2025.09.19: Bricked Eyeballs

How would I yell at a subordinate?

Seems unfair to yell at someone who can't yell back.

What?

That's sub what?

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Shut up!

Good!

Morning to you, wherever you are, because

it is 37!

For September 19th, 2025, my name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

She's on a boat.

It's actually Burns.

I had to ask everybody.

I might be on a a boat.

I might not be on a boat.

You don't know.

Shout is from Grilled Cheese Today.

I like the name Grilled Cheese.

Grilled Cheese.

Cheese.

Delicious.

Cheese.

Delicious.

And

they kind of had a little flex when they sent it in, too, because they sent in a couple different takes of their morning somewhere shout, which I appreciate, having different takes to work from.

But then they also included as part of it where they were, which is some like gorgeous valley in some national parks.

So you might be able to hear the river and the

national parks over there.

And I didn't ask for all this information.

You want to hear their other takes on the parking lot.

Yes, I do.

Let's hear all of it.

Every take.

That was take number two.

Here's take number one here.

Moody's away.

We got a couple of different ones in there, different attempts.

So we know it's morning in the national park anyway.

We know it's morning somewhere, right?

Even in national parks, it's morning.

It's Friday.

You guys made it through this week.

Somehow, some way you made it through this week.

And now we go into the weekend where nothing ever happens and everyone is happy you get to deal with samsung's

now dude i saw you're saying are you talking about the refrigerator that has ads that play in your kitchen on the smart refrigerator yes i am so if you have one of those smart song with like family hub fridges that has like

uh has one of those uh like the the screen which i guess you can have all these different modes like art modes, so you can scan in your kids' art or something and have a display on the fridge without having having to actually like use a magnet.

Or, I don't know, I like theoretically use a calendar, or sometimes they have those weird windows where it's like you can see inside the fridge without opening the fridge.

Which is

that's a camera and a display, that's like the worst way to do a window of all time.

But can I just say, though, before we say anything negative about this product, go ahead, I actually think this is really cool.

What,

the screen, yeah, you have always, and I have never been able to provide this for you.

You, when you were a kid growing up, you thought, one day I'll make it and I will get a refrigerator that has the water and the ice in the door.

That's how I will know that I've made it in life.

Like, I have reached the peak.

There is nothing higher to achieve than having a fridge with indoor water and ice.

Oh, and if you can get the, the one that can do crushed or cubed ice, not go crazy.

Look.

With the features.

But you still never had it.

You still never had it.

You've been working towards this goal your entire life and still have not achieved it.

Well, look, at this rate, we might be heading towards the least sophisticated fridges we can possibly get.

Because, so Samsung has been selling these fridges for quite some time and have just now announced that, oh, by the way, that fridge that we sold you, we're going to add in the ads.

They weren't sold with the ads.

And back in April, I'm pretty sure they issued statements saying they had no intention of rolling out ads.

But someone in their one of their departments must have gone, actually, that's a really good idea.

And

they were explicitly asked this by interviewers.

I think The Verge is the article that I read where they said, We asked this company earlier this year, are you going to use this to display ads?

And they explicitly said no.

And according to The Verge, now Samsung is doing this and calling it a pilot program.

We're just trying to figure this out and see what's up.

Right.

Their specific statement.

Are you ready?

Samsung is committed to innovation and enhancing everyday value for our home appliance customers.

As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen that value, we are conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the U.S.

market.

As part of this pilot program, Family Hub refrigerators in the U.S.

will receive an over-the-network software update with terms of service and privacy notice.

Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator cover screens.

The cover screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle.

Now get out there and buy, buy.

Bye, bye.

I know.

It's a.

That's exactly what you sounded like.

Announcer from the dungeon.

And so they're rolling this out like this is some awesome value addition for Samsung fridge customers.

Like who is out there is going, you know, I really, I, I wasn't going to get one of these screen-based fridges, but now that they're doing advertising on them, I'm sold.

Do you like, when you work in a department like that in a company, is there a scanner as you enter the building to make sure that you don't have a soul?

Like, is there a detector and that you can't enter the building?

Like, who write a huge, I assume at this point.

a human wrote that copy and they all talked about it like yeah that sounds great like everyone's gonna believe that it's one of those like the side effects of the like line must always go up right it's like where can we find something new to squeeze right and if we don't then we're not going to hit our metrics.

And if we don't hit our metrics, not only are we not going to get our bonuses, but there might be like let's also be honest here, too.

We always think that people who work at these other companies love their job and are part of the machine while we hate our jobs.

