Classic TechStuff: The Rooster Teeth Interview

back into stuff that has happened recently. So we just concluded our two part series about how Bungee works and UH and Lawrence Farewell, and I thought it would be interesting to go back and listen to an interview that Chris Pallette and I did back in February two thousand and twelve with Bernie Burns, the founder of Rooster Teeth Productions.

Of course, Rooster Teeth does lots of different stuff, but they got their start doing machinima using the Halo universe, excusing the Halo game engine is sort of digital puppets. And we got a chance to talk with Mr Burns and find out all about how his company got started and what they had to do in order to make it a success. So, without further ado, here's the We've got Bernie Burns on the line. Bernie is the founder of Rooster Teeth Productions, the producers of the popular web

series Red Versus Blue, among other things. Bernie, how are you? I'm doing find Jonathan, how are you doing? I am I'm okay. Chris, how are you doing great? Thanks for asking. You're welcome, Chris. I don't want you to be left out.

Uh So, Bernie, I wanted to talk to you. Really, you're a pioneer in web content, especially when it comes to web videos and something beyond just the the one hit wonder web videos that that we're sort of the the earmark of internet video when it first started to take off, and I kind of wanted to talk to you about how you got into that at and the development of Rooster Teeth Productions over time, and where you're

at today. So to start, you were actually involved in creating content for the web before there was even a Rooster Teeth, right, That's right, I mean really back before video was even really possible on the Internet. Um, I mean you can download a I think one of the first things video wise I ever downloaded from the net was the first episode of south Park or what became south Park, and that was ten minutes short that I think was eighty megs and it was the size of

a postage stamp on the screen. But yeah, I started off writing for video game sites. I started writing off for writing for what we're called everything Nothing sites, where they were sort of like blogs, but there were more articles. You know, A modern day equivalent would be almost like Slate or The Escapist, where their articles that are kind of thematic, but they could really be about anything. So what led you into starting the whole red versus Blue

video phenomenon. Well, I was a filmmaker and I live in Austin, Texas, and so in college I built a non linear editor video capture device that could capture. Back then, it was VHS tapes, so we transfer film to VHS and then we would capture the VHS and edit it online. So then after making a couple of movies with some friends in Austin, uh, they moved out to l A

to start their entertainment careers. I stayed in Austin because I had a very good tech job and I was always just trying to find ways to make uh, you know, films or make short little videos. And I had all this equipment laying around, and I thought, well, why don't I just take some of these videos I'm producing and start putting them online. Forget a way to do that, and so started encoding them in quick time and dive x back then and we'll just upload them to a site.

And I did a few of those before I made the first episode of Red Versus Blue and that immediately caught on. So for for our listeners who may not be familiar with Red Versus Blue, can you can you get sort of a bird's eye view of what the series is and and uh, you know the vehicle you use to create the series. Sure, So what we do in a nutshell, uh, is we use the video game Halo, uh to produce short comedic cartoons essentially, um, and we use the graphics engine that's in Halo to do all

of our animation. And probably the best way to describe it for something for someone who's never seen anything like it before, it's almost like using the video game characters as virtual puppets. Um. You know, we're not doing animation cell by cell or you know, sitting down and plotting on all the character moves. We're actually controlling them in

real time. So it's a little bit like animation, and it's a little bit like live action shooting and that we do takes, we do rehearsals, and the performance that you're seeing is actually a recorded live performance by someone controlling the character in real time. That's that's really a

very clever way of creating films. And of course we now called this machinima, but back then that term probably wasn't very much in use at the time you guys were first getting into Red Versus Blue, Right, Yeah, it's funny, we didn't know what it was called. We didn't know this was the movement that people were doing these kind of things. So we thought we were brilliant and we had been invented this new technique of shooting, and we

were actually wondering what we're gonna call it. And uh, we we got a phone call from Paul Marino, who was the head of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Scientists in New York, and you know, they said they wanted us to come out and do a presentation about Reversus Blue, and um, there was no awards ceremony that they had been nominated for. And yeah, that's how we first found out about the word mishinima. Yeah, so, and you said that you were. It took off almost immediately.

