2025.07.18: Social Killed The Reality Star

Hey guys, I would like to see fair play on the field, respect, and positivity.

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is morning somewhere for July 18th, 2025.

My name is Bernie Burns, sitting all the way over there in Spain.

It's Ben King.

Say hi to Ben King, everybody.

Hey, Ben.

Hey, Bernie.

How's it going?

How are you doing?

Are you okay that I tell everybody that you're in Spain right now?

Oh, yeah, I'm off the grid.

I'm actually in witness protection, so you've blown my cover.

How is it there?

Because the heat wave in the UK has been a nightmare.

Yeah.

And the temperatures in Spain are much higher, but you guys are much more equipped to deal with it, right?

I'm feeling hot.

I'm looking hot.

It's going great.

But it's, you know, having lived in the cold, bleak England for the first 30 years of my life, I've earned this.

So it's okay.

I'm enjoying it.

Do you say you've earned it or you deserve it?

I don't know which one you're.

Both.

Yeah, both.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm in my hot girl summer era now, but it's like my whole life.

So it's great.

Hey, can you explain something to me as an old guy?

Does hot girl summer mean

that people are getting hot girls or the hot girls are having a great time?

Or is it both?

No, no, in this context, you are the hot girl.

Am I the hot girl?

And

it's suggesting that you're single and free and you're out sipping apparel spritz on the beach and dancing to disco lines.

You know, you're having a great time.

Having rose and such.

So do you get to travel much?

Because now it's, it's even less of a journey for you to go to a bunch of different countries from Spain.

You could just hop on a bus or a train and go to a lot of different places.

I guess you can do that from London, but really kind of plane is kind of still the default because of the channel.

Well, it's kind of weird.

Like one thing I did for the first time, I think maybe, oh no, I did it in America, but sort of domestic flights, that's a really foreign concept to me because we don't do that in England because it's too small, right?

Right.

So I did Barcelona to Ibiza and

it was just like a normal flight.

I don't know what I was expecting, but yeah, it was kind of interesting being able to just sort of fly.

I guess I was going to a different island technically.

But yeah, I know you can, there's definitely, there's like cities in Spain that I want to see.

I want to see like Bilbao, Sevilla, Valencia, places like that.

But yeah, no, I mean, I ping-pong back to London a lot.

It's like a 90-minute flight and it's, you know, I've still got a house over in London.

So

yeah, I drop in and I get to, you know, sort of dip in my toes to the British life so I don't lose all that kind of cultural

stuff that I've built up.

And it's, yeah, I stay in touch with my, with my roots that way.

You know, I didn't think about this before, but especially post-Brexit,

you would almost never get on a plane.

from the UK and not need your passport at this point.

Yeah, exactly.

Whereas if you're an American growing up, it's very rare that you ever do have your passport.

It's like a very exceptional journey if you're traveling somewhere that you have to have your passport on you.

It's the exact opposite in the UK.

You very rarely would get on a plane where you're not going to have to show somebody your passport at some point.

There is one exception, which is going to Ireland, and it's just for like really weird reasons that I don't even understand.

To be fair, like even my mum, up until when I was talking to her the other week, she thought that Ireland was in the UK, and so she was confused.

She didn't realize they're in the EU.

And

it's no one really understands because we have a special deal just with Ireland, So we can go there without any passport or visa, but it's also in the EU.

It doesn't really make any sense, to be honest.

You know, and this is something that you probably already knew this.

I discovered it when we were working together setting up the privacy policy for the new website, for Rucheteeth.com.

I discovered that Switzerland is not in the EU or they're kind of sort of in the EU.

They're in that weird, like, we're in the economic EU, but not the political EU or whatever.

We had to have a separate privacy policy and representation for Switzerland.

And I was even thinking, I understand why some people, especially, you know, the websites in the U.S.

for local news stations, whenever I want to check the weather back in the US, I have to get on VPN because they just block all of the UK and EU.

Because they're like, why would we ever want to provide local news to someone over there?

It's just more expensive for us to deal with all your regulations.

I get it now.