Everyone hates their job.

Like the person who wrote that hates

their job.

They hated doing that.

God damn it.

But like in their kitchen with a cup of coffee, going, I got to go in.

You won't believe what I got to write today.

Yeah.

But like some probably like chat GPT model somewhere said, you know, what it'd be a great idea.

And like the boss at the top said, let's do it.

We're implementing this.

And now everyone below them has to deal with this bullshit.

Listen, this is just, this is going to sound like future sci-fi stuff, but at one point having a display on your fridge was super sci-fi stuff.

We cannot put technology inside of our bodies.

We can't, right?

They've ruined it for themselves.

They've ruined it for themselves.

At some point, you will have advertisements in your goddamn dreams.

So there's a show that's on Amazon Prime called Upload.

Did you ever watch any of that?

Or was I watching

the season with you?

Okay, so it's

one of us did not fall in love with leading man.

I won't say who, but one of us did not.

But it's a series that it kind of has vibes like The Good Place, where it's dealing with kind of like heavy topics in a lot of ways, but trying to do so in a lighthearted and fun manner.

And it's the sort of near future where the idea is you can live forever.

You can be uploaded into a simulation.

It destroys your head to do it, right?

So usually it's done like upon the moment of death or if you're about to die.

And they basically like scan your head off.

And then you go into a simulation.

You can live forever.

But there are side effects to that, of course, which is...

It sounds like you has all your memories, not you.

Which is that that simulation is not free.

right?

Your family has to pay for this.

And if they stop paying and you have to go into like the free version where you get essentially one hour of existence per month and so on, it gets like, it deals with some dark shit, but tries to do so in a sort of fun, quirky ziney manner.

And this sort of stuff

is the, it's like it takes this line and just keeps drawing it out further and further and further until it seems absolutely ridiculous, but we're on the path.

If you want a shorter version of the same thing too, Black Mirror has an episode this season.

It's got Rashida Jones and the dude from the IT crowd who's not the guy with Asperger.

It's the other guy.

Neither of them have.

Wait, who's

talking about the Irish guy?

The Irish guy.

The Irish guy.

His name is he was in Bridesmaids.

We've done this before.

We've had this conversation before.

I can never remember this guy's name.

But it's the episode with those two in it, and it's about she gets some kind of medical procedure that has to be

has a subscription plan, and it just gets worse and worse and worse.

It's one of the best illustrations of inshittification you could ever imagine.

I also find like this

word, the definition of this word inshitification, even since we've talked about it,

it's on the move.

It specifically means a specific thing where people introduce features and then make them worse and then make you pay more for them and then offer less services and things get worse.

Unfortunately, inshittification now means to people, I saw something on the internet I don't like.

And that's not what that term means.

It means something specific.

At the same time, I realize language is kind of an evolving thing, and you can't control that.

So I guess that word doesn't mean what I think it means anymore.

It's also really difficult to

avoid or even to resist that march forward.

I sent this to you.

I don't think you've had a chance to read it yet, but I saw there was a review for a new, you know, the Meta Smart Glasses.

They've got a new one coming out that actually has, it basically does what Google Glass said it was going to do, where it can project into your, the lens of your eyeglasses, like things like, well, it's from Meta.

So it's going to project Instagram reels, right?

If you want.

It has a display name.

It has a display in the lens.

You can read and send text messages.

You can do like all this other stuff.

And it's projected into the lens, but looks like a pair of Ray-Bans.

Guess what's coming?

Yeah, right.

Just wait till they roll out the ads.

Sure, why wouldn't they?

Eventually that's going to happen.

Or it'll be like, oh, if you want to.

It's an amazing idea.

but eventually it'll squeeze and listen everything's got to be supported in some way you either support things with money or you support them with your attention and your time that's just the system that we've evolved in the internet at this point at the same time

Having ads playing in your kitchen to you within your own home, I guess your television does the same thing.

It's not something that you need or want.

I do like the public's response to this, which is, you suck as a company but guess what we're going to do instead we're just going to make fun of people that have these in their homes that paid an extraordinary amount of money to have now this vector for corporations to send you advertisements in your own home right we're making your fridge uncool it's like the same thing as like when they started having subscriptions for like like heating packages in cars and stuff like that.

They just decided, you know, if we make this uncool, people will just not buy it at that point.

Right.

Like, congratulations, you uncooled your own cool thing.

Yeah, you paid an extraordinary amount of money for something that's wildly uncool.