Was that like from episode one you immediately saw a real interest in this or did it take a few before it started looking like you really had a hit on your hands. No, it was pretty immediate. We put up the we put up the first episode, and we along with it, we put up p s A, which was just the characters looking into the screen and talking and um, we were doing jokes about it. Was it was so long ago as weapons of mass destruction. Uh, this was back in two thousand and three, very very

timely at the time, was very very topical. Um and uh. We were linked the first episode of the series was linked on farc and slash dot and Penny Arcade, And so it went from three thousand views the first day that we put up the episode to the next day we had about fifteen thousand views on it. By the time we put out the second video. Quarter of a million people showed up the day the first day to watch the second video. And yeah, by the end of the month, we were up to about seven hundred and

fifty thousand viewers a week within within four weeks. That's that's meteor. It was. It was. It was the biggest problem for us was figuring out how to get it out there. Yeah, the bandwidth, this shues. Yeah, I mean we were we were paying tons of money to deliver it because I mean, I'm sure you remember back in the eight people would get banned with bills when they would put up, you know, things on servers and then

get a popular site. Um, And so we were trying to figure out how to host what we're at the time pretty massive files. I mean, these were, you know, seventy megabyte files people were downloading in you know, two thousand and two thousand and three. It was it was hard to figure out how to stir all that. And YouTube didn't exist at the time, so we couldn't just throw it up on YouTube and hope for the best, you know. I have I have a question, um, about

what's your recording schedule look like? I mean, how many of these how fast can you do one of these videos? And and about how long does it take to uh, you know, from beginning to end. When you're talking about scripting and going through rehearsals and things like that, how long does that take. Well, we're a lot faster than we used to be. Just soon as we've been doing it for nine seasons that we're we're just going into

season ten right now. But if you look at like a Pixar movie and the missinima, what we produce is not on the fidelity of of a picture movie. We do more custom animation now. But um, the big thing about MACHINEAM is how efficient it is. So a Pixar movie might take a team of three people the course of three years. Um, we can produce five minutes a week with about This is now just neglecting voice actors who you have to have a different actor for every character.

But we can produce five minutes a week with about three people. Uh, and that'll take us about you know, thirty forty hours to do that. So every year we put out of a full feature on DVD, and we can do that with a production crew of anywhere between you know, three to five people. Now now that in later seasons we've been adding more custom animation just because of Sinima got more popular, we found we had to

do more to stand out. And you know, like anything, it's like if it stays the same, it'll it'll get stale. So we had to kind of evolved the series while it was in place and so now we have a much bigger team. Now we have a team of about twenty people that work on it, uh, and they do a lot of custom animations, some really fun action scenes, fighting scenes, that kind of thing. So when you guys were first exploring motion capture, UH, when did you guys

actually sit down and consciously make that decision? And was that a huge challenge? Was it that or what? Was it surprisingly easy compared to everything else you had been doing. Well, we we made one higher that made it a lot easier, and that was Monty Home. I'm a big consumer of all things internet as well, so I'm always online, always like looking at you know, online video. I just I love it, and um, it's it's fun to spot people

who are doing cool new stuff. And montyme put up a video where he custom animated master Chief from Halo fighting Sammy's from Metroid and it was the models were okay, in the texture okay, but the animation was outrageously sophistic it and the choreography of what he was doing. And so we contacted him and we tried to work with it for like two or three years before we were finally able to hire him. And that was in season eight, and so we essentially built an animation pipeline. That's it.