Yeah, I mean, I actually, I had to build, I put in a VPN server actually in my home in England because I needed it to be able to log in to watch Love Island.

So that's,

I've got that set up.

Yeah, I actually haven't seen the American one, but apparently it's really going off this year and last year.

So I need to loop back to that.

It's just, it's a whole commitment.

Do you watch the Traders?

I watched it a little bit.

Yeah, I don't really get, I'm not really a huge fan of the format.

It's just kind of a bit.

I don't really get it.

I'm kind of familiar with it because they film it up in our part of the world in Scotland, the UK version.

Yeah.

But now there's also a US version that

I don't think is quite as popular.

That seems to be the trend, though.

It's like we'll get an ever since the office,

we're really bad at adapting UK television since then, I think.

Yeah, there's a few good ones.

I mean, yeah, American TV is always so.

I actually was quite surprised, not to like keep banging on about Love Island, but I was quite surprised they managed to sort of take a super British sense of humor kind of format and it actually sort of works over there.

Yeah, they've done quite well with that.

Peacock, I believe.

Oh, it's on Peacock.

Yeah, the one network that I don't have.

Yeah.

And they're doing the, what is it, The Post is the new one as well?

The newspaper version of The Office.

Oh, right, right.

Is that in the UK or is that just going to be the UK?

That's American.

Yeah, that's coming up soon.

Yeah, they, in my opinion, the first kind of knockoff was Parks and Wreck.

And I actually couldn't watch the first season because it felt like such a pale imitation of The Office.

But then eventually Parks and Wreck just

found its own footing and became this incredible show.

I probably watched more Parks and Wreck towards the end than I did of The Office.

I didn't watch a lot of the later stuff of The Office.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have kind of said that to me.

It's like, basically, ignore season one.

I just don't really have much time these days to like, if there's a new show, I'm like, I really can't afford to be sinking hours and hours into it.

Like,

I feel guilty.

I feel like I could just be productive with my time.

So that's why, like, in COVID, I was like, what is the most binging I can possibly do?

So I just started re-watching 24.

That was like, that was great.

But I mean, I think that was that was the last time.

The uh, you know, actually, it occurs to me.

I don't know much about Love Island.

Is it just a bunch of sexy people they put on an island and then kind of like survivor, but with sex?

Is that what it is?

I mean, sure.

I mean, you might actually like there is some kind of there's gameplay elements because you have to be in a couple, and so because you're kind of voted, you have to be paired up with someone.

And so, if you're left unpaired, then you get kicked off, right?

So, there's some people that kind of tactically join up together.

But, yes, no, it's mostly just about

the sex.

To be honest, it makes me feel like

I almost believe in love again when I watch it because you get to watch it develop in real time.

It's such a beautiful thing to witness.

And it's real people.

So how can you not sort of be enamored with it?

Right.

Yeah.

It makes you believe in love.

You know, you fall in love with love again.

But do you like, like, when you watch, did you watch the UK office, the David Brent office?

Yeah.

Do you like that, like that super cringey, take the piss?

You know, well, take the piss, yes.

But cringe is a bit hard.

I mean, I really like

Nathan Fielder, his stuff.

So he did, he used to have a show, Nathan for You, which is just some of the most unhinged shit I've ever seen.

He has one show.

He's just basically the premise is,

are you familiar with Nathan Fielder's stuff?

I am.

I'm wondering if you're going to talk about the moment that I'm thinking of, which is the single most unhinged moment I've ever seen in a television program.

But go ahead.

Is it the claw of shame?

No, it was the kid with the grandson and he drinks his pea or something like that.

But that was Nathan for you, right?

Yes, it was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's such a, actually, such a great concept where it's like, it's all, and it sort of blurs the line where it's like kind of improv comedy, and you can tell it's like kind of constructed, but it's real people that are like basically dead panning this the entire time.

Oh, it's just brave.

I just started watching, and when I say started watching, I watched all of the studio.

Oh, yeah.

Oh my God.

I really have trouble with the cringe stuff.

I really do.

And there's a couple episodes in that first season.

It's just brutal.

There's one episode in particular.

If people have watched it, it's the Wonder episode.

