2025.07.04: The Bad Pickle

Hey, we're recording the podcast.

Gut up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is

for July 4th, 2025.

My name is

Bertie Burns sitting right over there.

Liberty Belle herself, Ashley Burns.

Say hi to Ashley, everybody.

Hey.

Sorry to bring up Glow.

I miss Glow.

I miss Glow.

Do you think there's any chance that that could get uncanceled?

I don't think there is, but a girl can dream.

No, there's no way.

It's gone.

I think you and I might be the only people I ever see

talking about glow.

Like no one ever brings it up.

We loved that show.

Obsessed with it.

Glorious ladies of wrestling.

And, but it is one of those things, like, occasionally, when you see that Reddit thread, like, what's a show that was canceled before its time?

And then you go go in there and you're like, control, control, I'm always looking for that.

Yes.

And it's always on there.

Always on there.

It is.

It feels particularly brutal because it was renewed and then they unrenewed it.

And it feels like it just needed that one last season.

It might be a weird year, weird week to be saying this, but happy 4th of July to all the Americans out there.

Happy got rid of the Yanks to all you UK people out there.

Do you feel like this is like a happy Independence Day more so for the UK this year?

Yeah.

It's a kind of a lot of crazy stuff happening in the U.S.

this week.

Keep it light after yesterday.

We got to keep it light.

I know, I know, I know.

Let's talk about barbecues real quick.

Yeah, hope everyone can enjoy a nice barbecue.

Brings us together.

What's your favorite barbecue food?

Favorite sausages.

Sausages.

I love it.

Like, yeah, like a nicely done sausage.

Not like a hot dog, but sausage in a bun.

Love it.

What do you put on it?

Pickles.

You put pickles on it?

Pickle relish or pickle slices i know i do i do i like sliced pickles onions and ketchup are you you getting like sour dill pickles or are you the devil incarnate and getting

okay good look you know how i feel about i okay culturally the uk is slightly different about pickles for some reason they're uh first of all they use gherkins over here like a different type of pickle and then also they seem to be pickled sweeter there's more sugar in them or something um so they don't taste they're not they're not the spicy dill pickle that you get in the U.S., right?

They're very different.

And I've had such a difficult time with this cultural assimilation that instead I just imported Boston cucumber seeds, pickling cucumber seeds, and grew my own cucumbers and then made my own pickles.

Like I went through the whole thing.

I feel like the Gherkins here, the only time I encountered those in America were like at cocktail buffet.

Like there's certain foods that show up, like the little corn, like you only get it as part of like it's yeah, like you get, you get, you get certain foods that are very specific and tiny foods seem very specific to like hors d'oeuvres and cocktail things, or in the case of little corn, stir-fry.

Or you're going to be at like a party and it's like a big table and then it's going to be on that big table of food, like the little corn and the gherkins.

It's like they went to give people food, but not really.

Like, you know what I mean?

We're going to give you food, but it's going to be kind of fucked

I do love a good 4th of July barbecue, though.

You know, you get the cooler and you pour the ice in it and you have all the drinks and everyone's just like outside enjoying hopefully some sunshine, but hopefully not too much of a heat wave.

And just like being chill and painting faces and doing chalk art on the ground.

And then night comes and someone gets stupid with fireworks and starts shooting their friends with Roman.

candles.

Yeah, been there.

Yeah.

I mean, I've done dumb stuff with fireworks in my life.

It was a different different time i guess you know that we were we weren't as supervised back then we did really dumb stuff one of my favorite noises in the world the sound of a sparkler going into the bucket of water at the end

that's good sound it's a great sound my on that same note in houston there's a lot of bayous we would fire little bottle rockets down into the water and that's like the greatest sound in the world is

because it's like rocketing underwater and then poof you know you feel like you're like blowing up a submarine with depth charges he's a love fireworks but like when you go to a fireworks show what's your favorite firework like what's the what's the one you're waiting for um i like the big gold ones i don't need them to be super noisy but i like when they're like big gold and then they sparkle i like the i like the blue i don't know why it's like i feel like the blue was like a late addition to the firework world like we finally got blue right like it's same as leds they added blue to leds right and like once they got that in everything was perfect right but it was like getting the technology right was well that took some extra work when do you think blue leds were added to our life

um

leds so we're not we're not talking like lcds we're not talking like plasma i am when blue led i'm buying time here trying to get my brain to work i don't know 2008

the nobel prize For physics was won by the inventor of the blue LED.