He's the centerpiece of it. We built it around him, essentially cool. Well, jumping back again back to the early days, about how long did it did it take before you realize that you actually had a viable company on your hands? I mean, the show was a hit, but that there's a big difference between something that ends up getting really viral on the internet and then turning that into something that can actually sustain itself as a business. Did that

happen right away as well? Well, I mean it came in the sense that we all of a sudden have these major expenses for striving. That's what a great way to start up business, right. Well, you know, if there's a massive expense side of this, then they're they're they're theoretically should be some kind of revenue stream help service that I mean there's there's not is the demand for this, So if you sit still, the demand will generate bills. Uh, we kind have get a little proactive here and figure

a way to generate some revenue from it. And um, you know, I think there's a big opinion, Uh that a common opinion, I should say that if you make something on the Internet and you get a ton of views, um, that the ad companies just show up like the ad trucks shows up in your driveway. It does. It doesn't work that way. Getting advertisers for content is very hard, and it's always been hard. It was never it was

never easy to do it on the internet. UM. And there's a lot of places that will abstract that for you now, a lot of a lot of video services that will do that for you. But it's a very difficult process, and so we had to go through and figure out a way to build a business model. UM. We actually built one that was based not on advertising,

and we reran on that for five years. UM. We just did merchandise, UM, premium memberships and DVD sales, and that's how we funded the company for the first five years. We never we never ran a single ad on anything. Uh. For the first runt of the show. Yeah, it actually brings me to the question about the sponsorship the premium memberships that you ran. I've been a fan of Red

Versus Blue since season one. I've been following it since season one, and so I'm familiar with the idea of you became a premium member, and you would get access to certain videos. Sometimes you get access early, sometimes you get exclusive access. And also for the first few seasons, I remember, you would even get the DVD at the end of the season when you're a premium member. Yeah. Yeah, so uh so, clearly building a community was an important part of your business model as well, right, and we

built a community site to that. We knew that eventually the popularity of the show would wane, or at the very least that people watching the show, you know, the individuals would you know, say well, I can't watch something for you know, ten years. Um, you know, people just naturally fall out, and so we wanted to have something in place to hold people as like our portion of the Internet, so that people would always know where they

could find us. And when we put new things out, it would be great to be able to show it to people, to get that initial seed of a of a new project. And that's that was probably one of the smartest things we did, was making sure that we carved out our own portion of the Internet. Yeah, it's it's still a very popular portal. I mean, people want to go and check out the You have several different you r ls that all lead into this kind of uh hub really of all the different products Rooster Teeth does,

because it's not just Red Versus Blue. Although we'll get into that in a little bit. I did have another question about the tone of Red Versus Blue and the early seasons the Blood Gulch Chronicles in particular, which is the first five seasons of Red Versus Blue. Uh, it was it was almost exclusively comedic, and then you began to experiment by inserting some more dramatic elements into the storyline, sometimes with uh tertiary characters who were not playing directly

with your main cast. What time, at what point did you decided to do that? Was that something you had wanted to do from the beginning, or as you were going, were you thinking, hey, you know what, we could actually try something new here and try and do almost like an action movie type script parallel to the comedic stuff we're doing on this other side. Yeah, So it was essentially when it first started, essentially, like somebody described it as Stripes in Space, which I think is a great

way to describe it. It's just just it's very lighthearted. It's a it's a military comedy which which focuses on a lot of bureaucracy humor, which I think crosses over a lot of industries, not just you know, the military, but also business and school and everything else. I was always as a as a writer, I was always writing though background threads so that the story could stay consistent. If you base it in a universe, you know, then it seems more honest. And I was doing all of that.