Yeah.

You just like, you want to scream at the television.

Just stop.

fucking talking man just stop and you know get out of your own way and it's brutal man it's i i i i can't watch it i don't know how these people are able to act in those things because it's just so brutal and you know that episode because you know at the start he like not there's not a spoiler he parks his car and it's like did you did you because i i sensed straight away what was going to happen and i don't know if you like caught that as well but it's like it gets to the very end and that comes back around again and i was like Because you just, that entire episode, I'm just waiting for that.

Waiting for the car.

It's very Seinfeld-esque.

It's a little bit like later years like Curb Your Enthusiasm, where there's stuff throughout every episode that ties together in certain ways.

And I think sometimes you can write that stuff.

You write it backwards and it's easier.

Cause then he's like, okay, I need a bunch of different events that are going to go wrong.

And I say, well, put this in.

Well, then how does that end up in?

So they just introduce it at some point earlier in the script.

And it feels very convoluted when if you just work backwards, it's actually really simple to layer that stuff in.

But man, that's a rough one.

That's a rough one.

I will say the only thing I was disappointed by was that I wished, I hoped hoped it would be more serialized.

It kind of felt too isolated, like the individual episodes.

Because the first episode where they have the, was it the Kool-Aid Man thing, like that kind of seemed to be dropped, but it did come back again.

But yeah, I kind of assumed it would be a running series, and they kind of felt a lot more contained than I was expected.

But no, yeah, it is funny.

It's really good.

I do like, too, they hint at some stuff, though, that it's more, I feel, you're right, plot-wise, it's not very serialized, but I feel like the relationships between the people are, and they develop over time.

Like, even Seth Rogan and Catherine Hans character, the marketing lady, it's like they hint at stuff about the relationship and then that starts to get paid off later and you're just like

with those two.

Oh, and Brian Cranston as well.

Oh my God.

That Golden Globes episode, which then led into the Las Vegas episode, it's really great.

I recommend anybody who is interested in this stuff watch the studio on Apple TV.

People kept recommending it to me.

I finally sat down and watched it and I absolutely fell in love with it.

What's on your backlog that you have to watch that people have been telling you you need to go see?

Well, I mean, movies is actually a weird one because,

you know, over here in Spain, it's quite a bit of a faff.

You have to, a lot of the times the movies in the cinemas are dubbed in Spanish, which is like, even when it was the other way around, I would always hate watching a show or a movie dubbed in a different language from the original.

Because it's like, you know, it's not the original actors.

It's just the energy's all off.

But that's the main way it seems that they do that here.

So you have to go and find,

they call them Vose, so original language screenings of films and i did manage to go see 28 years later um recently so that was that was great but i've missed the yeah the big ones like mission impossible i was going to see i missed that um i guess i'll just have to wait till that hits my uh my uk vpn

is it difficult for you to watch uh movies in spanish

Are you yet in Spanish?

Oh, yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not at the full kind of immersion

level of Spanish yet.

But it is actually a good, you know, like one of the best ways they sort of recommend is is like

watching Netflix shows.

And I actually, you know, I've watched some Netflix shows before in Spanish before I started learning it.

So the Casa de Papel, the Money Heist, and

Elite Day and things like that, but with English subtitles, obviously.

So yeah, going back and then you, you.

you kind of already know what's happening, so you don't have to worry about that.

And you just listen to Spanish and you're picking up.

And it's also hard because you have to distinguish between what is Spanish and what is like, what is slang, what's colloquialisms.

You know, in my life in Barcelona, there's a lot of Catalan as well.

So you have to kind of real time split those up.

You know, it's funny because we always talk about Ash and I.

When we first started going over to the UK and we'd see all the tabloids and all like the reality stars and, you know, you know, local television stars who were on it.

And we're like,

we don't recognize anybody on the covers of these magazines or these newspapers or anything like that.

It was like such an uncanny valley for us to see that.

And to be honest with you, like when these shows end, I mean, it's always been, I've always used to watch, I watched Big Brother for like 20 years, right?

And it's like, it's really fun.

You really get into it and you want to see your person win.

