25 Years of Knowing

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Okay, I fixed it so that way it's a valid card now.

This is episode 70.

Nice.

Nope.

Okay.

The last episode.

This is fine.

I'm going to do that.

Fucking sucks.

Last episode was Talisman Coffee.

We talked about gentrification.

We talked about shithead donuts.

We talked about passive-aggressive communication, which was the thumbs up thing.

We just talked about it again.

I talked about AP style guide and nostalgia for personality.

I want to apologize.

Apparently, I had the

MLS

style guide.

Yeah, you weren't using the API.

Yeah, I went and I found a photo of it.

You fool.

It was the MLS.

That's okay.

There are many style guides.

It was a different time back then.

Different time.

Yeah.

But this is episode 70, so this is different from the last.

Man, I can't believe we just did Talisman last episode.

Yeah, and guess what?

We went back.

We went back, baby.

Speaking of.

Good morning, Gus.

Hey, is it Morning?

Pandistal.

Of course,

somewhere, right?

Yeah,

we went back there.

We'll talk about that at length later, I guess.

But we got a little bit of a barbecue.

Check out the BBQ side of the video.

It's called Mum Foods Smokehouse and Delicatessen.

Which is, you know, it's a bit of a left turn for us.

We are a coffee and occasionally burger podcast, so we're branching out into new territory.

Have you think about it?

A little bit.

A burger is a sandwich, and I had a barbecue sandwich.

As did I.

So by the transitive property, it's still okay.

And a burger is beef, and I had a beef brisket.

I had a beef sandwich.

I don't think it - I don't think we have to do the transitive property for our own podcast.

There was mustard on there, too.

I had onions on mine, which is also and pickles, which are popular.

Uh-huh.

Jeff had all my pickles, so he had a very pickled sandwich.

I had to end up having to take a few off.

I like pickles, but that was a lot of pickles.

That was a lot.

Those were, and those look like fresh-ass pickles.

Yeah, those are restaurant pickles.

Yeah.

You could put 50 Velasic dill chips from my fridge on it, be fine, but restaurant pickles are a whole different thing.

They're intense.

Yeah, they're a little more intense.

So here we are, 2024, January.

Is this your first recording of 2024?

Is this my first?

Yes, it is.

I'm doing another one right after this in the same room.

But

that's important.

I want to set the date because this is like...

Kind of an annual we're approaching an anniversary milestone.

It was January 1999 that you and I met for the first time.

So we're approaching 25 years of having known each other like next week or the week after.

Why do you say it like that?

What do you mean?

I'm just trying to.

I would have said we're approaching 25 years of being friends.

Yes.

Listen, I don't.

Wonderful friends.

I don't know anybody that's not my friend.

Huh?

You heard me.

I don't believe that.

We're approaching 25.

I know tons of people I know you don't like.

We weren't friends immediately when we met.

Pretty close.

Pretty close, but.

Pretty close.

It was like a day or two.

It was a couple days.

We were friends.

All right, right literally take it

so this is january and the reason i bring that up no god 25 years of friendship you guys were saying you couldn't pick like we were talking about it at the restaurant it was trying to find the exact day that it happened and you were saying it was like the third week of january the third week of january yeah

i want to say it was like the 20th or the 19th that's my right but it's been 25 years dude who the fuck knows and i i didn't we didn't i don't think we spoke other than saying like hello or like he helped me with a problem because he was a you know a senior level technician

i think the first time we spoke was actually at a party that uh one of the girls or two of the girls that lived together through

and uh i remember when you walked in and i i went to this party i think we talked about this i think we did i got there like an hour early and it was awkward and so i saw gus and he was like anybody else to talk to and i thought he was that tall skinny simbo and dude party an hour early and like helping to set up is that when you don't know the people yeah that has to be that's the move

when i had worked with them for two weeks i just got it wrong in my head like they said show up at eight, and I showed up at eight, but it was really not.

I don't know.

I don't remember how I fucked it up.

Someone got it wrong at your wedding.

Somebody got it.

I don't know if you know that.

No.

Someone showed up an hour late.

Really?

And yeah.

Like, can I say it?

So

it was like the ceremony had finished, and then everyone was kind of mingling around.

You know, we were looking, there's like the area over there where the ceremony was over on the side by the dance floor.

So like it was, it was crowded over by the ceremony was.

So Esther and I kind of moved out to by the dance floor and we saw Michael and Lindsay walking up.

And Michael was like very sheepishly, he's like, I got the time wrong.

I forget what time your wedding actually was.

He's like, I thought it was seven, but it was actually six.

He's like, we just realized it on the car on the way here.

I had no idea.

That's fucking awesome, though.

They both seemed really sheepish.

They were trying to sneak in, and I just happened to be standing right there as they walked in the entrance.

So fucking Michael and Lindsay, too.

That's fucking

hilarious.

Perfect.

That's awesome.

That's great.

So, yeah, it's not an uncommon thing to

get times wrong.

You're off the hook on that.

So, 25 years.

25 years.

We've been friends.

What is that?

Is that our silver anniversary?

What is 25 years?

Can you look that up, Eric?

Yeah, absolutely.

It is

you, how old are you?

45?

Yeah.

I'm 48.

So we've known each other for we've been friends for more than half of our lives.

You did the exact same thing, but I'm not giving you a a shit

we've been friends for more than half of our lives that's wild it's it's yeah it's really crazy it's crazy to think that when we made our first website together which would have been ugly internet when i was 23 and you were 21

my birthday in february so i probably just was 21 by just turned 21

Sterling silver.

That's both traditional and modern.

I'll have to get you something special.

All right.

Well, I'll find something.

I'll get like a serving platter, Sterling Silver Serving Platter or something.

It's just crazy to think that with that moment, like when we're plotting out ugly internet, that more than half of our lives later, we're still going to be doing shit together.

Yeah, it's been going on for, God, a long ass time.

It's crazy how much I think about it a lot, and I think I talk about it a lot in a few different podcasts, but it's like how much the world has changed.