You know what I think of when I, when I see this stuff, do you remember, gosh, I'm going to try to remember one of the names of the services, something like All Advantage.

Does that name ring a bell?

No.

Do you remember back in the days of web banners and ad bars?

Do you remember those?

And you could install an ad bar on your browser and it would, there was a thing that you could do and it turned into like a multi-level marketing thing.

And I think the name of the company was All Advantage.

But you could sign sign up for an account you could put an ad bar add an ad bar to your browser and it would show you ads and then if you got other people to sign up underneath you you would share money in the ads that were shown to you like you like a like a pyramid you were exactly it was a multi-level marketing thing for sure

And you could get like this ad network of people who also were getting paid for the ads that they were seeing.

But then, of course, the people in the next level up got a little share from the people below them as well.

It was a complete pyramid pyramid scheme, but it was a way that people were actually making money from the ads that were being shown to them.

If someone said like Samsung said, hey, not we'll give you the service or whatever for free, but we'll actually pay you money to let us show you ads in your house, I think a lot more people would do that, honestly.

Yeah, it's like, where's the upside for me here?

Right.

Especially because the fridge was sold without ads.

Remember as well, Samsung is one of the first companies, I think, that rolled out ads to smart TVs.

So really,

the writing was on the wall there.

Also, they also had voice controls in the TV and then the privacy statements in that.

I'm not, I'm kind of not a big fan of Samsung products these days.

And we've had a couple in the house, but like the way it listens and what they can do with the voice data on and the audio recordings that they collect from your house is pretty dystopian, in my opinion.

Pretty dystopian.

All right.

This is from Wikipedia.

All Advantage was an internet browser.

It was an internet advertising company that positioned itself as the world's first infomediary by paying its users and members a portion of the advertising revenue generated by their online viewing habits.

I saw people who were getting like $70,000 checks and stuff like that.

They would be posting them online.

Oh, they're the top of the pyramid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They were.

That's the way that works, right?

And then everyone else thinks, oh my God, I want a $70,000 check.

And then they would start signing up their friends and everything and get a $12 check or whatever.

Was this around the same time as the CD programs where you get like 12 CDs for one penny?

Right.

No, it was about that time.

It was in the late 90s.

It was actually one of the first ways that people could make money on the internet.

I mean, it was way before YouTube.

And then even YouTube was around for years before they decided to start sharing revenue with the people who were making the content for their network.

So it was really, it really was one of the first ways.

It was like 10 years before the YouTube Partner Program.

Right.

And that was also like, it's look, but we're paying you to inshitify yourselves.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If we're going to, if we're going to take up your time and attention, we're going to pay you for it, right?

Does it say what years the program ran for All Advanced?

It It says

that I know.

I'm impressed.

It launched in 99.

It says, All Advantage ultimately fell victim to the sharp decline in advertising spending as the dot-com bubble burst and the U.S.

economy entered a recessionary period in the mid-2000s.

Oh, sure.

Blame it on the economy.

The company finally halted consumer-facing operations in February 2001.

So

it was short-lived, yeah.

It had a bright two years.

Dude, somewhere somebody guy is in a beach house and he made all of his money from the All Advantage

program.

I won't disparage you by using a different name.

But

I'm curious, when do you recall, when did the YouTube partner program start?

Okay, so here we go.

This is the Asking Ninja stuff.

I always say those guys are owed an enormous check.

from YouTube and from iTunes for the amount of traffic they drove to those platforms when they were the darling viral hit of the internet.

So YouTube launched 2005-ish, but then they introduced the YouTube Partner program in 2007.

2007, okay.

2007.

But it might also have been like a very, like a very small, it was a pilot program for me for their U.S.

customers.

Yeah, exactly.

It was

a way to enhance your experience on the YouTube platform.

But we, you know, talking about all this stuff, too, we had a comment that showed up

that I saw a post where someone was saying, like, why am I all of a sudden being served the RT podcast?

And I'm showing up in my algorithm and I didn't see if people commented on it.

Crazy coincidence.

Right now, we're in the middle of revamping the back catalog of the RT podcast to remove all those old ads where all the old like baked in leather like here, let me read this.

Yeah, all the host read ads and everything to update it with dynamically inserted ads for the back catalog that's on YouTube.

Because it's just, it's reading an ad, but like it's advertising a service that's no longer paying for that ad.

No one's making making any money from that.

So, we just thought we'll remove that and put in a normal modern ad in the place of that.

Go figure as soon as we started doing that, what happens?

It starts showing up in the YouTube algorithm again.

Isn't that interesting?