And when we got towards the end of the fifth season UM, I was talking with people about stories in the background that we're knowing that audience members had picked up on. But I had this whole fleshed out uh universe kind of behind the scenes, and I was talking with somebody here about it and I described it all, was writing on the on the white board about all these things, and they said, maybe you should show this to the audience, you know, I mean, maybe you should,

Maybe you should put this out there. And I thought, yeah, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe we should. It's it's it's interesting to us. And you know, our philosophy here is UM, if we make things that we like, we just have faith that there's enough people on the Internet that are like us that they'll like it too. So yeah, it's just a natural evolution. Like I said, it's you know, we started off the very first episode of the very first season saying,

all these guys, do we stand around and talk? That's what they were doing last week. That's what we'll be doing five minutes from now and for five seasons. You know. It's it works very well standing around and talking, but you really do run the risk of becoming stale. Five years on the internet is is like a looks like a glacier. You know, it's it's like an eon. It

seems like, um, that's the rise and fall of my Space. Yeah. Yeah, and you know we talked about that to you, like the we're I was talking earlier about the carving out your own space on the internet. It's like a lot of people that today, you know, they don't do that. There's a big opinion that the the web is dead and that you should just go all in on Facebook or all in on YouTube or what you know, whatever the darling uh site of the moment happens to be.

But I mean, we've been doing this for so long. I remember when if we just spent all of our time building up our Facebook or assuming are MySpace friends. In two thousand three and two thousand four, we would, I think, you know, uh, you know, we're dealing with rever or something like that. You know, it's just it's it's it's Twitter, Twitter follower accounts and you know, Facebook like seemed very important right now, but five years from

now they probably won't seem all that important. Yeah. The biggest shifts that I see right now are really more platform shifts. So it's more like the emphasis now is on mobile as opposed to the desktop and laptop models, which that makes more sense. I mean, that's an access thing, not a not a you know, this is the particular website that's in vogue right now. Well, oh no, go ahead, I'm sorry. No, it's crazy. It's crazy how much mobile

has taken off. I mean, it's just it's just insane. Yes, yeah, we we talk about that all the time here at how stuff works as well. I mean, it's it's completely changed the way that we create certain types of content. Because there are some kinds that are perfect for the mobile platform, and that's just people love them. There are other types that just don't quite fit as well. It's a real challenge to try and find the balance there. Fortunately, I think web video is one of those that it

transcends the platform you don't have. You don't have to worry about that as much. UM. Let me ask you also about some of the tricks you guys did working within the confines of a video game universe and actually

within the actual physics engine of the video game itself. Uh, watching some of the behind the scenes stuff, I love the idea that you guys got really creative were the ways you shot the series, especially early on, when there weren't as many tools for you to use, tools that I think have been built into games like Halo because of the work you've done when they didn't exist back then.

You found really creative ways of getting around it. The one I think of off the top of my head is using a tank as a crane for crane shots, right. I mean that's excused back to how it's a lot like live action. It's like we wanted to get a shot where we raised up, how do we do? How do we do that? Um? There wasn't any ability within the retail game to raise the camera above eye level. I mean the entire first three seasons of the show,

you're seeing the entire show through another character's eyes. That never appeared on screen. It's literally a camera man, um. And so we would walk him around in order to set up shots and to be the camera. And so we thought, well, how can we get this? I thought, why don't we just put him on the end of the barrel of the tank and just slowly raise the tank barrel up, And sure enough, that allowed us to

get a crane shot with it. Likewise, we would put people on the tops of ban cheese and fly them around if we wanted to get a really high view of the canyon or something like that. Yeah, we had to be really creative. Um. In a later season. One of the things we we would also just employ like some of the oldest tricks that there are in filmmaking. Um, we had a character, a baby alien, so we need

a small alien. Well, you can't shrink a character in the game, so we would just do forced perspective where we would set the alien far back in the shot and because there's no depth of field in the game, it's an infinite focus. Um, we would just set up the scene so that one character is really far away and they just happened to look a lot smaller and

it worked perfectly. I mean, if the illusion was great. It's, you know, just like old things that used to do back in the days when they would you know, shoot King Kong and voyage the Moon. I imagine getting eyelines in this series is a bit of a challenge. It definitely is. I mean there's nothing in the game where it's like everyone looks in the same direction, you know, And so we're we're probably the best people in the

world at playing Halo in a very specific way. Like ever, if you ever put it in in a matchmaking game where all the players on the team have to look in the same direction or all run in the same line while looking at their feet, we would we would kill at that. So so yeah, we ever created Days of our Lives game within Halo, you guys will rock it. Yes, we would be the dramatic reaction team. Well, let's talk about some of the other content that Rister Teeth produces.