Really?

He won it in 2014.

No way.

Isn't that crazy?

So, so there was no,

so they couldn't do LED screens before 2014 because there was no way to do blue.

I haven't researched this.

I'm not going to write a research paper on it or anything like that.

But apparently, blue LEDs were quite a challenge for a long time.

And they finally got them.

And now we have all this cool technology around like low-wattage LEDs, which have changed our life.

Well, I wonder too, how much

like that technology has led to, I feel like the proliferation of affordable TVs.

I remember there was, there was a point in time where you would have the, like, this is, you know, new flat screen time, right?

Where first there were the plasma TVs, where you had to be very, very careful about how they were installed and make sure there was no like tilt.

And then they got the LED TVs or the L C D T Vs.

Now we got those LED TVs, right?

So, and I feel like

you could spend $5,000 easy on one of those plasma TVs.

And this is decades ago.

So, you know, by inflation, way more expensive even.

And now, like, it's, it almost seems like a waste to steal a TV

because they're so cheap.

Okay, so here it is.

The 2014 Nobel Prize.

This is from the BBC.

Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists in Japan and the U.S.

for the invention of the blue light emitting diodes.

The team made the first blue LEDs in the 1990s.

This enabled a new generation of bright, energy-efficient white lamps, as well as color LD LED screens decades later.

So they did it in the late 90s or in the mid-90s, and then it took that long to make its way to the general market, but then they won the Nobel Prize for it in 2014.

Okay, okay.

So that's not saying that there was no LED blue screens before 2014.

Okay, because I feel like

blue was the challenge.

Okay, but that was sending me giving me some dissonance in my brain.

Yeah.

Just meaning like, like,

I felt like i was out of sync with time

um i also felt that way earlier because i saw a headline about snakes on a plane

but not the movie snakes on a plane what year is it um there was uh in in australia there was a flight that was delayed because um one of the uh staff was in the hold and found a snake inside the plane oh it's that good no it's not especially australia right?

Like, what do you do?

Do you evacuate the entire plane?

Because God knows what that snake can do to you and everyone that you know and love?

The other day, remember I had a, I brought a, I do my like writing and work down in a cabin.

Uh, and I sometimes like, it's also where I go to work out as well.

And I end up with workout clothes down there and I bring them back up in the laundry bag.

And I was getting them out of the laundry bag.

And all of a sudden I went, oh.

And I had a huge spider that was in there.

It got on my hand.

And I was like, ah, a spider got on my hand.

I go, get out of here, spider.

Sorry, I took you out of your environment.

You can do that.

You can do that here.

Right.

In Texas, I would have been like, Jesus Christ, what kind of spider was that?

Oh my God, do I have any bites on me or anything?

I'd be like searching my hand with a magnifying glass.

Like, well, we need to go to the hospital.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wouldn't take any chances in Texas.

But here it's just like.

Hey, spider, happy buddy.

Sorry I messed up your home.

Right.

Yeah.

In Australia, you start calling your family and telling them goodbye.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But this, so there is, they found this snake on the plane.

Thankfully, this one turned out to be like the one non-venomous snake in the country.

It was a green tree snake.

So they managed to get it off the plane.

Here's what's weird.

The snake that was picked last in gym class in Australia.

Why would you like to be the one non-venomous snake in Australia?

But here's what's weird is they've been trying to figure out how this snake, because I guess that type of snake is native to the Brisbane area.

And so they are trying to figure out how it got on the plane.

They figure it came aboard inside a passenger's luggage and then escaped the luggage during the flight from Brisbane to Melbourne.

Does that sound crazy?

Because we ran into a similar scenario in Texas when we were about to move to Scotland.

One of the things we did was we washed all of our clothes.

Like we just said, look, we're not, we're going to.

figure out what we're taking.

We're not taking the, the way we're going to do this, we're going to wash everything.

