2025.12.02: These Dogs Are Raw

It's the economy, stupid.

Hey, we're recording the podcast. Gut up.

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is Morning Somewhere for December 2nd, 2025. My name is

Bertie Burns. Sitting right over there, she's Raw Dog in the holidays.
It's Ashley Burns. Say hi to Ashley, everybody.
It makes sense in a little bit here.

Ashley has a story she wants. Do you want her to talk about your thing right out of the gate today? Sure,

let's talk about raw dogging right out of the gate. It's a morning.

Yeah, I saw this insane article. Well, the thing is, the article itself isn't insane, but it's like the headline makes it sound way worse than it is.
This is from Newsweek.

Does Gen Z raw dogging boredom trend actually fix your attention span? And it goes on to talk about how there's this trend on TikTok, which

sort of doesn't make any sense, of people putting down their phones and just like staring at a wall and intentionally cultivating boredom. Right.
Right.

And everyone's like, congratulations, you just invented meditation.

But also,

that doesn't seem like a bad thing.

I mean, I realize it's a trend people are finding on TikTok, but if they're like, hey, put down your TikTok for just a second, stare at a wall and just see what thoughts happen.

Does it feel a little bit like Columbus discovering America? Right. Is that what it feels like?

I guess so. It's one of those things, like, it's a good thing that it's happening.

Maybe where I'm getting hung up, Bernie, is that they're calling it raw dogging boredom.

My favorite part about the article, it was on Newsweek, is the reporter, I got to give him a shout out. Marnie Rose McFaul

had to, in the first two paragraphs, basically

explain to the general audience the etymology of the term raw dog

to set them up for the rest of the article. So that must have been a really interesting thing to have to navigate.
I get it, though. There was a viral clip from.

I feel like that wasn't the first draft of that paragraph.

That was when their boss or something is like, so what's raw doggy? And they're like, oh, for God's sake. You talk about the morning show with the gay guy? Yeah,

there was this, this, I'll find this clip. We'll put it in the link down, but it's this British morning show.

And there's like, there's one guy who understands what they're talking about. And everyone else on the show has no idea.
It's all these like older people.

an morning show uh and they're talking about uh they're just super square super straight and they're trying to explain barebacking uh reality and they're like they're like oh yeah it's like oh like yeah it's like raw dogging reality and you go um you put down your phone and you and things and you go out and you just experience the world yeah and then someone said i did that once they said i was uh barebacking and this guy this poor guy at the corner is just because they They don't seem to understand the sexual connotations of all these words that they're using.

And there's this guy off in the corner just quietly dying on television it is such an incredible like impromptu performance that the guy spikes the lens at one point I actually felt like he was making eye contact with me directly

like through time and the internet he was making eye contact with me like can you believe what they're saying right now and it was incredible like they took it up a notch unintentionally and he's like this has to be a fucking joke maybe at that point he thought it was a prank on him right right like at that point you would but then if it keeps going and it's on television then no right yeah they mean it god he's so funny he's so funny the uh i think that what they were talking about in that one was the previous iteration of the raw dogging trend which was people who were raw dogging travel yeah where they would just like they would just go outside and they wouldn't take stuff with them No, this was people who were on airplanes and they wouldn't watch in-flight entertainment and stuff like that.

You know what that sounds like? Like on an international flight. That sounds like they were raw dogging boredom.
Right. It's a little of both.
This was like probably where the trend started.

There might have been some, I don't know, maybe there was some raw dogging thing before that.

And I don't know exactly. I just like, I mean, I like the idea that people are acknowledging, like young people are acknowledging that the constant scrolling is not great for them, right?

Like it's something that it's so hard to break away from because it's... Everything is like a new thing.

There's a new thing just to swipe away.

And I'm going to be entertained. And it's so easy.
It's so hard to break away from.

But you know, as you're doing it, it's not doing wonders for like your brain, for your attention span, for all that stuff.

Like I'm constantly saving like fitness tips that I could be doing in order to, like, I'm not going to do them, but I'm going to save them with the idea that I might do them.

I'm going to feel really good about myself that I intend to do them without ever actually doing them. Like, there's a lot of that that I'm like, I know that I'm not doing myself any favors here.

It's also like if you have any of those

like features on your phone that track your screen time, it's mortifying. Oh, yeah.
And I was like, you spent like this much time in like these types of apps. And I'm like, oh.