Because of the shift in

how ads are handled and the being

dynamically inserted ads, right, which benefits YouTube.

There has been a shift in our monetization ability

of the RT podcast.

Now, coming to your Samsung fridge.

It's the RT podcast.

Oh my gosh.

Can you imagine?

You thought it could just play elder scrolls?

No, no, it can also play the RT podcast.

What if your Samsung fridge played a video complaining about your Samsung fridge in your kitchen?

That would be amazing.

Just wait till it starts like autoplaying video ads with sound.

What do you need to be advertised?

to you.

Like, I just feel like, are they advertising food to you?

Like, oh, I'll go ahead and I'll buy that.

Look,

tell me that doesn't make sense, though, right?

You go to your fridge because you're hungry and you want some food.

What are you always advised to do

before going grocery shopping?

Eat something so that you don't shop hungry, right?

Because when you're hungry, everything seems like a great idea.

You're like, you go along the shelves, you're going to buy everything.

You're going to buy way too much stuff because you're hungry right now.

It's very true.

So you go to your fridge, right?

You're hungry.

You want something.

And they show you an ad for,

what do I show you an ad for, Bernie?

You only go to the fridge when you're hungry, amateur hour over there.

I don't need an excuse to go to the fridge.

So now you're going to see an ad for, like, I don't know, like some new 100% food, right?

This is going to fix all of your poor eating habits.

Um, just buy this 100% food thing.

And now you're like, oh man, I'm hungry, but that's a really good idea because I'm hungry.

But I know that I'm doing a naughty thing by going to the fridge, right?

So now I'm going to fix my problem by, I don't know, what do you click on the ad or do you have to then like go do something else?

I'm going to pull it up on on my smartphone.

You know, I don't know.

I have I've I've looked very briefly at a smart fridge or a fridge with a display.

They are

refrigerators are very expensive anyway.

No, do you do people just randomly upgrade their fridge?

Like, what do you do with your old fridge if you do that?

Don't you have a fridge until it dies and then you figure out what to do with it?

I always assumed that that's when they go into the garage and become the fridge that holds like all of the sodas for the neighborhood kids because you know that's that's the era that I grew up in right is there was a fridge or a fridge or freezer in the garage especially like that's where like you knew like that that family had made it because they had like a fridge or freezer in the garage what you're describing is one of those things in America that's either a super rich thing or a super fucking poor thing like somebody has an extra fridge in their garage to hold drinks and or dead deer.

It's one of the two.

No, well, we had those growing up.

I'm remembering, I completely forgot about it until like this moment.

We had a freezer.

It was a freezer only, but it wasn't like a deep freeze that you have to like reach down into.

It had a door.

You open the door and that's where we stored our otter pops.

Yeah.

Among other things, I'm sure.

Probably.

You didn't have a dedicated otter pop fridge in Ogden Valley.

No, that's also

where we would store the cans of orange juice.

You know, you'd have like the condensed orange juice and it'd be in like that, that sort of a canister, and you would have to undo a thing around the top and take the foil off, and then squeeze the orange, the frozen orange juice into a jug and dilute it down.

Did you ever have that?

No, no, I'm just thinking about the experience of eating otter pops and just slicing the sides of my mouth open.

That's that, that's actually how the joker got those scars.

That is, those are the scars from otter pops.

That's how the joker got that.

So, we could buy a Samsung family hub refrigerator

right now from a department store called John Lewis for two, no, that's not a family hub.

I want a family hub.

Okay, 2,500 pounds is what it's going to cost us for a Samsung family hub.

If I spend that time, call it about $3,200.

If I spend 2,500 pounds on a fridge that's then going to advertise to me, how much does a fridge cost?

Like, yeah, I always love in your head.

I think everyone has a list of prices of just what things cost.

And you'd be asking, a fridge costs what?

$800.

$100.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

A fridge costs $800.

You tell me a fridge costs $3,200?

Get the fuck out of there.

Mind you, like, that's like one of those things, too, where I might be time-locked because it's been a while since I bought a fridge.

Right, you don't buy one once a year, it's a refrigerator.

You buy one once every couple decades.

I don't buy a new fridge till I need somewhere to store the otter pops.

Let's be honest, you move into a place, the fridge is there, and you just use that fridge.

I don't know that I've ever, like, when was the last time I purchased it?

Hold on, I'm thinking the last three places that we've lived, all like the fridge.

Friday had a fridge at the place.

Right.

Last time, the last time I bought a fridge, I was a renter in Australia, and the fridge did not come with the apartment.