You know, I talked about the other couple weeks ago about how the amazing race has changed so much.

Like when that episode came out,

they went to payphones, and that episode came out.

After you and I knew each other.

Yes.

You and I knew each other for a few years before then.

We were living together at that point.

Right.

So it's just, it's crazy how much the world has changed and how much we have to continually try to adapt to it.

But yeah, so we, that ugly internet.

I'm trying to think what spawned that initial idea.

And we know we wanted to make something.

I don't know why that's the idea we settled on.

Do you remember why?

So it's interesting that you ask.

I don't know the answer, but I actually was just kind of going through this today because I just edited an episode of my solo podcast I do, so I'll write, which is, I was trying to answer, you know, everybody asks us the questions of how you got started at Rooster Teeth, how did you find your footing?

How did you find success?

And I feel like we've answered those questions like one million times in one million different ways in a million different places.

And so instead, and I've been getting that question a lot to in email to talk about.

So instead, I decided to talk about like my life up until the day I started Rooster Teeth.

And the only plan was to just kind of follow the creative path in a way that I've never really sat down and looked at how my life unfolded, you know, in that way.

And so I was kind of figuring it out as I went and just telling stories and like realizing opportunities that I had that I seized.

Like I, it hasn't crossed my mind

until last week when I recorded this episode that when I was 19 years old, I was starting zines.

Like I started around 17, 18, I started doing zines, punk zines.

The first band I ever interviewed.

When I was 19 years old was Fugazi.

I interviewed Ian McKay

at 19 years old, the very first professional non-Army interview I'd ever given.

And I was thinking to myself, so I'm 48 years old now.

Can I say a real quick clarifying question?

So you talked about, you know, starting these publications, doing these interviews.

Was this like internet-based or was this like paper-based stuff you're doing?

That was paper-based.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I want to get into that.

I'm getting to us.

I'm getting to us.

So.

No, no, no.

To get people the perspective.

For sure, for sure.

It was paper-based.

This was that long ago.

These are print zines.

And

that got me thinking,

at 48 years old, if you asked me to interview Ian McKay, I wouldn't do it.

I'd be too scared.

Interesting.

I'd be too scared to talk to somebody that I have that much respect for, who has made such a mark in a world that is important to me.

I would be so scared at 48, but at 19, I just didn't care.

I was fearless.

You have no perspective.

You have no perspective, right?

And I was just kind of following those

moments through my life up until I just wanted to stop basically at the day I started Rooster Teeth, or we started Rooster Teeth.

And I kind of skipped ugly internet and drugs.

I ended up stopping at the day I met you because that was the, I realized that was the moment my life changed.

And I'm not trying to blow smoke up your ass or be overly nice to you.

I'm just being like as pragmatic and as honest as I can be.

But when I look back at my career, the most important moment in my creative journey was becoming your friend because it was the first time in my life I found a creative partner.

Well, I think it's helpful to have like another voice to bounce ideas off of and to collaborate on things with.

And just to find somebody else who's passionate, you know, it's such a, it's such a heavy thing to

handle alone.

You know, it's such an overwhelming amount of work to try to cut your path in a creative way, especially

especially when there aren't a lot of examples to follow in the, in, in the, in the paths we were following.

We were blazing, I guess, honestly.

And so

looking back on it, Now at 48, almost 50, and having perspective, I realize just how important you have been to my life, personally, because we're very good friends.

So we've known each other for forever.

Long time.

You mean so much to me on that level.

But

I don't know that I'd be anywhere close to where I am in my career if you and I hadn't made our first website together.

It's totally, I mean, it's totally a two-way street, right?

Like, I mean, it's my turn to blow smoke up your ass.

I think, you know, when I was younger, I definitely had a lot more, you're going to be shocked by this, a lot more of a like, a rigid, very mathematical approach to things, right?

And you?

So

the thing that interested me at the time, leading up to then, was, you know, probably around the same time you were, you know, interviewing Fugazi and talking to them, like, that's when I was cutting my teeth, learning web stuff, right?

Like 1994, I was like 16.

You know, we always talk about it and always make fun of me, deservedly so.

Because

going to math camp, right.

Yeah.

Because that's where, like, the math was fine.

That was whatever.

But

the valuable thing I took away from that camp and I went there three years was like all the computer systems were all like Unix-based.

And I learned about accessing websites.

I learned how to make websites.

I learned like how to do everything from a command prompt.

I was like, oh, this is really interesting.

And I would help everyone make websites.

So it wasn't necessarily that I was good at generating the content.

I was good at figuring out how to deliver the content.

You aren't giving yourself credit.

You wanted to, we didn't know what we were doing at the time.

And you were definitely a techie guy.

And I was a designy guy.

And there was a good marriage of skills at the time.

Cause I had in tandem to you learning how to make websites, and this is something I talked about in the episode of Soul All Right.

A formative moment for me was in 1996 when I was the press, the one-man press shop at the United States Military Academy Preparatory School in New Jersey.

They came to me, my boss came to me and said, hey, West Point just launched a website.

I don't know what that is, but I'm told we need to have one.

I need you to do it.

And I was like, I don't think that's my job.

And he's like, it is.

It is as of today.

And so I had to call up the webmaster at West Point and say I don't know what the fuck I'm doing I need help and he was like figure it out I'm not helping you

yeah and so I started I was gonna say googling but I didn't I started probably like Magellan or web crawlering and I taught myself how to make websites so that I could for I had to I had to make the first use maps website and that's that was the moment where I learned oh there's so much possibility here These print zines are fucking stupid.

I need to port this to the internet.

And I think that's why I had a lot of success early on with record labels giving me, because I was getting free, I was getting 20 to 30 free albums a month.

And I had stringers who were doing reviews for me.

I had a little empire going on.

That's impressive.

On my web zine, because I think I was one of the first ever in the punk world to do it, at least that I was aware of.

So I was also like, I was coming to you really energized and really excited about the internet and the possibility of making content online.

For the first couple of years, we were friends, even

probably into Red vs.

Blue a little bit.

I was still running my zines and I I was still going to emos and interviewing bands and that whole thing.