I mean, Red versus Blue is probably what got you guys on the map for most people, but you do a lot of other, uh things as well, including some live action stuff. When did you guys decide to start producing live action shorts? Well, that's our that's our background is live action, and I mean we start off like I made a feature film in college. Was a computer science student, but I wanted to learn how to uh make films because that's from premedic computer science, and surprisingly

not a lot of stuff transferred. So I had a bunch of I have like organic chemistry as a as an elective on my transcript um and so I had a bunch of hours on campus where I was trying to kill time, and I found the student run TV station down there, t STV, and started meeting film students and wanting to get involved in video editing in film production. But I did not want to go and sit through um film classes. So I thought, you know what, Robert Arriguez just made El Mariachi at ut I went to

the University of Texas. He made elm Actually just a few years ago, there was this idea that you could just make an independent movie and set the world on fire. So I thought, why don't I just make a feature film, uh, you know, spend ten thousand dollars doing that as opposed to spending it in a classroom, and then I'll probably know everything I need to know about filmmaking by the time it's over. Well that took about eighteen months to get that done. You know, we we actually did shoot

a feature on film on sixteen millimeter film. That was a long process, but uh yeah, that's that's just how I got involved with it, and I uh um, you know it was it was worked out pretty well. I mean that, you know, I own a production company and I don't have a degree in in any kind of entertainment. I have a computer science degree that just hangs on my wall and I never use basically. So, uh so, who are the writers on your on your staff? I know you write red versus blue? Right, Yes, that's right,

I write versus blue. Uh. And you know the actors add a ton when they get in the booth. Uh. All the actors know their characters so well now that they you know, sometimes I'll just like have blanks that they can fill in for ad libs, you know, where they add a lot in as well. Uh. And then we have a team of writers upstairs, um that work on our shorts. And that's a that's a very collaborative effort. Um. They have a whole team like a writing room where they go in and pitch ideas and then they take

them away and then come back with scripts. And trade them off in new drafts. It's a it's a very fun process. Cool well, and we're pretty familiar with the writing process around here too, it's not not this similar, although we of course write articles and not not not scripts. But tell me about the Immersion series, which kind of married this video game and and live action short thing into an increasingly hilarious series of misadventures. Well, that was

kind of fun. That was had this idea that we could take things from video games and test them in real life. And I had the idea for a while and eventually I said, you know what, I should make one of these because someone else is going to do this if we don't. And that's a big thing on the internet. Man. It seems like by the time you think of an idea, you should go look it up because somebody's probably already done it, you know, and things

move that fast. And so this, this idea, this probably gives you a good example of what the whole series was about. When you play a Grand Theft auto game or one of those open world or urban environment games, when you drive a car, you drive from a third person perspective. You're your view of the car is behind the car, and that's not the way you drive a car in the real world. So we thought, okay, let's try that. Let's set up a car in real life

that is a third person perspective. So we blacked out the windshield safety first, UH and blacked out the entire cockpit, and then suspended a camera on a rig behind the vehicle and then ran that down to a monitor that was on the dashboard of the car. So you're in the car, driving it through a course and you're looking at the car from behind your views from behind the car,

and we shot that episode. He took us about six hours to shoot the pilot um to the driving part of it, and then we spent another four hours out there afterward because everyone in the crew want to drive the car. We said, we had a blast doing it. It