Something that you didn't have.

I guess at this point, it's like 15 years ago, it didn't even exist. Like you just didn't.
have these things. It didn't exist.

Somebody in the Austin subreddit was just recently talking about, I like how we're decrying social media. I'm at least going to cite social media.

They were talking about hearing a broadcast from the morning show,

Dudley and Bob, who were on KLBJ in Austin.

I was on their shows a couple times, but they were in like the 90s when like that was like your, those were your influencers where like whoever had the drive time radio, right?

And that was a, that was a big deal. Like getting the drive time radio slot was such a big deal.
And they were talking about how much stuff doesn't even sound like it makes sense in today's era.

Like they would call in. It's like, you can dial star 967 on your mobile phone.

We have a special deal now with Cellular One where y'all, you don't have to dial our phone number, just dial star 967 if you have a mobile cellular telephone in your car.

And they're like introducing the concept to people, yeah, yeah. They have to overexplain it because no one knows what they would be talking about in that era, and that's just how weird it sounds now.

And now we're now we have to overexplain raw dogging. And now, those guys, I remember talking to those specific guys years later.

Uh, um, Bob's son was a Rooster Teeth fan and like would come to RTX and he's just like would talk about how much things changed so fucking quickly. And I think you don't see that

as well as you do as when it's moving away from you. Does that make sense?

Like when it's moving towards you, then you're like in it and you're in the wave, but when you're watching the wave go the other direction, you can see the progress happening.

Seems like it's going a lot faster. Right, right.
Because things change very rapidly for you. And we're seeing that now too.
There's been

in business economic data, the thing that everyone is trying to figure out right now is even though everyone apparently was in theater seeing Zootopia 2,

that the Black Friday sales set a record. They jumped by almost 10%

from last year. Which is a big deal.
But then I've also seen a lot of people saying, Yeah, but how much more expensive are all the things? I think you can hand wave some of it with inflation.

You could definitely do that. But they're seeing a general rise in spending in general, which is also the problem with inflation.

We've been talking about that since the beginning of the podcast, that even with inflation and this like loss of consumer confidence, I don't actually know how they rate consumer confidence.

I should look into that.

I would have thought it would have been from economic data like sales. And it's like, oh, we're not selling as much.

So consumer confidence is lower, but it seems to be completely separated from that fundamental because all the sales data is always tremendous, which is a huge problem for inflation, right?

It's why inflation keeps dogging us is because no matter what happens, Americans just don't stop spending money.

And the new thing is now that they keep talking about how now there's this, what they call a K-shaped economy.

And this derives from the recovery that they were anticipating from the pandemic when spending essentially ground to a halt. Were we going to have a V-shaped recovery where we had a quick recovery?

Were we going to have a U-shaped recovery? Were we slow, steady increase back to where we were? The scary one was the L-shaped recovery. Would we have dropped and stayed down?

Stayed down long recession with lots of stagnation. And then there was this concept that started to be introduced called a K-shaped economy, which is what we're seeing now in 2025.

Seems to be what happened, which is

the wealthy class got wealthier and everyone else just went the other direction. So you basically have two vectors.
Call it what you will. It's basically two economies.

And the people who are combating,

for lack of a better term, they're combating.

This economic data that's coming out, like, oh, there's all this record spending.

They're projecting now that for the first time ever, Americans are are going to spend a trillion dollars, a trillion dollars in holiday spending.

And it's all this, normally what you'd see is very positive economic data.

And of course, there's everything is political in America. Literally everything, actually, is political in America.

So I do feel like when people talk about this economic data, there's a lot of people who don't want to say anything positive because they don't want to lend any kind of credibility to the current administration.

So one of the things I see people combating this data with is they're saying that

it's not spending that's happening across the economy. It's spending only among wealthy people.
And it's kind of like this gotcha.

That's way scarier to me because that to me says that economy is doing fine. You're just not in it.
We're talking about that wave going away.

That's it. Watching that wave move away from the middle class and watching it depart, it's...
enormously scary. It's scary.
It's very scary to me. Yeah.

Because what that means is everyone is basically basically saying the economy is doing great without you. Right.
Or we're not part of that economy.

If there's a completely separate economy that is the traditional American economy and it has moved away from the vast majority of American economies.

And it's now focusing purely on the spending of the wealthy class.