I started to wean off of that when we started to spin up ugly internet and drunk gamers.

It was a different outlet for all of us.

It was a different outlet, yeah.

But don't sell yourself short because you had ideas.

You and I had so many ideas and you were such an ideas guy.

And we

I couldn't have done any of it without you.

And I don't think you could have done it without me.

No, absolutely not.

And if I can give some crossover promotion here in a weird roundabout way.

So

I'd always, you you know, growing up, I'd always considered myself,

I tried to be a funny person.

Maybe I wasn't, it didn't always succeed, but I tried.

And I think a lot of that stemmed from, or a lot of like the trying to come up with jokes and trying to, you know, come up with things off the cuff stemmed from playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons when I was like in middle school and high school and trying to, you know.

roll with the punches and trying to be on top of things, which is why, you know, one of the other projects I do is like Tales from the Stinky Dragon here at Rooster Teeth.

And I think that, you know, having that long pedigree that really helps you train with improv and, you know, trying to make a joke out of whatever the situation may be in front of you.

And I think that that really

helped.

You know, that's a really interesting connection you just made that I've never arrived at on my own, but makes total sense.

Because you're right, role-playing games, DD, whatever it is, Warhammer.

It's pure yes and.

It's like the essence of yes and.

And I never made that connection until, well, you just made the connection, honestly.

I'm sure, you know, you know, we're relatively the same age.

I'm sure you remember like the satanic panic back, you know, in like 80s and 90s.

Oh, hell yeah.

Everyone was like, Dungeon ⁇ Dragons is worshiping the devil.

And I say it all the time.

Dungeon ⁇ Dragons is just math and improv.

That's all it is.

It's like, it's so nerdy.

If like, if back then if parents just understood, it's like.

It's dudes following rules and arguing about who's following rules better than the other dudes.

And then adding two numbers quickly together in your head.

That's all it fucking is.

And I think it's it's it's a great vehicle for training your mind to do that kind of stuff and you know dnd has obviously grown a huge amount since then and it's a huge dnd podcast alone are a huge thing on the internet so i'm happy to see it gaining such wide acceptance because when we were when i was young and we were playing you know second edition

we started with first actually uh but like we would lose players like we had to play in secret and then if someone's parents found out like oh they're they don't come anymore really yeah oh wow yeah no that was the thing i i dealt with that similarly and not in the sense that my mom particularly gave a shit, but other kids' parents did.

Say, my parents didn't care.

They cared, but they thought it was okay.

I had a friend who was our DM, and when his parents found out about it, he wasn't allowed to play anymore, and then it died for me because he was the one who had all the stuff, and then they threw it away or whatever.

And that was it.

That was the end of D ⁇ D for me, probably in sixth grade.

Dude, that's crazy.

Yeah.

And then I had a friend in high school who got me into it as well.

But yeah, it was like.

It was the height.

The 80s was the height of satanic panic.

I remember hearing about satanic.

I was too young and everything, but like hearing about it and everything, but I never considered like,

I don't know.

It just seemed like one of those things that like, this was on the news, but I never considered parents actually seeing it and going like, no, dude, you

dude.

One time when I was in the seventh grade, I came downstairs, lived in a townhome in Louisiana, and I came downstairs and my mom and my dad had my Motley Crew Shout out the Devil album.

And they said,

I just watched a news report.

This is satanic.

It's got secret messages in it.

And they broke it and they threw it away in front of me.

That's the only time they ever did anything like that.

And I lost my Shout at the Devil album, which was, I wasn't a huge Motley Crew fan, so it wasn't the end of the world for me at that point.

It wasn't pray to the devil.

Yeah, but it was like, but I'm like, I guess I can't remember.

Shout at the devil.

Fuck you, devil.

See?

He's got to spin it.

But yeah, even, so even my mom, who was very progressive and very cool when I was growing up, was subject to it a little bit.

I think all parents were.

When I was a kid, they would have Smurf burnings at churches.

That was a huge thing.

Smurfs?

Yeah, smurfs were the biggest fucking thing when I was a kid.

I never heard of smurfs.

Vaguely

I collected smurfs, but smurfs didn't wear like shirts and

there were like

Christian fundamentalists that decided there were some weird sexual undertones.

And then there was a wizard.

Gargamel was a wizard and it was satanic.

And so they would have, in my community, they would have people come and bring all their Smurf action figures and paraphernalia and they would make a big bonfire and then throw it all on the fucking bonfire and then just melt plastic and breathe those feet and breathe it in and that shit happened and come up with new ideas.

Dude, that shit happened all the time in the 1980s.

All the time.

I heard about that, like the Smurf stuff or whatever, but like, aren't they against the wizard?

Like, the wizard's evil.

Shout at the devil, Eric.

Are you trying to breathe some common sense into a bunch of religious practices?

It's not a fucking cartoon.

It's a cartoon with little blue creatures that try to help each other.

They live in mushrooms.

One of them is a girl and wears a dress.

The biggest problem they have in the world is a mean cat, and all they're trying to do is bring peace and unity to each other.

Why the fuck wouldn't that be a message you would every parent would want their children?

Yeah, but when I'm burning the plastic and huffing the fumes,

I'm starting to really see the light.

Everyone's looking a little blue.

So fucking stupid.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Wow.

But we.

Hi, Mike.

Mike's looking at us.

Hey, Mike.

We're recording Adma.

He can't hear us.

There's a, so we, you know, we, so going back on track a little bit, so, you know, we had all these things, or we had all this ideas and things that we wanted to do on the internet.

I think actually our first thing that we did was we, so when we worked at the call center, which we've talked about many times, we had free access to like Unix servers that were connected to the internet with high speed.

And that's where we hosted Red vs.

Blue at first, you know.

Not for long.

Not for very long.

Oh, really?

But it's like the company, though.

It's where we would host all of our websites because it's like, oh, the servers are in the vault, like 20 feet that way.

We can connect to them and do everything we need to do and

all of our stuff right here for free because we were just employees.

