirely on the ground.

So I busted out

one of those like an air mattress to put in the tent.

But then I just ended up sandwiched between two kicking kids on a far too small air mattress, trying to hold them on so they weren't slipping off onto the ground all night.

And

that may also be an ingredient for why my brain is not working exactly.

I read the reports of the camp out and grandpa said that Evie just was having a blast and stayed up until midnight.

She's two years old and she was just like kicking and playing with everybody all night long.

So it might not be her environment.

Yeah.

Well, it was, it's also that for, especially because like she's two, right?

And she, she really enjoys the novelty of new things.

And when you're two, a lot of things are very, very new.

So for her, the, just

the idea of not sleeping in her crib was a novelty.

You add on the like, you're outside.

You add on that like everyone is sleeping in the room with you.

You add on that like, oh, and we're having a snuggle.

You add on that also, it's really, it's kind of hot outside and kind of sticky and and uncomfortable.

And you add on that, you know, you, you just had roasted marshmallows and you're probably riding a sugar high.

And you add all these things together.

And then, yeah, you get, you get a kid who's like rubbing her feet on the walls of the tent at 11:30 at night.

Oh, my God.

I can only imagine.

And you get, and you get her mom next to her going,

go to sleep right now.

You know, I'm clearly not an authority that this child listens to.

There's another part to this, too, which I don't want to manifest anything, but but our two-year-old is a pretty amazing sleeper.

Like, she has been since day one.

I don't know if it's a testament to her scheduling abilities or just she inherited my sleep anywhere, anytime, Gene.

But it's like for terms of frequency for babies and toddlers, her waking up in the middle of the night, she is a dream child, right?

Right.

It's a little bit of a two-sided coin there because in her sleeping environment, she is an incredible sleeper.

If you get the, you get like all of her inspected ingredients just right, she's an incredible sleeper.

She sleeps through the night.

That's almost never a problem unless she's feeling unwell.

However, you take her out of that really specific curated environment and she's awful.

Do you remember trying to get her to sleep in a car?

I remember that very well.

Thank you very much.

What I'm worried about now is that she's getting old enough to wear having this new novel experience.

Now she's like, wait a minute, this is what you guys are doing when I'm sleeping in the crib.

You guys are coming down to the garden and sleeping in tents and lighting fires and all this stuff.

She's like, I'm never going, I didn't know this was an option.

I'm doing this all the time now.

We screwed ourselves with a nice candle.

Yeah, we did a little bit too, because I also,

you've been away and so, and it's been, it's been incredibly hot here.

The heat wave has finally broken, but it's been incredibly hot.

So thanks to you and Father's Day, we have one nice cool room in the house, and that's the bedroom.

And so

I

did the thing where I broke Evie's sleep ingredients.

I took her into our bed

to sleep.

You're crazy.

One night.

I know, I know.

And now I'm running into the problem of every night it's time for bed.

And she goes, Sleep mama bed.

Oh, no.

There it is.

Yeah, now she knows it's an option.

That's it.

It's all over.

She knows it's an option.

So now we have to have a negotiated, a negotiation every night that, no, no, no, she's going to sleep in Eevee bed.

Okay, look, let's talk to the kids of the world.

I don't know how many toddlers listen to our podcast, but parents would let you sleep in the bed if you would go to goddamn sleep and you didn't sleep horizontally across the top of the pillows and put your feet in the face of your parents.

You would get away with it, but you can't figure it out.

That's the problem.

It's kids and cats, man.

There's something to kids and cats that makes sleeping horizontally the natural natural direction.

The problem I've got when Mush gets in the bed is he gets on top of me.

And then it's like having Mjolner when Thor sets it down on something.

I will never get up if Mush is on top of me because he just like locks me in place because I don't want to disturb Mush.

Well, that's that's a, that's one of those cat physics things, right?

Like they obey their own specific laws.

And one of those laws is cat on you, no get up.