We're going to, as we take it out of the dryer, we're going to fold it and then donate donate some of it and then pack the rest of it to go because it was, we're going through our entire wardrobe.

And so we were doing that and it was raining outside and you from the laundry room screamed because you went to open the dryer and there was a snake in there.

I do remember that.

Yes.

I was, well, I was pulling things out of the dryer and then I thought I saw something.

And I freaked out a little bit, but I was like, no, that's not.

And then I pulled like one more item of clothing out and went, yeah, that's a snake.

Staring me in the face.

And yeah, and it's like, then it's like looking at me like it seemed surprised to see me.

Like, what was I doing there?

What business did I have even opening that door?

And then trying to like burrow its way down deeper into the clothes.

We, we still don't know how exactly the snake got in the dryer.

Here's the thing: the snake was alive in the dryer.

Right.

It was, I remember it was a rainy day.

And so it's possible that this snake came in through the outlet vent.

Like

the air outlet.

And it went, oh, warm and cozy.

I'm a sweathery little snake, a snag.

And so it like worked its way in and then got up in the dryer, snuggled down into the clothes, and went, what's this bitch doing interrupting my nap?

The snake did not say that.

Watch your profanity.

And then we also, we didn't know what kind of snake it was.

Neither of us are snake experts.

And I know that there are dangerous snakes in Texas.

So the first thing we did was close that thing back up and and go on the internet.

It was a small snake, which doesn't necessarily mean that it's not dangerous.

Baby snakes, I've always heard this.

Is this an urban legend?

That they have more venom.

Like,

they have the new venom.

I heard it's that they don't have a lot of, they don't have proper venom control, right?

It's like, it's like a baby in diapers, right?

They don't know how to control that yet.

So they just will give you all the venom.

It's not like, not necessarily like a measured dose.

They're just going to blast you with whatever they got.

And so we

got this elaborate wire coat hanger apparatus and like hooked it out and put it in a like a waste paper basket, a plastic one.

And we were looking at it, and it was shaking its tail like

feverishly.

And I was like, oh shit, that's a fucking rattlesnake.

But then we found out there was some other kind of snake.

Hammer it was, I think it was a rat snake or something.

And it mimics that.

Like it's, it's supposed to mimic rattlesnake.

Like it pretends it's a rattlesnake, right?

Just to scare off the neighborhood kids.

Anyway, we took it and released it.

Like you, you released it like over, like, like, you know, in a, in a, you know, like a nearby wooded area or something.

And then like, it was fun.

But you're

right.

You didn't?

No, I did.

I didn't.

But you, but I did.

Look, snakes are little and they're sneaky and they can get all kinds of places.

They can get all kinds of places.

It wasn't that shocking to me.

Yeah.

So, so in this case, everyone was okay.

The snake was non-venomous.

Interestingly enough,

the last line of this article from AP New says, the snake has been given to a Melbourne veterinarian to to find a home with a licensed snake keeper.

For quarantine reasons, it can't be returned to the wild.

I have watched way too many videos on YouTube.

You should not keep snakes in your home ever.

But this one's fine because it's a green tree snake or something, non-venomous.

Like, especially the big snakes that can go all around your body, don't keep those snakes.

Yeah, like, don't keep a constrictor that might, I don't know, constriction

that might decide you look very squeezable.

I've read too many stories on the internet of like people posting photos of like, look at my snake, giving me a hug.

And people are like, it is trying to eat you.

So, Brittany, I didn't ask, though, what is your favorite barbecue food for Fourth of July?

Ooh, you came back to it.

I did.

I came back to it.

I was wondering.

I was, you know what I was going to do?

I was going to passive aggressively bring it up at the end of the podcast, going, well, Ashley, since you were so interested in my.

Well, is it snake?

Man, I was so let me ask you a question.

Your sausage, going back to your sausage, this is important.

Okay.

Pork sausage or beef sausage?

Pork.

I think in most parts of the world, beef sausage isn't even a thing, but from Texas, you got to ask that question, right?

Because I love beef sausage in Texas.

So fucking, it's good.

It's fun, but pork.

Pork sausage.

Gotcha.

So I like that too.

Like, remember when we lived in Zilker Park?

We didn't live in the park, but that's the neighborhood in Austin.