They didn't charge us for access, which is crazy.

Anyway, we

started making websites that way.

The first thing we did was we put that flash animation up, the Show Me the Monkey.

Yeah, that you had made.

Bleep the name.

Okay, yeah, babe.

Yeah, we put up the Show Me the Monkey with the flash animation of the monkey eating eating a banana and then

just like I guess that was kind of like a dry run practice.

And then you know from there we're like well, let's start actually making content.

And then I remember Bernie would go in and edit it and fuck with it.

You put like a pirate hat on the monkey, you know, like an eye patch.

That was cute.

Yeah.

But I think that was like kind of training wheels for figuring out how to make stuff and how to put stuff online.

And then I don't know how we decided our first website was going to be making fun of other people's websites.

We were in our early 20s and obnoxious, and we thought we were funnier than we were and more clever than we were, and that we knew more than we did.

And to be fair to us, this was before the wild, wild west of the internet.

This is when it was become, it was like, this was a couple steps before that, and everybody was rushing to the internet to make their own ugly, disgusting, terrible version of a website.

And then there were all these companies that would pop up that would give awards for good website design.

And that's what pissed us off is these ugly fucking vlogs would have, or e-insights would have like four awards at the bottom that

looked like somebody made up in about five minutes.

And it was clear that they had given themselves the award.

People might...

not remember or might not have been there for this time this time period in the internet but it was like the time of web rings the time

yeah what's the last time you thought about a web ring?

I haven't thought about web rings since

there were web rings.

The time of visible counters on websites and the time of that little under construction animated GIF.

Yeah.

Bitmaps.

Remember doing a giant image and

depending on where your mouse was on the image, it would be like different links where you could map out.

Oh, yeah.

It was just an awful.

The blink tag would still work in web browsers.

I mean, it was just, it was just a fucking nightmare.

But I will say, I think maybe it's because it was my idea, but my favorite part of all of that was we would, you know, tell, we would write how bad these websites were, then we would email the review to the webmaster, the people who made it.

But then I would contact the American Registry of Internet Numbers and ask for their IP address to be revoked because they were wasting space on the internet and we were running out of IP addresses.

This is fucking great.

And so we did that for over a year, every

day.

Pretty much.

I mean, it was our, we would get off work.

Much like our red versus blue, we'd get off work and then we'd go home and work on ugly internet.

We'd get off work and just hammer websites.

Yeah.

No, we detail them and let them know they fucking suck.

I don't say this as someone who's proud of it now.

That's just what happened.

Looking back on it, like, how?

If it was my nine to five, let's get off my five to nine.

Hey, fucker.

Oh, it the worst

but it was it was a learning experience it was a learning experience people have to learn you have to you have to learn not to be a shithead sometimes yes yeah and i think we do my dog right now is biting my sock my shoes every fucking chance he gets you have to learn not to bite shoes we had gus and i had to learn not to bite shoes but it was like that was kind of our our first

experience with like engaging or cultivating a community.

I remember we had like

some like

a shirt that we would sell.

And I remember there was like a dude in Oklahoma, I want to say it was, who like took our shirt and ran it up a flagpole and then sent us a picture of it.

You remember that?

Yeah.

And I was like, oh, that's fucking cool.

You don't happen to have that dude.

No.

There's no way.

No.

I remember the dude, though.

It was like, this is, it probably wasn't even a digital camera.

He probably took a picture, like a photo, developed it, then scanned it and sent it to us.

But then we, we, in, we ended up shuttering ugly internet.

One, it was kind of a one-note wonder uh it was mean spirited disguised as comedy although i guess it i mean we were trying to be funny but we were just i don't think we understood the line necessarily or we were still trying to find it but also the internet was rapidly changing and websites were not as ugly the year after we started as they were when they started and we did it and then we had the death threat right and then that ended the website for us.

We pretty much ended ugly internet right that moment.

So one thing that I feel like we often forget to mention when when we talk about ugly internet is that, you know, it was never wildly popular.

If I'm remembering right, off the top of my head, I want to say we had like 3,000 visitors a day, which is

a good amount.

We had 3,000 visitors a day, which back in 1999 was pretty cool.

That's most of the people on the internet.

Yeah.

But one time

we were actually linked to in a post on Penny Arcade.

Yes.

Like, you know, they would make their blog posts when they would put comics up.

And Tycho mentioned our website at one point.

Do you know why he he did that?

Do you remember why he did that?

Because I emailed,

I had a list of websites.

I took this from my punk world when I would email record labels or send actual physical letters to record labels.

I had a list of about 40 websites, video game websites, internet culture websites.

And anytime Ugly Internet would put anything up, I would email them and go like, hey, just want to let you guys know,

the new article just came out on Ugly Internet.

Think you'd like it.

And

he must have, I don't remember specifically now, but he must have, because I remember he called us Wrath on Tap, yeah, which I thought was cool.

Then we put it on a shirt and we sent him

to him, yeah, that's funny, and that's kind of how we became friends with the Penny RK guys.

And then they linked us again when uh, drunk gamers came out, which wasn't too much later.

I think we immediately spun Ugly Internet down because we were, we were, we weren't having fun with it at the end anymore either.

And then, uh, and then we were like, what do we love, right?

I remember having that conversation.

We were like, what do we love?

We love two things: we love alcohol and we love video games.

So, combine them both.

It's like peanut butter and chocolate.

That's what we did.

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And I feel like that really, when you did the drunk gamers launch, that really was,

you know, we talked about this earlier, like the overlap of our two skill sets.

So I think you made a phenomenal design for the drunk gamers website.

Like I, I, I, it, it, I thought it looked really good at the time, and I was like so impressed with it.

And then Bernie used to shit on all of that.

No, it was great.

I loved it.

It looked like all the Donkey Kong stuff for all the lips.

I love the Donkey Kong.

It was such a great idea.

idea.

Yeah.

Anyway,

so then you made this beautiful website.

So then I had to figure out how to make it into like a content management system where it was like, okay, we've got this beautiful design.