It was great. It reminds me there was a guy there was a It was more of an art project than anything else, but there was a guy who built an MMO suit that did sort of the same thing, but it was just a It was just a person in a in a suit where you have a helmet

that has a monitor built into it. There a rig that's UH warned like a backpack that suspends the camera above and behind to give that that MMO view of a character running around the world, so the only view you had of yourself was as a third person, and of course they added spikes on the helmet to give

it that authentic MMO feel. And uh, apparently anyone who put this on would first spend the first half hour struggling to interact with the world in a way that wasn't going to feel like it was going to kill them because it was so weird to be have an out of body experience like that. And then the next half hour was spent stomping around and swinging your arms around because you look like the incredible Hulk. So yeah, walk up to people and ask them for quests, right exactly. Yeah,

that was yeah. No, there there are people who are still in therapy because of that art project. So we did a fun one like that where we tested what it would be like to be in a side scrolling environment where we had a wireless rig that we could send a videos signal to to goggles that the person would wear, and we shot them from a ninety degree angle directly from their side, and so we had like a Mario course that these guys had to navigate while

only being able to see themselves from the side. So what short straw that Gus and Jeff draw that they have to be in all of these They drew the academic short straw. They should have just been better in school and they would have better career opportunities and they wouldn't have to be subjected to all this terrible stuff. We we we got to a point where we were torturing them, I think, I mean we we did this one thing

where we tested video game foods. You know, when you're playing a video game and your character is hurt, if he eats a steak, then he immediately feels better. I don't know what they think the healing properties of food are in video games. So we took them out. We didn't tell them this. We took him on drinking until two in the morning and to celebrate something. It was all a ruse, and then the next day we showed up in the production at their house at five in

the morning. They just I mean they literally just gone to bed so they would woke up and they were just miserable, and we just like fed him food for about an hour and a half, big hams and pizzas and strawberries. Everything you see in a game that is supposed to cure you, and let's just put it this way, did not cure them. Yes, to learn more, visit the Rooster Teeth's website and you can watch all of these or get the DVDs if you want to be able

to have them for posterity's sake. Uh. Well, let's also talk. There's another another project, Achievement Hunter, which is again hosted by rooster Teeth, which is all about achievements on Xbox three sixty games, although you guys also cover other games occasionally as well. Right, yes, we cover It's the achievement focus does seem to make it seems although achievements are

bleeding into bobile games and Steam games as well. Um, it does seem to think it's like a three sixty uh site, But no, they cover all different games like they've been covering a lot of the Star Wars Older public MMO lately. But it's just it's a celebration of video game culture, which which we love. We love online culture and video game culture. And we're actually holding a convention uh in Austin this year rt X, which is the intersection of gaming and online culture. But Achievement Hunter

has been a huge, huge success. Um, it's just been It's something that you know, we kind of kicked around for a while of you know, recording actual gameplay from our footage from gameplay video games and then commenting on it. And uh we Jeff Ramsey, who plays Griffin our Reverend Blue series, he headed up, he hit it up the project and he has just been. Man, it's been an enormous thing. We're about to hit uh one billion total views on YouTube across all of our videos, and Achievement

Hunter has been a huge part of that. That is incredible. And I also should add the the successive Rooster Teeth has been truly phenomenal and that your effect. You know, you guys talk about how you have absorbed video game culture, but you've also become part of it. I mean you several people from Rooster Teeth have been featured in games as voiceover talent and other things. Can you talk a little bit about some of those, you know, we actually are trying to go through and compile a list of

the places where Richarchie's has been referenced. Rivers and Blue has been referenced. Um, just in most recently, Um, there's a there's a reference in the World of Warcraft expansion where there's a I forget the name of the thing, but it's essentially like a parody of Blood Gulch. And there's a character in there that's based on griff um Uh in there. And then we just did a like a commentary, a bonus commentary for gun Stringer Twisted Pixel. And then we always it's funny these we always end