It also scares me too because it's like, what else do people have left? to affect change? Like, what do they have left in the arsenal?

Theoretically, then that's when you have to bring like employment pressure to bear, right? Like unions and things like that. Your labor, yes.
Guess what? That's also going away rapidly. Right.

With the, with the, with the AIization of everything, right? It's, there are, what, how many, how many layoffs have we had this year? An enormous, like 150,000 jobs lost.

I've seen projections anywhere from 15 to 33% of all jobs currently could be replaced by AI. And someone is funding those studies to say those things publicly, right?

And it just seems to be a general trend away from, even from the companies who are making AI. They're laying off people who are making the tools.

Like those are the first people getting like thrown out of the labor market. It's insane.
And where are they going to go?

You already automated everything, everyone else's job, and now they're getting thrown out. Anyway, it just, it makes me feel like there is a

long-term, a slow bleed, a disarming of the middle class in America. And yeah, maybe there can be a sustainable economy for some people, but it's like, if the middle class in America completely dies,

I'm not saying America dies, but the America that I grew up in is definitely gone. Right.
Right, because long gone. Well, because that America was the middle class.
Right.

It's unrecognizable at that point in time. Yeah.
It was something different. But then, like, what is left for people? And, you know, there are always other options that are left.

You don't talk about them publicly on a podcast, especially not in an era where the government is threatening death to people who say things like, don't

do anything illegal. Don't do anything illegal.

Yeah. So

it's insane. So this whole discussion around the Black Friday records and this trillion dollar spending this holiday season is crazy.

And we even thought like yesterday to steer away from political stuff, we were talking about this board game that I recommended that people could buy as a gift because we were just talking about gift giving stuff.

Quarto. Quarto.
And I was like,

that game cost 25 bucks. I know that game cost 25 bucks.
And you were like, nope, it's $38 because you looked it up on Amazon. I was like, God damn.
I was like, that's really changed. It hasn't.

I went and looked it up. That's what we paid for it.
And it's 25 pounds still in the UK. I was just using bucks as like, I paid 25 pounds for it.

And yes, there is an exchange rate there, but also the prices in the UK include a 20% sales tax for everything. That's how it sales tax is here, it's 20%.
And that's in the price.

So even it's like a 30, a dollar 30 exchange rate. you know that adds that takes it up to

31 bucks 32 bucks in the us what it should be it's 38 bucks and then you got to add whatever your sales tax is for your state on top of that.

So it's, it's, we've seen a flip of like prices in the UK versus prices in the U.S. since we've lived here.
Yeah, because when we moved here, we would try to get things from the U.S.

and then have someone bring them over if they were coming to visit because things were so much cheaper to buy in the U.S. I had a really similar sort of like shopping experience.

I was looking for something online, some hair care, right? And I went and I added it to my cart. And I was like, wow, that's way more expensive than I was expecting.

And then I realized that it's because I was shopping on the US site. And I switched over to the UK site and it was half the price.
Half the price. Half the price.
It went from like $60 to 30 pounds.

And that's including the 20% VAT. Yes.
Right. And I was, I was like astonished.
I don't know when that happened.

By the way, I never understood why people were like, who cares if they don't put the sales tax in the price on the the shelf? That was such a big deal to people I remember who were outside the U.S.

It's a big deal to me now. Like,

and it is. Well, I get why they wouldn't do it in the U.S.
And it makes a lot of sense because sales tax varies state to state.

And so it could be a really difficult thing then for all of the sort of multi-state vendors to be having different prices, or you go to a different state and something looks like it's a different price, even though like it's just that with sales tax, or we don't have sales tax in the state.

And so it could be really complicated.

On the other hand, I love looking at a price and not having to mentally add like 8.25% to it. That's Texas sales tax.

It'll depend on what state you're in, but Texas, who doesn't have a state income tax, has 8.25%.

You know, and then you get like other states, like I think is it Oregon that has no sales tax, but they make it up in other things as well.

It's, you know, so it varies state to state and it would be really messy for retailers. But you know what?

It would be really nice for consumers to be able to look at a price and know that that's what they're paying.

It's no wonder that spending is so high because there are some things that you can get away with not buying, right? And I think that... Like Cuarto.
Like Cuarto, yes.

But, you know, it's like things like, you know, your milk and your butter and your eggs. There are necessities and like things that you have to spend money on.
Right. And then if you have.