How do we actually post to it and automate it so that it's not, we don't have to rewrite the fucking entire website every time we do it?

Then we use, you know, I've mentioned it before, we used movable type for that to kind of like automate everything and categorize everything.

And it's wild to me that, you know, these things were such a struggle back then.

And I probably said this last time, you know, whenever we talk about it, but it's like, now now there's services that you can just pay and it's like all drag and drop.

And it's all so much easier when it was such a fucking hassle back then.

Dude, no kidding.

You know what the easiest thing in the world to do is in 2024?

Sell a t-shirt on the internet.

You know what the hardest thing in the world to do was in 2000?

Sell a fucking t-shirt on the internet.

Do you remember that?

Yeah.

God damn, it was, it was, all the tools that exist today were theories in 1999 and 2000.

And we had to wait for the technology to catch up to our dreams and desires.

So one of the things we always talk about is like the march of technology and how things have changed over our life.

And specifically, we tend to focus on the internet and the 25 years we've known each other.

But in the course of my life, I've watched credit card transactions move from

the chunk-chunk machine where you would make an emboss of the card to now

virtualized

token credit cards on your phone or

Apple Pay and all of that stuff.

Dude, I still remember when fast food restaurants started taking credit cards.

I was an adult.

I was 20 years old when I used a credit card to buy Burger King in San Antonio.

And I thought it was the, I was like, where the, I'm in the fucking future.

I saw the fucking future.

I saw a video about that.

Somebody had found a news report.

from when Burger King started taking credit cards and interviewing people at Burger King.

And it's a lot of people going, I just think you must be in a really sad state if you got to buy a hamburger on a credit card.

I was.

I was in the army.

But that's crazy.

Like, that's not...

They didn't take cards.

cards.

Yeah.

Technology like that, especially with like money stuff, is so

recent, not even in terms of like

our lifetime, but in terms of money.

Yeah.

Like we moved away from hard currency to this other thing in the last 30 years.

That's insane.

That's nuts.

And it's.

It's everywhere you look, right?

We were talking about this earlier because I just did another solo ride on that, but on this, but I was looking at the history of VHS.

VHS launched in 1976 and it died in 2006.

I had it in my head that VHS would always exist because it existed since I was born.

Right.

You know, and then you watch a technology peak and then die in your lifetime and then be replaced by another technology that then is replaced by yet another technology.

Even quicker.

Even much quicker.

It's crazy how much things have changed.

Just insane how quickly things have changed.

I don't know if you remember those initial credit card terminals.

You had to run like a phone line to each of them.

Yeah.

And like you would swipe your card and the fucking terminal would make a phone call to authorize your card.

And it took fucking forever.

Anyway, it took fucking forever.

And yeah, now it's just so fast.

Like you've got the internet in your pocket at all times.

I don't even need to pull my credit card out.

I can buy shit.

If I can't tap my wallet on a

on a, what do you call it?

Like a terminal?

Terminal.

Yeah, if I can't tap my wallet on a terminal and pay, I get huffy.

I get like a, I'm a pissy little bitch.

I'm like,

stupid stick.

I'm like, stick it in now?

What year is this?

You know what's the worst?

I fucking hate HEB terminals because you can't tap.

You can't tap at HEB.

They're so...

I don't know what the problem is.

Anytime I try to do a chip with my, to pay at H-EB, it doesn't work.

It's like, bad chip read, bad chip read, bad chip read, swipe.

Fuck.

Just fucking get the tap.

And those terminals are all pretty new.

They replaced them last year.

Those are.

They chose.

Those are like post-terminals.

We're not getting rid of those terminals.

Yeah, those are post-COVID terminals.

We're not getting rid of those for a while.

H-E-B is going to to fuck us on the tap for at least another two years.

And on the insert and the chip.

It doesn't work.

It's so funny.

That's maybe my only complaint about HEB.

Like, as a grocery store,

it's great.

I can get all the stuff that I need.

I think it's a great grocery store.

And then I go to pay, and every time I leave upset because I just go, it didn't.

All right, hang on.

Hang on.

Fuck.

All right, hang on.

That being said, it really is the best grocery store.

It is a great grocery store, but man, what a negative note to end every single day.

Every single trip.

Every trip.

I agree.

Man.

All right.

Anyway, I don't want to get into the grocery store

episode or anything.

Were you going somewhere else with technology, though?

No, no, no.

I'm just talking about how primitive payment acceptance was at the start, like from the chunk chunk, which most of our listeners might not have even ever seen in their life to now just you know, like I said, virtualized credit cards, virtualized numbers, and, you know, tap payment systems and not having to pull your wallet out at all.

I remember some of my early experiences with the internet.

Similarly, like I said, I went to a math camp and we were using these Unix servers.

And it was amazing to me to always be connected to the internet, right?

It wasn't like I'm going to log on in there.

It wasn't like AOL, like I'm going to dial up.

It's like this computer is always on the internet.

And that was wild to me.

It's like, this isn't, you know, a mainframe, thinking back then, like, this isn't a mainframe.

This is just an Apple terminal I can sit at.

I can sit and, you know, do whatever shit I want.

I actually learned how to use Premiere on that computer.

And then if I wanted to, I'm on the internet.

I can launch NCSA Mosaic and load a website really shittily.

And then going home, not having that, be like, okay, fine, I'm at home.

I have to dial up.

Then you connect into this closed ecosystem that isn't really connected to everything.

Then you gradually, like, the web kind of seeps into everywhere.

And now, you know, you care, I carry my phone and my watch.

I've got things that are just online all the time.

And if I don't don't have the internet for like five minutes, I'm like, what the fuck do I do?

I know.

It's like a common joke on the internet, right?

Like back in the old days, you'd go to the bathroom and taking a shit, you like read a shampoo bottle or something.

And now it's like, I have access to the entire knowledge of human history and the entire knowledge of the world at my fingertips.

But I'm going to watch a cat smell a foot.

I watched a cat eat a rotisserie chicken live on TikTok the other day.

He just was eating, it was a rotisserie chicken on the ground and it was a live TikTok of a cat eating a whole rotisserie chicken.