That's a scam.

See, that's the kind of thing where you get ads.

I need a fridge.

Just tell you what.

You give me a fridge, play me ads all day, and I don't have to pay for the fridge, then okay.

Right.

Or like, if I'm going to buy a fridge, I want, like, I'm going to want a steep discount.

I don't want a premium fridge that's going to advertise to me.

That's bullshit.

I want a fridge that's got two-factor authentication.

That would be a great diet plan.

I got your code to like your phone to go in the fridge.

Mom, I want to eat.

What's the code for the fridge?

I don't have a signal.

I starved to death

because I didn't pay my mobile bill.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the only time I've ever bought a fridge was, oddly enough, the first house that I ever had in Buda, I moved out of Austin because I couldn't afford to live in Austin, but I could build a house in Buta.

They were, you know, building lots of these big neighborhoods and developments.

So it was a new house.

So I had had to buy a fridge for that.

I think that might be the only fridge I've ever bought, besides like for offices and things like that.

So while we're on a theme of bitching about technology today or talking about the advances in technology and the pressure that's going to put on us, I'm going to go to the next one.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I'm getting hungry over here.

I'm going to talk about some new iOS features.

Have you installed the new iOS?

I have not because I'm falling prey to all the griping about liquid glass, and I'm not giving it a fair shot.

And

I'm being an asshole.

I should just install it.

If you want to, you can, I don't know, I guess, have a look at the liquid glass on my phone because I installed the new update.

And

it has some features that I guess I didn't really pay attention to, but now I can tell already they're going to take over my life.

One is this is really stupid and it requires you to have an Apple Watch is a sleep score.

But it already had sleep scores.

I know it did, but now it gives me a score.

It grades me on my sleep every night.

So

I installed iOS 26.

I already like to sleep with my Apple Watch on because I like it when I can look the next day and go, oh yeah, look at all that deep sleep I got.

Or like, I did really good here.

Clearly, I woke up to go to the bathroom or something, but look at me not staying awake.

I got back to sleep.

And I'm proud of myself about it.

So the first night that I installed, that I had this, the 26 installed, and I woke up and it said, you got a sleep score of 96.

It says based on like how long you stayed asleep and how many times you woke up, but then also like how quickly you went to sleep after you woke up, you got a sleep score of 96.

And I went, fuck me, because now not only do I know I'm getting graded on my sleep, I got a really good grade the first night.

I'm going to be chasing that.

Do you know how long I'm going to be chasing that grade?

I don't think the rest of the school year.

I don't think that's good though.

I don't think now

you'll be falling asleep thinking about this.

What can you possibly do to get the four extra points?

You either are asleep or you're not asleep.

It's not about the four extra points for me.

It's about the fact that, you know what my sleep score was the next night?

87, Bernie.

Do you know what it was last night?

80.

Did we say this?

I read a tweet one time that's been in my brain, rent-free in my head for years, which is somebody pointed out that the way that you fall asleep is by pretending to be asleep.

And it's the only thing that you do by pretending to do it.

And I just, I wish I didn't have that in my head because I think about that now when I go to sleep.

Hey, you did.

We should post the reel that you sent to me, though, because it works really well.

Some lady had something about when you wake up in the night here's a way you can move your eyes please look at this in the link really that actually works for you i thought that worked really well you know what you can tell if it works or not try it when you watch the reel you'll have to understand it's like an exercise with your eyes that makes you fall back asleep do it with your eyes do it with her and you'll feel yourself be like suddenly sleepy doing this at least i did great that's wonderful i sent that to you specifically because i thought that you might enjoy it all i need to know is how long did i I sleep?

That's it.

I already got that.

And I also feel like even that was too much information once my watch started to tell this to me because

I felt like my sleep was fine before.

And now that I have metrics around my sleep, I feel like I'm not doing enough.

What else can I do?

You've got pressure to sleep better.

I had a, I was fine.

I was operating just normally.

Now I'm like, oh my God, I got seven hours and 15 minutes.

I've only averaged seven hours of sleep over the last five days or six and a half hours.

Am I going to die?

It's like, I was fine.

You go to sleep when you're tired.

You wake up when you're not.

That's the way that works.

I don't know.

It's like, now I'm thinking too much about it.

But the other thing that they've rolled out is now the AirPods.

I don't know if it's all the AirPods, but the ones that I have now have some sort of sleep detection on them.

So you can be listening to, in my case, an audiobook.

I stopped listening to Bobaverse, by the way.

I think I've fallen off it.