No, you're not going anywhere.

In fact, that's a legitimate thing of like, hey, sorry, I was two hours late for dinner.

There was a cat sitting on my lap.

It's like, okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, speaking, by the way, Bernie, of kids who listen to this podcast on a regular basis, we also, I guess, should issue a warning to all of the kids on Twitter, specifically all the ones who are following Elmo.

Did you hear about

the Elmo X account getting hacked?

over the weekend and posting like a whole a bunch of like really horrific stuff.

When I read about it, I think the, what's the company that runs Sesame Street?

Is it children's workshop?

It's a Sesame Workshop, which is the non-profit behind Sesame Street.

Okay, so Sesame Street's a non-profit.

That's interesting.

It's been running for like 60 years at this point.

So they were still struggling to get hold of it, which is kind of weird because it was in newspaper articles.

You think somebody at Twitter would help them figure that the fuck out and get Elmo back in the hands of the people that usually run it.

So it's not spewing from what I read was anti-Semitic and racist posts.

And also it went into a profanity-laced tirade about Jeffrey Epstein.

Well, yeah, look, that's that's it's top of mind right now.

So I'm not all that surprised.

But yeah, I guess they did get control of the account back.

But I'm just imagining, like, you know, I don't think there's a lot of kids on Twitter following Elmo.

Right.

But I can imagine that that would be quite like quite the sit-down discussion with your parents if you got it, if you you got that one like honestly ashley who is this really affecting honestly because

what parent is going to be outraged if they're letting their kid have an x account so that they can follow elmo unsupervised if you're giving your kid an x account you should really evaluate your parenting skills at that point Right.

Like, oh, it's Elmo that you're concerned about on that platform?

Sandwiched behind like all of the other Mad Max, crazy apocalyptic bullshit that's on that platform now?

Or or it's like in the reply that every Elmo post is a bunch of people like promoting their OnlyFans or their snake oil stuff

unbelievable so yeah I don't I don't really know that anybody's been affected by uh Elmo's uh meltdown over uh the weekend I think I think everyone will be okay we're gonna recover from this okay what did he post can you even say what he posted no that's the so there have been a lot of articles about it but now that it's all been cleaned up and all of those posts have been deleted a lot of the articles just sort of talk around the topics that Elmo was spewing, but there's not exactly, there's not a lot of screenshots floating around the articles that the big sites are running with the, with the, I guess, the sensational posts.

Yeah, maybe the Elmo account, maybe its password was 123456.

Like the McDonald's.

Seriously, that, I mean, come on, that's, that's egregious.

That's the password on my luggage.

So did you, did you, is that a Spaceballs joke?

I'm not a Spaceballs guy.

Yeah, it is.

Okay.

Yeah, that's the password to the airshield and

President Scrooge's Scroobs luggage.

So let me ask you a question, Ash.

Did you

have you been to see Superman yet?

No, no, I haven't.

I was, so I, first of all, I've been busy with kid camp outs.

I'm hoping to get some time this week to go see it and contribute to those less important international box office numbers.

But it's a challenge because we've mentioned this before, as we're kind of far from a lot of things,

the nearest theater to us, they're not open

a couple days of the week.

Like they're not open today.

So maybe I can go tomorrow

and see

or either that or I have to like drive an hour away.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I won't talk anymore.

But I am hoping to get to it because it sounds like everyone is on board with this.

It's doing great.

There was, there was

the box office tracking for this one going into the release was it was like watching you know sports betting right like is it going to be are we talking a 90 million are we talking 110 million where is this gonna fall and it ended up at a really respectable very optimistic 125 million domestic that's great oh no the international numbers are looking a little bit weak well you know superman's never really been strong in the international numbers he's a very american superhero it's it's amazing it's like sports like analysis of all this box office stuff but it sounds like everyone's really happy with it you seem really happy with it which is a big deal because i feel like going into it you were a little um

not pessimistic but you weren't like super super jazzed just because superman's not usually your guy but the fact that you said it was uh to me what you said was it was tremendous and i thought holy shit i have to go see this I guess, on Wednesday when the theater's open.