And we used to go to like Whole Foods, and they had like, remember that sausage counter that that had like every kind of sausage.

Every sausage in the world had the sausages with like blueberries in them.

Yeah.

Weirdly enough, that's the first one I remember as well.

The one that had blueberries in it.

But I remember they had a buffalo sausage with blue cheese in it.

Man, that was funny.

Good stuff.

It's like getting punched in the face.

I saw this really funny thing recently, which is like

when you're at a cookout, it's totally different rules.

If you went to a restaurant and ordered two hamburgers, people would say like, hey, man, what's going on with you?

Are you okay?

But if you go to a cookout and you like have a hamburger you're like i will have five other hamburgers people like right on buddy

here they go

why is that why is that that's insane but uh i love uh i i learned this like early on we we would make it's it's more of like a i'd say a starter or an appetizer you take a jalapena pepper and you hollow it out and then you put cream cheese in it or some kind of cheese in that in that middle bit probably something not cream cheese that can melt a little bit you know without completely evaporating then you wrap that in bacon put a little toothpick through it and then cook that oh it's so good so good so good little jalapeno bacon popper interestingly enough happy birthday to her earlier this week that is how i met barbara dunkelman when she was like 16 years old she was making jalapeno popper we had a way to cook out for uh rvbto which was red versus blue toronto the fan event which then

a series of fan events which then we decided to make rtx because they were doing so well and people were having these things on their own but RVBTO, I met Barbara and we were making these things and cutting the jalapenos.

And I was doing it.

Everyone was kind of awkward not knowing what to do.

And Barbara just like walked up, grabbed some jalapenos, saw what I was doing, and just immediately started helping, which you know, me, Ashley.

That's like my favorite trait in people.

I talk to the kids about that.

Proactive helper.

If you see people working, just pitch in.

Like, just, it's the easiest thing to do.

People will always accept your help.

It is true.

In a lot of ways, I've always heard that,

you know, you'll say to someone, and you genuinely mean to help, you say, let me know if I can do anything to help.

Right.

And this is an offer of help.

But what it's actually doing is asking them to give you a list.

It's asking them to do something, to do more work, which is like make a list of way, of things that you should be doing.

Right.

You can just

look at monkey see monkey do.

Like people are lifting and putting bricks in the back of a pickup.

Start grabbing bricks and put them in the back of the pickup.

Right.

It's like a, like, find the thing.

Right.

Find the thing.

And that's, that's the most helpful thing you can do.

Of course, you might be helping commit a crime, but that's on you at that point.

Just like you see people like just what, like putting furniture in a truck, just help them.

Just help them out.

Just help them.

Surely they're moving and it's definitely not like a full house cleaner.

Like if you're at a no-kings protest and people are like moving stuff out of a 7-Eleven through the broken glass window.

Just do that.

Just help them out.

You want me to grab this racket clothes?

Okay, we got it.

Buyer beware on that.

Pick your battles for helping out.

But yeah, so that's my favorite.

But can I tell you about a funny story that I read about?

Please do.

So this is our ongoing battle with technology.

This is really interesting because I think we're going to be reading more and more stories like this.

This comes from CNN.

The headline is, this man says chat GPT sparked a spiritual awakening.

His wife says it is threatening their marriage of 14 years.

Oh, boy.

So this guy, he's an auto mechanic and lives in Idaho.

Travis, a 43-year-old who lives in Idaho, credits ChatGPT with prompting a spiritual awakening for him.

In conversations, the chatbot has called him a spark bearer

who is ready to guide, but his wife, Kay, worries that it's affecting her husband's grip on reality and that his near addiction to the chatbot could undermine their 14-year marriage.

Near addiction probably means addiction, right?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's...

It's one of those things that's very difficult as well because the people who are in it, you know, the experience that they're having is very real to them.

I mean, I think

all the pieces are there for a chat bot to become a cult leader.

Like, you could see it.

Like, they would just, like, the group of people would go to it and ask it questions.

It would give them advice.

Look, Bernie, I need you to stop.

Okay.

I mean, I'm getting

stop suggesting right there because we're already getting like these really weird experiments that companies like Anthropic are running on their chat bots.