And then it's probably like five days later, I just erase them from my memory.

Like, they are just gone.

I was on one of those shows.

I was on the amazing show.

Oh, yeah, you were.

Sorry about that.

Right, exactly.

And I can tell you, out of all the times I've been stopped for someone to say hello in public, no one has ever stopped me just for the reality show that I was on.

They knew about the other stuff, you know, but never just like, oh my God, we're such a fan of the amazing race and you guys were on the amazing race.

That's just never happened.

And I think you're right.

I think like reality stars, there's a lot of people actually, especially in our season, who were struggling with the decision of whether or not they wanted to be on a reality program because there was for a while a stigma to it that if you did a reality show, you would always be seen as a reality star.

But being a web celebrity is way worse than that.

So we were always okay with that.

And

so we did it.

And I don't think it negatively affected a single person at all.

Not in the least.

Although, I think if you got voted off first, I think that would always stick with you.

I really do.

We were so scared to be voted off first, man.

So we're yeah, I mean, that happened to a podcaster I listened to in on Pod Save America on Survivor.

But no, to be honest, I've always kind of thought even if I was, you know, super rich and famous and doing my own stuff, I probably would do a reality show just for the fun of it because it does seem quite fun.

I can tell you that I have absolutely no idea how much money it would take to recreate the adventure that we had on that season of The Amazing Race because we went to every single destination.

We went all the way all the way around the world, essentially, but just didn't win.

And I can't imagine how much it would cost to recreate that stuff.

It wouldn't even be possible, I don't think, to do it.

It's exactly what it's just.

It's one of those unique life experiences that really a tiny handful of people get to do.

Yeah.

Whether it's going around the world or being locked in a house.

If you could do any reality show, which reality show would you do?

I have actually applied for a reality show, and I got quite far in the auditions when I was younger.

Yeah, it's the only time I ever wore a suit was to The Apprentice.

Oh, really?

The Apprentice?

Yeah, but this was in the UK, so not the Trump one.

Yeah,

who was the UK guy?

Was it Piers Morgan?

No.

Just guessing.

It's Alan Sugar.

I would like it to be Richard Branson.

I've always thought that.

Richard Branson would be good.

It should be him, but it's not.

It's Alan Sugar.

Alan Sugar.

Do you know who that is?

I don't.

I don't.

What is he?

He's not very important, to be frank.

No, yeah, he made TV set-top boxes in the 90s, I guess.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean,

I got a few rounds in the interviews, and I was just being this really cocky bastard, like trying to play up to what I thought the producers would want.

Smart.

Yeah.

But

it was a fun experience.

I quite enjoyed it.

It it would have been nice.

They just, you know, it's one of those things where you have to come in with a business plan and you have to kind of, I think the question that lost me was: I had a casting director ask me, like, oh, why do you need Alan Sugar's Lord Sugars investment?

And I was going, oh, I mean, I don't really need his investment.

I'm just going to be successful either way.

Thinking that was a good answer.

And the guy's like face dropped.

Oh, no, really?

He was like, he literally put my CV down and was like, thank you for coming in.

Oh, it sucks when that happens.

you know what i mean when there is a right or wrong answer and it's not really like on a spectrum but i can get it you know they they want he's the star of the show and they want you to be playing to him all the time although you know i think you did the smart thing by essentially having a character when you walked in but i do also think those reality casting people who are very good at what they do uh i i think they're very good about sniffing out authenticity They really are.

Oh, 100%.

And there's a great show that I used to watch called Unreal, which is basically a woman who used to work on The Bachelor made a drama that's about those producers.

And it's all about the psychological manipulation they do to the contestants.

Because

all the producers have their own bonuses tied to their contestant winning.

So they're all trying to sow discontent.

And

yeah, it's really...

Some of the stuff they do is crazy.

But

yeah, to be honest, I mean...

Yeah, I think last season he invested in a bakery or something.

So I think it's fine.

It's not that.

Well, before we talk about some of our own housekeeping business, because I do want to talk about the subreddit thing I started to mention, I do want to talk about one current event.

And I'm going to sabotage our future business discussions, I think, here.