I just don't think it's for me.

That's completely fair.

I'm coming to you.

I like the concept.

I like the concept, but it just doesn't feel like it's for me.

Instead, I've now started listening to the Dresden files.

I've only ever like read it, you know, with my eyeballs like a chomp.

And so I'm listening to the audiobooks because I've heard very good things about them.

And I tested,

I tested listening to the audiobooks while I went to sleep.

And it did.

It paused the audiobook when I fell asleep, which is awesome.

So I didn't like, I lost like maybe five minutes that I had to back it up.

That's kind of weird.

It's kind of weird that my, that my headphone knew when I fell asleep based on what exactly.

But now I feel like your technology is watching you while you sleep.

I mean, it was already monitoring us, I guess, but now this feels like another level of that.

Well, what's happening next probably is it's going to get to the point where it knows I'm asleep and it starts whispering in my ear.

You want a Samsung family hub refrigerator?

It's going to be really great.

We do have a Samsung product in our bedroom, too.

I'll have to be careful.

It's like you literally hear the Samsung go,

she's sleeping.

I'm going to start reading ads.

And it's going to be all like subliminal stuff that's delivered to you in your soul.

I'm telling you, dude.

And I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to go, sweetie, I don't think we can get by without a Samsung Family Hub refrigerator.

All I'm going to say is this.

Some point in the future, just remember I said this.

If you put technology inside your body,

you deserve it.

I don't know what it is.

Whatever it is, you deserve it.

You, you should have known better.

Well, look, there's already a lot of really disturbing stories.

Like,

I want to say it's bionic eyes.

I'm going to look and see if it's not.

Well, if you're solving a problem, that's different.

Right.

But no, but this is something that happened to people.

Like, they actually got this, you know, these implants because of a vision loss and then they were helped by it, but then the company went out of business and now their eyes breaked.

And that sounds like sci-fi, so hold on.

I knew somebody that had really bad headaches, and they got what was at the time called digital medicine.

They had electrodes implanted in their neck, and they ran down their back, like the wires for it.

And there was a control unit in their back, which they could then turn up and down with a magnet outside of their body.

They literally like almost like a dial, right?

And they could turn up the electrodes to help them with their headaches.

So what happens when you like go through an airport scanner or something and there's magnets involved?

You just suddenly like,

does it turn itself all the way up or down?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe get past the Samsung soul detector on the way into the office.

All right, I was not wrong about this.

Here's an article from the BBC from

2022.

Hundreds of people who had retinal implants to improve their sight facing uncertain features.

The technology they rely on is now obsolete.

That get together, just chip in and buy it, whatever that is, right?

That's what you want to do.

You want to chip in and buy that stuff.

One of the purchases that we've made here that I'm really happy about is we invested in a treadmill

and we bought the,

it took effort to get like the lowest tech treadmill we possibly could.

Like one that didn't have like a screen on it.

We've found one that has like, you know, the dot screens where it's like all the like little LEDs to make the number like six miles per hour or whatever.

Like it's that low tech.

It's a treadmill.

It's a treadmill.

All it does, you tread, you tread on it.

That's what you do.

It's got a belt that moves and you have to keep up with it.

That's it.

You set the pace, you set the incline, incline, and that's it.

You're done.

It's the like the lowest tech thing we have, and it works fantastic.

And I love it.

Mitch Hedberg bit about the donut with the receipt.

I don't need a receipt for a donut.

I don't need to prove to anybody I bought a donut.

It's too much.

It's too much.

Did you, was it Voodoo Donuts we went to?

In Austin?

I think it was Voodoo Donuts.

And they put the Mitch Hedberg joke at the bottom of the receipt.

Did they?

Like, I just want to buy a donut.

We don't need to bring paper into this transaction.

By the way, we went to that place.

Three bucks a donut.

That was, I mean, they're crazy over the top donuts, but was it three or was it more?

Those, can we, can we also note, though, that those donuts were the size of our head?

I get, I get it, but it's just like, once again, I got a matrix and a list in my head of what things cost.

Donuts are not $3

per donut.

Yeah, we keep running into things that like dramatically shock that

internal cost index.

Yeah, every time we go back to America, we run it.

I guess that's true.

I guess that's true.

All right, Ashley, who's helping us pay for some donuts today?

All right, thank you to Kevin Martinez.

Happy birthday, by the way, Kevin.

Orion Monkey, and Half Origin for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morningsomewhere and roosterteeth.com.

All right, well, that does it for us this week, ending September 19th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you on Monday.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.