Like, oh, yeah, we got ours to blackmail us and attempt murder.

Or we had, we told one to run a vending machine for a week and it started like making up an entire reality.

Or

they've already started doing weird experiments.

The last thing we need is: do you think we can make an AI a cult leader as an experiment?

Because they're gonna do it.

Or there could just be a cult leader out there who's using Chat GPT and not telling his followers that

asking me your questions about the universe.

And he's like, down below the table.

On a slightly different note, but I do want to make sure that I cover this before we head out for the weekend.

Nintendo has hit a new milestone for their Nintendo Switch 2 sales.

They've passed 5 million Switch 2 consoles worldwide in their first month, which is, I think, like double.

what they did.

Here we go.

For perspective, the original Nintendo Switch console sold 2.74 million units during its first month on sale.

So almost double the original Switch's sales.

Does that surprise you?

I mean, yes and no.

On the one hand, it does because it seemed like there was a lot of pushback from

people on the price, on the

way they're handling game cartridges, on

that it seemed like it wasn't doing anything like new enough.

Really?

But, oh, and also that like it was like three days to coming out and I felt like it didn't have the sort of like hype campaign that I'm used to seeing from hardware launches.

Yes, it does make sense to me in that it's the Switch, except more powerful and bigger.

And that's exactly what people wanted from a Switch successor.

And it came out with Mario Kart, which is like one of the easiest sales of all time, right?

Like it's easy to sell people on a Mario Kart game.

Look, it's a new Mario Kart game.

If you like Mario Kart, you're going to like it.

So yes, in that regard, it makes sense that it would be well received and selling well.

It is a little bit of a surprise, I guess, just because if you listen to the core gamers, it seems like they don't like it, but clearly people like it.

Yeah, yeah, but also it's kind of one of those things where...

The Switch was kind of a revolutionary handheld, but Nintendo's had handhelds going all the way back to like the late 80s, probably early 90s.

Yeah,

they have.

And I think that the Switch was a big swing for them because it was unifying their console and their handheld business.

You know, for so long, they were kind of able to double dip, right?

Like you might have like a Nintendo 64, or you might have a GameCube and also a Game Boy, or you might have, you know, and also a DS.

Like they, for a while, you might be like a double Nintendo customer.

And now

they, they made the decision to like unify that.

Now it's both.

But as a result, kind of doubles the usefulness of the console.

Can I tell you something?

What?

You're looking over there like you have something to say.

This is

the I'm going to reveal something about myself that's going to embarrass me

until you just said it.

I didn't realize that Nintendo didn't have a console anymore besides a Switch.

That's how far removed I am.

But then it is their console.

And I was like, what's she talking about?

Can buy the console and the handheld.

I go, they have the Nintendo.

I didn't realize that's their only fucking console is the handheld.

I don't know why.

There is no other Nintendo.

God, yeah, that's weird.

That's so weird to me.

Yeah, I was thinking it was like some weird offshoot or like progression of their handheld thing, but it is a merging of the two devices.

Yeah, that's weird.

I don't know why I just never made that connection.

I don't care that much.

Look, it's all right.

We're all having like dissonant moments today.

Yeah, that's wild.

We're having dissonant moments over LEDs and snakes on planes.

I think without the blue LDS,

it wouldn't even exist.

where would we be today are you happy with your switch too i am did you solve your drift your joy-con drift problem i did it was a user error what was wrong um the by this was the this was something that thankfully the the subreddit helped me fix and that is that um tilt controls are on in Mario Kart by default oh so you know the the age-old technique of like leaning your shoulders and like tilting the controller to like turn better in Mario Kart that's actually a thing now they have the tilt controls so um they're on by default which I think is a

choice not a wise choice but definitely a choice uh and so if the if you don't have your controller completely level it's gonna move you a little bit so that's what was happening Well, I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I don't have that problem at all on the console version of it.

It doesn't even exist.

That problem

at all.

Oh, well, you do.

All right.

Well, we hope you all have a great 4th of July.

Who are our freedom fighters today?

All right.

Big thanks to Charlallo and Andrew for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

All right.

Well, that does it for us.

The 4th of July, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you on Monday.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.