But did you hear that Meta has poached an AI engineer from Apple with a total pay package of $200 million is what they're paying.

an AI engineer.

What's shocking to me about that is, A, how much they're paying, and B, why would you poach someone that expensive from Apple for AI?

Isn't Apple the furthest behind in the AI race at this point?

Yeah, that is a bit odd.

I mean, the thing is,

yeah, I mean, there's no scenario, I think, where an individual engineer is worth

even tens or millions of dollars or 100 millions of dollars.

You know, it's all very weird economics.

I've never liked the Silicon Valley way of doing things.

I've never liked that huge venture capital.

You know, I mean, companies I've worked at have raised $200 million,

never made a single penny of profit and collapsed.

It's just like, it's just a, it's, it's a, it obviously works.

You know, it's a very big, go-big or go-home strategy.

Um, right.

But also, I think the other thing that those people are contending with is like a lot of the top people are, you know, they, they have no problems just going off and starting their own companies.

So if you're going to join a meta, you know, like a

mega company, they, they really have to, you know, make that deal interesting.

Um, it's a double whammy too, because you're bringing someone onto your team who could benefit you, but you're also playing a little bit of a defensive move of you're keeping another competitor off the market, essentially.

Yeah.

And you know, the, I mean, did you see the Mira Marati?

Do you remember her?

She was the CTO of OpenAI.

Yeah, I remember the name, but no, I don't remember what happened with her.

So she was the one who was in the

meme where they asked her if ChatGBT was trained, oh no, sorry, their video thing was trained on YouTube videos.

And she kind of goes, oh, I don't know.

She just doesn't know.

But anyway, so she

left to start her own business because she was like, Oh, fuck this.

I can just do this myself.

And she's raised $2 billion.

And she has no product.

She has literally nothing.

They're just paying that because she was the CTO of OpenAI.

It's such a fucking bubble that's going to burst.

Well, that says it all to me, right?

Is when you talked about this $200 million

pay package, which according to this article is a multi-year compensation package from Meta, the deal, which includes salary, signing bonuses, and a massive equity component.

It's part of Zuckerberg's bold push to dominate the AI race.

To me, it says, you said there's no engineer worth that, but it just goes to show how much they value that particular industry at the moment.

Like,

a lot of people feel like there's an enormous upside to being whoever wins this AI race.

I don't quite know what the finish line is,

but I think they have an idea if they can get far enough ahead, no one will be able to catch them.

It might be one of those compounding things with AI.

They get so far ahead, no one's going to be able to catch up to them.

I mean, to be fair, this was the company that rebranded itself all around this idea that we're all going to live inside a social network in 3D VR, and we're going to be, you know, playing wee bowling against each other.

And that was the metaverse.

Right.

They bought a chat client.

They bought WhatsApp for $20 billion.

I mean, that was like within the last 10 years they did that.

They also, I remember when they, even when they bought Instagram, it seemed kind of silly at the time, but that's paid off pretty well for them.

I don't think Threads has quite caught on yet, even though it is starting to get to the point of traffic where it's going to surpass X.com.

We were talking about that the other day in one of our meetings.

Yeah, Threads is a really interesting one because I was so rooting for that, honestly, when

Elon Musk took over Twitter.

I was like, guys, this is an open goal right now.

And to be honest, they also have the same exact situation now with TikTok where it's like, just make Reels its own app, guys.

It's just right there.

Just take you 10 minutes.

You've got a TikTok clone.

They don't seem to have any qualms at all about just lifting other people's ideas and making it part of the platform.

Like you look at stories, which are enormously popular on Instagram.

They just lifted that right out of Snapchat, man.

They just took it straight away.

It even looks the exact same.

And I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that.

You know, as long as it's not patentable and, you know, there's all sorts of justifications to data.

It's like, well, it's a new messaging format.

It's a new.

But yeah, I think at the end of the day,

I was rooting for threads because I was like, look, I don't want to be on Elon Musk's Twitter.

And at the time, this was before Mecha Hitler was happening.

So, you know,

did you read that they signed a multi-hundred million dollar contract with the Pentagon like two days after Mechahitler came out of the ether?