up been achievements, references and achievements. Like there's a lot of Red versus Blue referential achievements. Um, there's one in Gears of War. Um, there's a dishwasher, Samurai dishwasher. They just put out a new version of the game that has the Caboose is Achievable system as part of the game. And the coolest things ever is that we got to be voices in Halo three. I mean that was that was an honor to actually participate in the game that we're obviously such a huge fans in Doable. It's like

a full circle right there. Well, when we started Reversus Blue, mean, when you have your you know, your initial meetings and you know you're talking about, well, what's the coolest thing that can happen. I mean, we thought the coolest thing that can happen, by far was that we somehow get referenced in an actual Halo video game or like some kind of Eastern because Bungee had always pretty put East Riggs in their games and getting getting to play marines

and contribute you contribute our voices to the game. That was just it was nuts. Yeah, it's fantastic that, uh, that that turned out that way, especially that Bungee ended up being such fans of your work, because if it had gone another way, especially when we see things like on tech stuff, we talked about lot of stuff like uh, intellectual property and patent wars and about this sort of litigious side to a lot of companies. Uh, it could

have gone a totally different way. It could have been that one episode went up and then you've got a cease and desist and then no more opportunity. So I'm so glad that this was a case where a company said, no, they're they're adding benefit to what we do. We enjoy their work, we want to see them succeed. Well, I mean, I think that would be what you're saying about the episode going up and then it gets pulled out. I think a lot of people say that is the expectation

of what would happen. Um, And certainly that was in our minds as we were doing it. And UM, you know, I can't speak for them, you know, why they made the decisions they made, but I mean, you know, Microsoft took a look at it and said, you know, here's something that's innovative and creative, and let's see what happens, you know, And that's that was the attitude they took, like, let's let's just go forward and see where this goes.

And I met with them and told them, you know, here's the plans for what I want to do with it. More importantly, here's what we're not trying to do. Um, you know, we're just trying to have some fun and do something and we're huge fans of Halo, and um, you know, let's see what happened turned into a three

relationship and has now turned into a tenny relationship. So I can't I cannot say enough good things about the risk that Microsoft took on us and how much that is meant to our business because they have been very open and very cool, fantastic stake well, I I have just two more questions. Here's the second to last one. This was one that was suggested by a follower of mine on Twitter. Um, how frequently are you mistaken as the guy who does the voice for Caboose? All all?

It's so insulting. It's uh, Yeah, Caboose is easily our most popular character. And uh, you know, it's uh. Whenever we go to conventions, it's, oh, here's Birdie. He plays the Uh. He's the writer and director and created a show and plays the lead character. Because I write it. Of course I make myself lead character, and like, hey,

that's great, where's Caboose? Yeah? And and often it's like, it's not so much getting mistaken for Caboose, it's the it's the raw disappointment that you see in people's faces when they realize that you're not Caboose. That's the problem when you have the gut check as an artist. I um no, I I can sort of identify with that, because a couple of years ago, not so much now, but a couple of years ago I bore a passing

resemblance to Jamie Hyneman of MythBusters. I could see that now you say that, Yeah, I can see that, so yeah, I have different glasses. Now. The glasses apparently are what made it. But I had two people within the span of a week make that that comment to me. And Dragon Con, which some Rooster Teeth people have been to in the past. But Dragon Con here in Atlanta was hosting several members of the build team from MythBusters as guests,

and so I thought, oh, this will be fun. I'll go and buy a military beret, I'll wear an Oxford shirt, and I'll just show up as Jamie. I'm clearly I'm clearly not Jamie, but that's gonna be my costume. And um. Then I discovered the joy and and and heartbreak of revealing to people that I was not actually Jamie from MythBusters and see that moment of realization where they're their

joy turned to disappointment. I actually disappointed an entire battalion of the first Stormtrooper Brigade that was you never want to pist off armored people with gunn no no, But it is funny to watch them all like deflate. At the same time, it kind of made you feel like what it would have been like to be on Coruscant when they revealed that the death Star had exploded. I guess it's over. Yeah, guys, all right, you know we had a good run. Um, so here's my last one.