It was awesome.

It was so cap that and hamster rave so captivating.

Oh, but yeah, it's just everything.

And I think we talked about this back in the day, you know, in the drunk gamers days, in the ugly internet days, trying to draw that line out and figure out like, you know, at the time we were working at the call center, it was all dial-up tech support, but,

you know, always on, high-speed internet was starting to roll out.

Cable modems were like a brand new thing in Austin.

At the, I would say the last two years we we were there, we started to do support for some cable modems and for some Amazon connections.

This is,

I want to say, well, in Austin, cable modems, I think, started rolling out like in 99 or 2000.

Like it was in test markets.

I think I mentioned this before.

You had to go to a class before they would give you

the cable modem.

So

we started Rooster Teeth in 2003.

Yeah.

So I would have, I probably quit

Tele Network in 2004.

Okay.

I think.

I worked there from 98 to 2000.

Okay.

I left in 2000 to go work at the other corporate job.

And then you came back.

And then I came back

02.

End of 02 for a bit.

But yeah, but I remember you and I would sit there and draw things out because, hi, Shane, can you come in?

Come in.

Can you come in?

No.

He's just staring at me creepily.

We tried to draw the line out to see, imagine what the world would be like and what the internet would be like.

Because I remember, you know, we would talk about cell phones.

Because, you know, even like cell phones were like a relatively brand new thing.

I think I got my first cell phone in 98 or 99.

That's when they really started becoming affordable and accessible to anyone.

I had a really low-paying tech support job and I had a cell, I could afford a cell phone finally at that point.

And trying to think about what always on connectivity was.

I remember we would always read about like coming future 3G technologies that they were testing in Japan.

That was going to be so fast.

You'll always be connected to the internet.

And now it's funny to look at it and be like, man, 3G, that's so fucking old.

I would be miserable if I had a 3G connection on my phone right now.

Do you remember we,

were pretty into anime back in the day, so I would watch it with you.

And there was one of the shows that you got that you were into that grabbed me that I really liked as well was Lane the Serial Experiment.

Serial experiments lane.

Yeah.

Serious experiments.

Serial experiment.

Experiment.

God damn it.

Serial experiments lane.

I had it backwards.

And it was like near future.

Yeah.

Very near future, like 10 years in the future.

But they had these thing called navvis that were iPhones.

And Gus and I would just watch her play with her navvi and be like, can you fucking imagine a world where we could play video games and take calls and do all this other shit just from our phone in our pocket and then it was 10 years later yeah then it's like oh it exists now yeah that was wild yeah

this is uh definitely the old man yells at technology episode of the podcast

i don't think no i think i think it's really appreciating like again the it's the march of technology do you remember when we would do conventions and you're talking about like 3g technology and everything and you would be inside the convention center and your reception would be so fucking bad that you'd have to go on like the edge network

like that I just remember like Rocco teaching me like oh you have to go and like disable this thing because everyone's on that and if you're not on like the 3G band you'll be able to get reception and it's like that's

insane or you could pay twelve hundred dollars for a fucking ethernet drop to your booth

the crazy the worst About that stuff was always, well, at that time, was always San Diego Comic-Con because people would pay for that drop and then they would set up a Wi-Fi access point.

And there were so many people with so many different Wi-Fi's that nobody's Wi-Fi worked.

It was like everybody's signals overlapped with each other.

Everyone's on the same channel.

It'd be like, fuck, I am standing right next to my Wi-Fi base station and I can't get anything to work.

What a pain in the ass.

Ridiculous.

Anyway, now we're in the future.

It's not a problem.

Now we're in the future and it's not a problem.

We're getting low on time, not just on the episode, but Gus has better things to do, like stinky dragon, stinky, stinky wary or something.

Yeah, hardy stinky.

Gerbal gurbal, everyone.

Yeah, we're doing a like a drive for first memberships for Talesman the Stinky Dragon.

You can get more information at stinkydragonpod.com.

Basically, we have a bunch of goals.

I think that Talesman the Stinky Dragon is very quietly one of the biggest shows Rooster Teeth has ever made.

Easily.

And we don't trumpet it enough.

And, you know, we're really trying to focus that and talk about it a lot this January, which we've dubbed Stinkywary.

If you've never listened to it, you should give it a try.

Ollie,

we make, We do the DD podcast.

You don't need to know anything about Dungeons and Dragons to listen to it.

It's really just, like I said, it's an improv podcast.

It's really a lot of fun.

It's family friendly.

And we have all eight puppet videos for Stinky Dragon Adventures are out now available for free on Rishite.com.

Just go, you don't have to pay.

You can go watch it.

Anyway,

we're doing like a big drive for first memberships this month.

And we're giving away, we're not giving away, we're selling like autograph posters, special merch,

video, audio messages from characters and from the crew.

It's really important to us to help support this show, which is so big.

It's such a pillar for us.

And we want it to reach more people.

We want to reach as many people as possible.

I want it to be, hands down, the biggest thing we've ever made and that everyone thinks of immediately

when they think of us.

Can I say two things about that?

Yeah.

One,

I think I've probably intimated this to you in the past, but again, kudos for cracking the code on the D ⁇ D format because we have tried multiple times.

I personally have run three different D and D shows, I think, through my time in Rooster Teeth.

And each one is iteratively better than the last.

And

we got closer and closer, but you guys finally figured it out and made what I think is the perfect DD podcast.

You figured out the tone, you figured out the voice, you figured out the length, you figured out like the right amount of silly versus serious and paying attention, which was something I could never do.

And it's just a testament to

all of your hard work, how great it is.

But I told Barbara the other day,

I guess a couple months ago, but when they were filming

Stinky Puppets, I walked into the room because she wanted to show me, she was proud of it and she wanted to show it to me.

And I watched them film for like 10 minutes.

And I told her, I don't want to leave the room.

And

I meant it.

And I told her in that moment, and I still think this stands true.

I felt something in that room when that show was being made that I have only felt three times in Rooster Teeth.