Unbelievable.

And now there's like, now there's like AI companions that can flirt with you.

And it's just so pathetic.

Listen, I think that's going to be a huge sector industry-wise.

And

I'm older, so I have different opinions about it.

I just see how lonely people are, you know?

And it also could be, honestly, because I just watched Blade Runner 2049 and I was, you know, I haven't seen it.

I was, okay, the

Anna DeArmis plays a holographic girlfriend.

Yeah.

In that, and she's the holographic girlfriend of a synthetic human.

So it's like two artificial beings having a relationship together.

Oh, 100%.

I get the concept.

I just don't think it should be on the platform that also wants to be in my bank.

Right, right.

There should be lines of demarcation.

Yeah, I get, I'm trying to play, I'm trying to pay my electricity bill and then this

anime character is trying to shag me.

I'm like, what's going on here?

I don't think we're doing enough for the site.

I think we need to expand our offering quite a bit.

Let's brush up on our AI companion.

Maybe we can fake it.

Like they used to fake AI stuff by hiring a bunch of engineers in India.

Maybe all the AI companions could just be me and you, like sitting in a data center somewhere, like rapidly flirting with people via chat or something.

But

I do think there's a huge loneliness epidemic.

But is this the cure for that?

You know, I mean, I think we all have been through, especially people who grew up kind of nerdier.

We all went through a lonely period in our life.

You know, I knew you when you were that age.

You didn't know me when I was that age, but it's, I think it's kind of normal to go through a lonely period.

But then finding your way out of that is really important as well, I think.

And if you give people ways to just kind of like circle back to that on the flowchart, they're just going to take those paths every time.

That's what I'm worried about.

And then you and then you get into the whole rabbit hole of, especially in the UK, all the kids these days going to reform and that whole sort of backlash and the sort of

adolescence in cell culture stuff.

Yeah, it's a rough world out there, to be honest.

Sometimes I feel a bit depressed even thinking about it.

Yeah, we have that in the U.S.

too, where a lot of the young voters shockingly voted more conservative than anyone has seen for a long time in this last election.

And a lot of that, like you're saying, is driven by just algorithmically heightened emotion and misinformation and things like that.

So, yeah.

So speaking of misinformation and all that.

This all ties in greatly.

Boy, do we have something for you?

So we had this grand plan where we were going to private the subreddit because this was kind of of a new way,

you know, if we're going to do this, come back and work on this thing again.

Thought it'd be fun to try things in a different way.

And then Ben, we tried to private the subreddit and Reddit said, no dice, buddy.

Can't do it.

We're not going to allow it.

Yeah, that's a bit of a funny one.

I mean, I guess where it's come from is, you know, you used to have the whole revolts where they were boycotting so they turned their subreddits predicts.

But it's very much a

sledgehammer solution, isn't it?

It's like, oh, no, I'm sorry.

You're not allowed to make your own community private anymore.

And it's, it's a, I get it.

You know, it is somebody else's platform.

And when you're on someone else's platform, you got to go in with your eyes open.

It still kind of sucks because we did have a plan.

And now all the people on the subreddit, that was our plan to introduce them to the closed beta.

But now we can't do that because there's no mechanism by which to offer up those credentials.

So we'll figure something out.

We're in the process of trying to figure out how we're going to do that, right, Ben?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we'll figure it out somehow or some way.

Yeah.

And it might just be even delaying it till the open beta, which is going to be a tight time frame on the,

on the, on the clock anyway, on the calendar.

It'll be a really tight window.

So we'll, we'll figure it out.

But it does kind of suck.

Although, I have to say, it sucks, but also it's a very good reminder of why we do what we do.

Like even when you're building your business, dance floor, you know, you are really careful to keep it on your platform, on your apps, and everything like that, because if you put it on someone else's, well, you're part of their business.

And whether or not you realize that you're building value in their company, not yours.

Yeah.

And also with the delay, it's really nice.

We get to really polish the anime characters that we have on there.

I get to brush up on all my love languages that are out there today.

So we can really offer valuable service.