Are there any other projects that you're working on that you would like to talk about. We've talked about the live action stuff and Red Versus Blue and r t X. Is there anything specific you would like to to mention to our listeners. Well, yeah, it's a crazy thing. Um, it's it's it's pretty irreverent. Uh, it's a lot different tone than this interview even. But our podcast on that that's on iTunes is the Rush Chief podcast has actually turned into one of our biggest hits. Um, and I

just love making it. We just talked about we just get on Mike and talk for an hour about you know, what's going on, you know with video games, what's going on with online culture, what's going on you know in current events, and you know and our interpretation of it, which is basically our misunderstanding of it all. Uh. And

it's just fun. It's you know, working at Rooster Teeth, it's it's a bunch of friends working together and so um, it's fun to get on there for an hour and just jaw with your buddies, and um, you know, we're working on some ways to punch up the podcast and maybe change the way we delivered a little bit. Um. But we're really looking forward to this year, to growing the podcast and also bringing people out to Austin July seven and eight for r t X, which is our

convention here. We're really excited about that. Fantastic And yes, I am also a fan of your podcast. And I should mention that both the Rooster Teeth podcast and tech Stuff we're mentioned as the rewind best of two thousand eleven on iTunes. Yeah, so we've got we've got that in common going for us. Yeah. The the show that you guys do is is incredibly hilarious, especially if you can get one of the more clueless members of Rooster Teeth on Mike aur Or or you know, or just Joel.

If Joel's on there and and all you have to do is say one thing and you realize that he's gone off on a completely different tangent and he's really angry about it for no apparent reason. For no apparent reason, now you can see why he played the voice of Caboose. Yes, well, well, Bernie, this has been a great time. It's It's been one of those things I've always wanted to do. I Like I said, I've been a fan of the show from

season one and I'm glad we had this opportunity. And we did do an episode on tech stuff about Missinama. Uh oh, I guess that was one of our first episodes. We're coming up on episode four hundred before too long, so yeah, yeah, people are still listening. So this was really and we we talked a lot about Red Versus Blue in our MISSIONEMA podcast, so this was really a thrill for me. Thank you so much for joining us,

and we really do appreciate it. Guys, if you have not checked out Rooster Teeth, I do recommend you go and look at their stuff. Watched some Red Verses Blue, watch some of their live action and uh and really pay attention because these guys have found a way before almost anyone else did, to make new media work in a sustainable way and build a business out of it.

And that that to me, is probably the best story out of all of this, is that not only do you guys create great content, but you found a way to make that, you know, pay for itself and and to actually keep it going over time and not just be Wow, that was incredible. I just wish they could have found a way to make it work. Yeah, why you make this sound so legitimate. I'm gonna record that and play it back at dinner parties. All right, you

have my permission to do that. That's fine, especially if you if you if you uh subscribe to text stuff, that would that would help us out, because you know, every listener counts it. All right, awesome, Thank you so much, Bernie, Thank you very much. Out of appreciate it. We have to thank Bernie Burns yet again, even though that that interview happened two years ago, I have to thank him for giving us the time with that interview. We greatly

appreciated it. And as a personal note, I mean I was a huge Rooster Tief fan from the early early days, so it was a thrill just to get a chance to speak with him. At any rate, we're planning on doing more interviews in the future. So if there are any particular people out there that you think tex Stuff should interview. Maybe there's someone that you think would be a really interesting panelist. There might be a topic that they're an expert on that you've always wanted to hear

talk on a podcast, let me know. Or if there's someone else in the podcasting world that you would like to hear as a guest host, let me know that too. I've got a lot of friends out there, and we've got a lot of possibilities lined up, and I'm really excited about all of that. So if you guys want to say in, it right in and tell me. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler.

The handle at all three is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon for moral thiss and thousands of other topics. VI isit how staff works dot com.