Yeah, but I feel like by saying that too, I'm kind of setting people's expectations incorrectly because my expectations being low are kind of really, honestly, non-existent.

That made me enjoy the movie more.

So I would hate if me liking the movie somehow sets the expectations for people a little bit higher.

But I was going to ask you because I'll talk to you about it after you see it, but there's an actress who has a part in the movie.

And I've noticed the other thing too where it's it's like they're almost doing like the speed run on the teardown because it's being called like super woke i don't even know what they're seeing in the movie that made it that way but um i i think it's because there's been discussion about is superman an immigrant yeah i don't like i mean i i think that was a bigger deal in the man of steel stuff where he was very clearly an alien but we could talk about it after you see it um i didn't i didn't get that feeling in it but maybe i'm not as sensitive to that stuff when it appears on screen as some people are um but the actress who's in it, she has a part in it.

I can't say who it is, but they've been going through her old interviews now and seeing how she said she would never be in a superhero movie and stuff like that.

And it's just like, oh, that's it.

Come on, just let it alone.

Give me a fucking break.

I don't know why people do that kind of stuff, man.

Look, we can all say that we would never be in a superhero movie because I don't know, for a lot of actors, I get it, right?

It's like it's,

you wouldn't, if you're one of those actors, may not consider these big franchise movies to be high art.

We as viewers don't look at them as high art even.

We're like, they're entertaining and they're fun and we have a good time and that's all we expect of them.

We're not expecting, you know, this to be like an Oscar bait thing.

Right.

So, but I can see how as an actor, you're going for those really challenging things.

And maybe this isn't normally what you're looking for until

someone opens a checkbook and you go, actually, I do like food.

Yeah.

I do like like food.

Right.

I like having food forever and having that problem.

Right.

And it pays me more than McDonald's.

So let's do this.

Right.

Also, I got to point out, Christian Bale has been in four superhero movies at this point.

And then I can count three Batman movies and a Thor movie.

So at this point,

and he's a very esteemed, well-respected actor.

So come on.

If he can be in the movies, anybody can be in the movies.

Get over it.

Everybody just anyone can be in the movies.

I have been thinking about this, though, like on the topic of Superman.

I guess I'm thinking more like sort of Man of Steel era Superman, but I was just thinking like how much it would suck to live in a superhero city.

It would suck to live in a superhero city.

Like, what would be the upside of it?

I mean, it'd be kind of cool for about

five minutes, you know, but that's about it.

Although, I feel like bad.

Like, right, because you want to think, like, oh, superhero is going to keep the city safe, but somehow, wherever there's a superhero, there's a super villain, and they're almost always, there's a building getting wrecked, or and there's a ton of property damage to vehicles so I don't even want to know what the you know metropolis insurance rates are looking like you know they did a a

comic book series called damage control it would actually be a really funny series to have it's the people who go and clean up after major superhero battles but I gotta say I feel like there is actually there's um hold on I'll see if I can find it but there there is a TV series about that you know this is going to be like the steam video game sale where it's like oh here's this game you've always wanted to play.

It's on sale.

I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to pay you.

I'm not going to buy that.

Would you like to play it now?

No.

Or I'll buy it.

But I'm not sure.

I mean,

there is Superhero Cleanup Squad, but I feel like there was another one as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Can we talk for a second, too, about this McDonald's thing?

Because we mentioned it briefly.

So the Mick Hire site, which is the weirdest name ever, the McHire site where people go to apply to work for McDonald's.

They discovered that you could access the admin side of the site.

You could basically get to the back end with the username and password 123456.

Now, to be clear, the article that I read about this, I don't know which one you read, Ashley, but it was from a security firm.