And then hopefully, you know, we'll all get hired by Meta for $300 million

when they need to update any.

These are starting to sound like sports contracts the way they announce these things.

I mean, it's not, as far as I know, he's not executive level.

And the only time I've ever heard of a pay packages like that being announced is when it was someone like that it was always you know I'm sure this is based on estimates especially with the equity as well which basically means like a stock package for a public company but yeah it's fascinating but then there's also weird stuff going on too like

I just read this article about how SpaceX is now investing in Elon Musk's XAI, you know, so what a what an amazing investment that Elon was somehow able to land.

He got money from SpaceX.

Wow.

That's, yeah, you would never, you know, never associate those two companies as coming together.

How did they work that out?

Unbelievable.

And it's also, I mean, you know, you get into layers of this where it's like XAI bought X, but it's like they bought it not with real money.

I don't know what's going on.

It's, you know, it's all equity and loans and stuff.

It's still just

moving,

you know.

What is money?

It's just a fictional construct, really.

Really?

It's just points.

That's all it is, right?

That's all.

Nothing else.

Yeah, back in my day, I used to buy an ice cream with 99p.

Not anymore.

Can't buy a rocket company with cash anymore.

I'm always impressed that the number of things that I can still buy in the UK

for under a pound.

And that's impressive.

Even though currency's worth more.

Well, it's usually like a banana or

an apple.

I was in the store here the other day.

An apple was $2

for one apple.

It's just like...

I have no sense of how much my apple costs.

I can't lie.

It's insane.

It's just like everything here.

There's such a sticker shock.

When was the last time you were in the US?

Oh, a long time ago.

It would have been

Yeah, probably seven eight years ago.

Do you remember what the currency exchange rate was when you showed up here?

By any chance?

I remember it being 1.5 at one point.

I remember it being nearly two.

Yep.

Which was great.

Like, oh my God, when we were like working through 2008, 2009, 2010,

and I was working for Rooster Teeth, and I'd be paid in dollars.

So as the currency crashed, I would get more money.

I was like, this is great.

Right, right.

It is one of those things.

You have to be careful about it.

When we first worked with Luke McKay in Canada, the opposite happened, I think, where his salary started to go down.

And then we had to renegotiate because we didn't want him to make less money.

He came from a nursing career and came over and we didn't want him to be making less money.

So we had to work that out.

So it's one of those things that I've been dealing with, I think, for a pretty long time because we've always been working, you know, fairly globally as well.

Yeah.

I saw the way that we had social.

Yeah.

So do you pay everyone with Bitcoin now or stablecoin?

What's this?

Oh, Oh, that's a good idea.

Yeah, we'll just do stablecoin.

You know, I was recently helping someone on a podcast with a, they were doing like a Kickstarter thing.

And I was like, I had to take a really close look at it.

And I got worried because I saw there was a crypto element in it.

But it was actually really savvy the way they did it, where they used, I think it was USDT.

It was a stablecoin, but it was a way that they could transfer funds between people

without having to incur like a lot of transaction fees and wire fees and things like that.

And I thought, oh, this is one of like the cooler use cases I've seen for cryptocurrency so far.

I'm not telling anyone to go out and invest all their money in USDT.

It's one of those stable coins that's supposed to be pegged to the dollar.

But good luck with that in this day and age.

Yeah, I mean, I haven't really looked into it too much, but like Stripe is going heavy into that as well, where they're basically saying, look, you can basically be transacting in USD, but it's all digital and it can be like transferred in half a second and it's free.

And that basically upends a lot of the, you know, like the Visa network, MasterCard, all all these sort of bank charges and Forex fees and things like that.

Well, it's pretty fascinating because the president of the United States this week has said that he wants the U.S.

to be the strongest partner for people in digital assets and cryptocurrencies, essentially.

That's a really interesting thing for the person who is leading the country with the strongest historically currency in the modern era.

You know what I mean?

It's like, it's people are starting to talk about this more and more.