And that is making red versus blue,

I didn't have anything to do with Ruby, but watching Ruby be made and making Achievement Hunter.

I think that you guys have captured whatever that thing is that made those shows special, that heart or that

just that right tone, whatever the secret sauce is,

that's so fucking hard to repeat.

You know, we've been lucky that we've been able to repeat it a few times in our history, but I really do think that when you, as long as things continue the way they should and you guys keep killing it with it, I really do think that when you look back 10 or 20 years from now and you look at Roosteith, you're going to think of Red versus Blue, you're going to think of Ruby, and you're going to think of Stinky Dragon up there with those two hopes.

And I hope so.

I think it deserves to be up there.

I think it's that good.

And I hope the audience continues to support it and it finds the audience it deserves to find because it is one of the best things we've ever made.

And it's the best version of that thing in the world.

There's a lot of passion that goes into it, right?

Like everyone involved.

Like, I think, you know, obviously if you listen to the podcast and you watch the videos, you know, you see the on-camera people, but the behind-camera people are also super passionate about it.

And I try to make sure that, you know, we include them in the credit as well because we couldn't make it without any of them.

But

everyone's really passionate about it, right?

And everyone has idea and vision of what it should be.

And everyone's mostly unified, right?

But every now and then, you get like these differing opinions.

So I think it's a matter of

right.

Recognizing, hey, maybe

that other way is the better way.

You know, not being so set that you're resisting those things, but being flexible and really giving everyone a voice.

And hopefully,

everyone elevates everyone else and builds on top of it.

That's why Chris is there.

Anyway, go to stinkydragonpod.com.

Please, we're making a real concerted effort to support the show and grow it this month.

Can I just say also as an aside,

I don't have anything to do with that show.

This isn't me shilling for it.

Like, I play like a, I think I play a centaur that's like two lines in the entirety of the show.

I really, I couldn't have less to do with it.

I'm just watching it as a fan from afar, like everybody else.

And

I really do, I really do think it's special, and I really do believe in it.

And I only say that about stuff that I believe in.

Like, there are a lot of productions in the company you've not heard me talk about.

You know, I've never heard him.

I've never heard about this one.

I've never heard him talk about Face Jam.

Oh, yeah.

Burn.

We're also doing Face Jamuary, but that's just us putting out a free video every Friday.

Is that this month or is that February?

See, you have to tell him we have a Stinkyuary.

It's like it could be January or February.

Now we're having fuck face.

We're having fuck you, it's January.

We, before we get into Stinky Dragon stuff that you have coming up, we got to talk about Mum's barbecue and del Coffee.

We're way behind schedule.

We're recording something else in this room in a few minutes.

I got to get home to that dog.

I know, right?

What did you guys think of mums?

We went to Talisman, the coffee that was in there.

In the same building.

Yes.

And then we saw, oh, they have deli and barbecue thing.

So we got to come back.

So we, after the break, we're here.

We did it.

I got Thursday afternoon action.

A combo.

It was

half sandwich and matzo ball soup, and you can pick from a few different sandwiches.

I picked the OG pastrami.

Yeah.

And, you know, they brought, they brought it out on a tray.

And my first thought was, oh, that's a cute little sandwich.

I'm going to be starving after this.

No, I'm totally full.

I'm super full.

I was like, I ate that sandwich and had that soup.

I was like, oh, no, that was really filling.

That was the perfect amount.

It's deceptive because I thought the same thing when I got my sandwich.

I went, this is not going to fill me up.

And I ate it.

And I went, I'm comfortable.

This feels good.

Yeah, I kind of like it.

Like, why did I think think I needed more?

Yeah, it's just like the greedy little monster inside of me.

It's like, oh, more.

Of course, I had a big red to wash it down.

Yeah.

I'm a big pastrami guy.

I was enticed by their pastrami sandwich.

Ultimately, I didn't get it because I was going to have to make too many substitutions.

Yeah.

And I'm always wary of that.

And I decided to be safe and just go with brisket because

they kind of like I go with the same coffee every time.

I kind of start all barbecue restaurants with the same thing.

Yeah.

So the pastrami was interesting.

And it's like, it wasn't what I typically think of as a deli pastrami.

It was almost like a brisket.

It raised.

It looked

yeah.

So like normally you think of like thin sliced like almost a deli meat pastrami.

This was like thick, like you took a brisket and made pastrami from it,

which was, it was really good.

I was going to say, what did you guys think of what you had?

Musical afternoon?

I'm going to put an asterisk on it.

Yeah.

I'm a real stickler about cleanliness.

Oh, right.

Yes.

I took a picture of the forks.

We sat down.

They brought us our food.

We're like, we don't don't have silverware.

It's like, oh, they're over there.

I hate when a restaurant puts out that tub with a cup and a bunch of forks and spoons and knives in it.

And they're like, they're all filthy.

So I'm like, all right, whatever.

Get over it, Gus.

Get over it, you big baby.

Go get the forks.

I go pull out three forks, one for each of us, and they're all filthy.

Like dirty.

I'm like, okay, let me pull.

This must be three bad ones.

I pull out another three.

These are worse than those three.

I went through every fork in there and they were all filthy.

Despite the fact the silver was filthy, I still used it to eat the food because the food was that good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I don't begrudge them for it.

It was a phenomenal.

It was so good.

Did you really like it?

I really liked it.

Wow.

What did you think?

It was okay.

I had the turkey sandwich.

I thought it was just, I thought it was fine.

I would put it in the category of better than an Ironworks or a Stubbs, but not as good as

La Barbecue.

Where it is in relation to us, I could see myself going there for

a bunch.

And it's creative.

They have unique stuff, right?

The matzo ball soup, they have pastrami.

It's not just Texas barbecue.

They have some interesting fare

for you to sample.

And you can also get a cup of coffee.

Yeah, and you can get a damn good cup of coffee.

It wasn't like the best pastrami sandwich I've had in the world.

I mean, if I was giving it like a score one to 10, it's like eight, eight and a half.

It was really good.

And the matzo ball soup was really good, too.