I don't even know why they put this out there, but the security firm discovered it, notified McDonald's, and then they clarified it.

They actually don't know if the user information has been exposed at all.

So it's actually kind of a really straightforward thing that normally would be handled, I would think, behind closed doors.

Maybe because McDonald's is a public company, they had some reason they had to report it.

Or if there was the possibility of a leak of personal information, then maybe they're trying to get in front of it.

I don't know.

But the crazy thing about it was it exposed the personal information of 64 million people.

64 million.

That's an incredible thing.

I mean, that in its like in and of itself is the standout piece of information to me because 64 million people, that's an extraordinary number of people applying to work at McDonald's.

If you told me 64 million people ate at McDonald's in a year,

I would say, yeah, quick look here says 342 million people in the United States.

So that's like what one in five people in the United States has applied to work at McDonald's and have all the, so that their information has potentially been exposed because of this.

That's astonishing to me.

Although I will say, last time we were in Austin, I saw the McDonald's was paying like $15 an hour.

And I thought, well, I guess my inner 16-year-old who made like $4 of $25 an hour, I thought,

damn, that's some good money.

Let's say I can make four hours and buy a video game.

Dope.

Well, now I do the calculations on it too.

If you said it was what, $15 an hour?

Yeah.

That's $32,000 a year, which is not what I would associate as a starting salary working in a McDonald's.

So So it is fairly impressive.

I know that especially if you're in a city and especially a city like Austin where the cost of living is so high, that's not really going to get you very far, even working full-time.

But like I said, my inner 16-year-old who just needs like money for gas and stuff is like thrilled with the idea.

Well, too, it's

the

numbers you just quoted for the number of people who live in the U.S., that's everybody.

That's not even, you know, people who are eligible to work, really.

So it's even lower number and a higher percentage.

It just seems ridiculously high.

64 million people have turned in applications for McDonald's.

It's got to be a global number, right?

It has to be a global number.

I kind of get it, though, because if you're

a young person looking for your first job, is McDonald's not like the first stop on your job application?

It was for me.

So is my information in there?

Like, did they move all of their historical records into the McCairs?

How far back does this go?

How far back?

How far back?

Did you apply to work at McDonald's?

Oh, I'm sure that I did.

I never worked at McDonald's.

I ended up working at a different restaurant, but I would be astonished with myself if I didn't at least submit a paper application back in the day.

Yeah, my brother worked at McDonald's for a short time, and I must, he worked at Burger King.

And then I applied, I applied.

McDonald's was always considered like one of those great jobs for, you know, your high school

after-school job.

tomorrow on the podcast uh i've got barbara dunkelman coming in and barbara dunkelman uh very famously worked at a uh burger king that was inside of a movie theater that was one of her first jobs so i'll have to ask her about that as well yeah let's see if uh let's see if any of her information leaked out

All right, well, say hello to Barbara for me.

And I want to say a big thank you to today's star applicants, C and Timothy Cligo.

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

So, Ashley, I turned in, this sounds so stupid, I turned in our application to turn our subreddit private because guess what?

You're not allowed to make that decision on your own.

I had to mark it as private and they put a reason why we were changing it private.

I'm sure they have that feature now because when the privating, the subreddits was weaponized against them in those protests, what, a year ago?

So, uh, I don't know if our subreddit is going to be private or not, but we have submitted the application.

By the time people listen to this, it either is or we have been rejected.

So

well, try this.

In the reason field, just enter one, two, three, four, five, six.

I hear that one is a pretty solid.

It'll be an auto approval and that'll be it.

I also want to say one thing before we go.

We were talking about Superman and superhero movies in general.

There is a new clip that they just released for the Fantastic Four, and I thought, I'll watch this.

I greatly regret watching that clip.

Don't watch any clips from Fantastic Four if you are planning to go see it.

That I took a bullet for you today, everybody.

So buy or beware.

All right.

All right.

Well, that does it for us today, July 15th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.