And I know a lot of people shy away from it.

and you don't have to do anything you don't have to put any money in it but it is something i think people should start to learn about and take a look at i mean i think it's tough as well because you have to sort of separate the positive good use cases from like buying milania coin and stuff like that right right we were talking yesterday about how there was like a 50 pound rock from mars that sold at auction for five million dollars and that's a rare unique item on our planet.

You're not going to get more Mars rocks on Earth for a very long time but at the same time that was five million dollars and the the highest selling nft of all time was like 92 million dollars is what it sold for it it's just i get i get flashbacks when you when i hit nft i don't

that's genuinely on my like muted words list and the social apps i can't deal with it do you know how lucky i was with timing where when i left rooster teeth between when i left and then kind of came back That was during the NFT slash,

when even NFT became a dirty word, they called it Web3.

Do you remember that phase where people were calling it Web3?

It's still kind of there, yeah.

Is it still there?

Yeah.

And there was a lot.

I think there was a lot of talk about how to leverage Web3 and NFTs.

And I'm just very grateful I was not part of those conversations.

This is probably be an awkward time for us to mention we're launching our NFTs and crypto coins.

It's all anime companion coins.

It's how you pay for time with your anime companion.

Can my coin flirt with me?

I'm not interested.

Well, Ben, thank you for joining us.

We'll have to get to work here and figure out what we're going to do for this

next level of the beta, but we'll move really quickly on it and we'll figure something out.

I'm sure that's part of the fun, right?

Is getting challenges and adapting to them.

Sure.

I love that boss.

Absolutely.

What a blast.

What a blast.

No, it is.

If nothing else, it's affirmation of us, you know, that we're building this thing again and building our own corner, you know, for Rooster Teeth fans and the Rooster Teeth community.

I think it's affirmation of that.

And it's not the way we want to get it, but glad to have it just the same.

Yeah.

And I literally can't wait to have everybody in on the new community platform.

It's

so fun.

And I don't know how much we want to give away about it, but there's so much

legacy content on there.

And we've managed to bring stuff back from the dead.

And it's such a great experience going through that.

Why don't you share?

Do you had some stats that you had compiled?

Do you have some of those by any chance in front of you?

Yeah, I mean, it's so this new, the new roosterteeth.com that we're building, it's, you know, we've kind of stitched together, I think there's three distinct roosterteeth.com platforms in the past, and we kind of compiled them all and merged them back together.

And, you know, we've got like six million posts on there, 44 million comments that are all now back online.

And it is wild.

Like we've got, you know, you can go down to the red versus blue forum and go back to see the top posts from 20 years ago.

It's mental.

Yeah, and you even had a feature now because you wanted to build this out where you can actually go and dive into a specific year and see what were the top posts for that year.

You can filter out just for one specific year and take your little snapshot.

I think it's one of the things we've noticed people do when they log back into the site and we did it ourselves of just like letting the nostalgia wash over you.

But that'll last for a little while, but it'll be mainly people who have been on the site for a long time.

But then after that, we'll have new things and be building the community there, you know?

And that's part of the story too, is we have spent a lot of time building up the subreddit.

But I think in the future going forward, obviously our efforts will be more oriented towards the roosterteeth.com website more than anything else.

Those other things will still exist, but our focus will be there.

And even if you weren't around at the original start,

it's just nice to have that continuity of history, right?

Where it's like all of that stuff is all in one place.

And it's not like it's going into the Wayback Machine or anything like that.

It's all right there in one platform.

And

it really kind of also just highlights how long this

Rooster Teeth community has endured.

And, you know,

it's, um, it's been, it's been absolutely wild to come back and be doing it.

I don't know, was it like over 10 years after I last worked on it?

But, uh, I mean, everybody at this point is coming back from some kind of break, whether it's 10 years or one year since the shutdown.

So it's going to be a lot of fun.

And we're looking forward to opening the gates really soon.

All right, Ben, thanks for joining us from nice, balmy Spain.

But I do want to thank our two sponsors for today.

Zeroes to Heroes and Cameron Jett.

Thank you very much for sponsoring this podcast at patreon.com slash morningsomer.

I'm going to have to change the way I say that pretty soon.

All right, that does it for us today, July 18th, 2025.

I will be back on Monday to talk with you.

I hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.