I thought I'm an expert on matzo ball soup.

I really like turkey from barbecue places.

So this was like an easy thing where I would recommend it because it was a good turkey sandwich.

I don't love love their barbecue sauce.

It was very

bustard based, which I don't have a problem with, but I wanted something that was more vinegary to go with the turkey.

So it was fine.

I mean, ultimately, it was just sort of like, oh, I liked it.

I didn't love it.

We got Chris and John walking in.

We're about to do Sneaky Dragon thing right now.

We just got a bunch of dragon stuff coming up.

So yeah, I would say

check it out if you're in the area, which I don't know why you would be in the area.

If you're gentrifying.

We talked about that last time.

They definitely are.

Just not on the other side where you looked at the building with broken windows that was falling apart.

You just went, what is this?

It looks good.

If you're thinking to go, if you're going to go get barbecue one day and you're like, I'll just go to Rudy's, instead of going to Rudy's, just go there once.

I think that's a great little substitution.

Instead of Rudy's, go there and try it because you know what?

I want to go back for the pastrami.

I'll like it as much as the move.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah.

Pastrami's the move.

We're wrapping up here.

We're almost done.

So

we'll rate it pretty positively for a podcast that doesn't rate barbecue.

Yeah.

Yeah,

it's not our wheelhouse.

No.

We're not

experts.

No.

Let's get through some anarchy questions.

I just have a couple.

This one's from Angela on Instagram.

You can send us questions at Anima Podcast on Instagram or on Twitter

or you go to r slash animopodcast, which is a subreddit we don't run.

This is from Angela.

Her name is Torta, but I wasn't going to call her that.

Whatever.

Can you guys open your own coffee shop

can we yeah

I assume we probably could figure it out you have any interest in doing that right it seems like you have to you have to be up so early no you know what would be fun well not fun you know what I could do

a trailer like outside of a corral sneak I just don't

like that like that just like a little trailer where it's just me

and it's just me and I was just like I'm just sitting there like I mean that's the perfect work environment right it's like I'm reading a book or playing a game and if someone comes up and wants a a coffee, I make a coffee, give it to them.

I'm reading a book or playing a game, and then make you a cup of coffee is your business.

Yeah, that's it.

And it's just like a trailer, right?

Like, it's not like you're not paying for rent for an entire building.

You don't need a big staff.

It's just me and a coffee machine in a little trailer.

Don't you think in Austin, Texas, to stand out in 2024, you have to have some sort of a remarkable coffee?

Well, I mean, just to survive.

There's so much competition.

No, he just wants to pop a thing in the Keurig.

Yeah.

You don't want a Keurig on my mouth?

I don't have any passion for I have a passion to drink coffee, not to make it.

Me too.

I just don't feel like I would do coffee.

I don't feel like I'd do coffee justice as a business.

I give plenty of options.

Folger's, Maxwell House.

You name it, I've got it all.

Well, I'll tell you right now, I would go to your coffee shop.

I'm going to fill it to the rim with brim.

Oh, yeah.

You don't want the afternoon jitters.

Go to store.rucheteeth.com and grab that shirt.

Early is the new late, also.

Hey, one more question.

This is from Bottle Water 1983

on the subreddit that, again, we don't run.

We're almost done.

We're just wrapping up.

My wife's family is from Pflugerville and the Round Rock area.

Is that considered a part of Austin?

If it is, what are some food options around there that y'all like?

If you ask anyone from Pflugerville or Round Rock, they live in Austin.

If you ask anyone in Austin, that's not Austin.

100%.

It's weird that I felt like when I moved here, it was this clamoring of Phlugerville and Round Rock to be like, we're Austin.

We're Austin.

Yeah, we're Austin.

And I feel like in the last year or two, they have been annexing and separating from Austin and going like, and we're our own thing.

Well, I think Round Rock is one of the fastest growing cities in America.

It is.

I think like number one or two.

It's crazy.

Really, really weird because they have Round Rock Donuts and the Dell Diamond and Kalahari.

If you want

the world's largest indoor water.

The world's most tepid swimming pools.

Kalahari.

That Kalahari place got hit by that tornado a couple months ago.

That is our friend Cole, who used to work here and then moved to Japan.

That was all he ever wanted to do was go to Kalahari.

I've never.

That's a very cool thing.

He's going to swim in that fucking

disgusting thing.

Phlugerville or Round Rock food recommendations?

No.

How the fuck are you going to do that?

Come to Austin.

Yeah, no, no.

What he said is 100% right.

If you live in Austin, you don't give a fuck about Phlugerville or Round Rock.

If you live in Round Rock and Phlugerville, you would live in Austin.

What is Chris doing over there?

You got an opinion about Phlugerville?

The meatballs at

Ikea.

The meatballs at IKEA.

That's the most Chris possible answer.

I could have imagined that.

That isn't Round Rock.

That isn't Round Rock.

I mean, he nailed the location.

I've driven to IKEA to get those meatballs because my wife wanted them so bad that we just drove there and got them and left.

You didn't pick up a malm or a scorch it or anything while you were there?

I'm a Billy fan.

I'm a Billy supporter.

It's a drive.

It's a hike to get up there.

All right.

Let's get out of here.

All right.

Well, thanks for listening at Anima Podcast, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can check us out r slash anima podcast, the subreddit we do not run.

But thank you for listening.

I think we have some ideas for some episodes we want to do coming up.

And then also, we, I think, are going to do our lawyer draft.

Yeah, I need to, actually, I've been meaning to cut together a promo for that.

I'm going to put together a bunch of commercials.

Wait until I start putting it together, but I'm going to get a date where we can lock it in and then we're going to do a stream where we're going to do a lawyer draft.

Great, great, great.

Have you seen those new billboards from that dude dang?

Oh, yeah, Dang.

I got some lawyer updates we can cover next week.

Oh, this is great.

Well, thanks for listening.

Uh, guys, anything to leave these people with?

Uh, singingdragonpod.com.

Happy Stinky Wary.

Yeah, happy stinky.

Happy Face January.

Bye.