Basically like you're staring down the barrel of Christmas shopping.

And if you're going to try to get as much done as you can and you're on a budget, it actually makes a lot of sense to do as much of the shopping as you possibly can during a big sale like Black Friday, because that's when your money is going to go the furthest.

And for the people who are in the position of like struggling to afford groceries, when you see this economic data about trillion-dollar holiday sales and setting records, that should be concerning because inflation doesn't just stop at certain products, right?

Right. It'll hit things differently, but prices are going to go up across the board because the spending power of the currency that you're holding is going down.
So everything goes up in price.

And there's supply chain stuff in this. It's a very complex.
We actually had an economist show up in the subreddit. I'm sure they'll show up today with lots of great thoughts.

They'll actually hold a grudge against me from like 10 years ago. Would you do? I said that.
What would you fuck up? Like economics is the tea leaves of something or

it's the philosophy of money. I'm talking about like macroeconomics, right? Right.
Supply and demand on a mass level. And it's like, just like, how do you like COVID is a great example.

When we stopped it dead, kudos to all of us for getting that thing going again, you know, which maybe we didn't.

Maybe we didn't. Maybe, maybe 20% of the people got it going again and 80% of the people did not.

Yeah. Are still trying to get it going again because that wave is going away.
Yeah. It's insane.
It's just, it's, uh, I read that.

I was, I, I was just so deep in the weeds about this K-shaped economy and all this Black Friday record sales. I just, I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe it. It's like, it's the same story.

I feel like I've been saying for the last two years, which is, uh, we're trying to fight inflation and no one will stop spending money.

Like, prices are high, yet we still see record spending everywhere all the time. But is that because like a lot of the things that people are spending on are things that they have to spend money on?

What, like, what are they going to do? Stop paying for their car? Are they going to stop paying rent? Yeah, but this, this date is not for that.

I guess the end of the day we're talking about is Black Friday. Nobody's getting a deal on their rent.
That's true. Black Friday.

But I would be very interested in seeing what the follow-up is for this.

Does holiday spending overall go up or is holiday or was it was everyone focused on the sale because that's when they could actually maybe afford something and they're not buying anything for the rest of the holiday i see it everywhere like even nvidia who's been the story of like leading this ai boom and is it these seven companies that are just trading money back and forth and all this they had these ridiculously high revenue and income numbers uh that they had to report against and they destroyed them.

Like everyone, they were well above what they thought would be.

While While everyone's talking about a bubble and this stuff is all about to collapse, and I'm not saying it's not, you know, and even like, you know,

we talk about the economy doing well because of these numbers. Ultimately, if you don't have a sustainable economy, that's a really bad economy.
It can look great myopically in the short term.

And in the long term, you're headed for an enormous amount of trouble.

What I worry about more than anything else is the disarming of the middle class and the power that they have to affect change in the system. That's what I'm saying.

It's taking away their ability to have any kind of say. And I'm worried about it too because I watch people leaning into it as well.
It's saying, yeah, it's not us. We're not spending this money.

It's like, that's not exactly the flex you think it is, right? Because that's power in the system. You're running out of ground to stand on.

And the ground you're standing on is like a polar bear on an ice cap that's slowly melting. Yeah, but the thing that's really scary about that is like, okay, so what's the solution?

And it's like, I don't, I have no idea. Do what you can while you can.
You know, I don't know what to say. This is a podcast, a morning podcast.

Getting in a situation where it's like, do what we we can while we can, right? Right. Scary concept.
Scary concept. Sorry, Tuesday.
What are you going to do?

Tuesday is always getting a little bit. Monday, you get college football.
Tuesday, you get this shit.

You get Bernie's philosophizing about money. Yeah, all problems, no solutions.
That's me.

All right. Well, I want to say a big thank you to McKinney and Tucker Wilde for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com slash morning somewhere and ruchoteeth.com.

I would love to hear from you guys about this. We have the voicemail number that's up on the site.
Did you you say the voicemail number yesterday? Yeah, it's 512-553-5430.

The way you said that, your face made me think we need to check that before we publish it. I should absolutely check that before I publish it, but I'm pretty sure that's it.

I tried to memorize that one really fast. If you have a mobile cellular telephone, you can document it.
Kyle Stars. No, no, no, no, no, no, not do that.
You don't know what that does on your phone.

Good luck to you. All right, well, that does it for us.
This record setting Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.