Talking Simpsons - The Talking Simpsons 10th Anniversary Spectacular

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

It's finally happened: Talking Simpsons has turned a whopping ten years old! And to ring in the occasion, we're replacing this month's episode of Talk to the Audience with a little—well, BIG—celebration of ourselves. Listen in to hear us discuss our humble roots, the many growing pains of running a podcast network, and the future of talking about an animated series with no end in sight. And, as a special treat, we respond to your questions and comments about a decade of cartoon cromulence. Who knows what adventures we'll have between now and the time the show becomes unprofitable? New opening and closing themes by Miles Morkri. And thanks so much to everyone who contributed to this episode!

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The The The The The The The Where were you 10 years ago on the night of June 24th, 2015? And if your answer is anywhere but I had access to the internet, it's very likely you heard the very first episode of Talking Simpsons as it went live. Hi, I'm Bob Mackie. You might remember me from such podcasts as Discussing Duckman and God the Devil and Bob and Bob. And who is here with me today as always?

Henry Gilbert, and 10 years is enough time for at least five interviews with Bill Oakley. And yes, this month we are skipping Talk to the Audience for one very important reason. And that reason is we are celebrating ourselves because we've been doing Talking Simpsons for an entire 10 years. So on this occasion, we thought we'd reflect upon the history of the podcast and then answer your questions and comments about a decade of us doing this thing that you like and hey, we like it a lot too. Yeah, hey, you reminded me that you had to remind me it was the 10 years. I had not, I totally missed it.

Like the time fly. I mean, for half of those years, basically time became meaningless after COVID to me, I think. Those days, the years didn't count anymore. To know that half of it is actually, it's, those days, the years didn't count anymore. To know that half of it is, actually it's almost perfectly half, isn't it? Like half is pre and half is post 2020 of COVID, isn't it? Yeah, basically. And it does feel like a 10-year blur, but when you look back at everything

we've done, and we're going to go over it, it's going to be a lot of fun, there's a mountain of podcasts that have been created in our wake. Yeah, I mean, we stand by being so productive. In our 10 years, we've probably made more hours of content than most podcasters could in 20 years, where they do have somehow started in 2005 and continue to now. Yes, this is all one big competition and we're winning. That's the point of this 10 year podcast, to stomp on the bones of our enemies. Nobody can put out as much as us and still keep at it.

So yes, we're going to celebrate ourselves. It's self-indulgent. Let us do this once every decade. And I will ask everyone out there to keep your ears open because some celebrity guests may just join us via pre-recorded messages like the following from a bunch of guys in New York City. Hey, I'm Andrew Jupin, Stephen Sadak, Eric Siska, Chris Cabin, and we are We Hate pre-recorded messages like the following from a bunch of guys in New York City. Oh, that's kinda sweet. Yeah, ditto, my god. 10 years, man, they go by so fast, don't they? It is a long time.

While The Simpsons was dipping in quality 10 years on, Talking Simpsons has not. No, not at all. That's right, yeah. You guys have only just begun, congratulations. Congrats on the big 10, Bob and Henry and Talking Simpsons. Thanks to the guys from We Hate Movies for sending that in.

They're some of our favorite guests. We're not gonna rank our guests, not yet at least. Maybe in year 20 we will. But before I started talking Simpsons and even RetroNauts, I was a huge fan of We Hate Movies and getting them on the podcast so many times has been an absolute dream for me. So thanks guys. That was great.

And listeners, I am just as surprised and happy as you guys. I did not know that one was coming. I'm looking forward to the others too. That was so great to hear. Thank you all, all you guys, Andrew, Chris, Steven, and Eric for doing that very nice thing for us. Yeah, I loved when we've been on We Hate Movies too. That's been so fun.

Bob, you introduced me to We Hate Movies and I've been a regular listener ever since. And so it's so great to have their compliment from those guys. Yes, so please check out We Hate Movies, everybody, and check out our episodes. We've done episodes on Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, is it two that we did it on? Yeah, it was the second, yeah.

Okay, I watched both of them, and I erased both movies from my brain. So Despicable Me 2, the Garfield movie, and thepsons movie so far. Right man. Yeah, I forgot the Simpsons movie in there, too Yeah, the Garfield one that was mainly fun just to celebrate Stephen Tobolowski But also although it's just so nice like those the the we hate movies guys Like they they just did what their 800th right like so we're still catching up to them. Yes Yeah, they began in 2010. So they were way ahead of the curve in terms of recapping stuff.

Yeah, they were some of our earliest guests. I think Steven was, we had them all on in short order, but Steven I think was the first of their group and one of our earliest guests. And I always think back to, once we have one of them on, it's always a happy time of like oh boy the cycle begins again We need to invite the others on very soon Yes every spring the we hate movies cycle begins on talking simpsons, and you can expect them all to show up So thanks to we hate movies guys. We're gonna hear some more celebrity appearances throughout this podcast It's gonna be a lot of fun stay tuned for that

But you know we normally do the history of TV shows or movies or other things, but now we're going to do the history of ourselves. And I didn't have to look too hard into this because it's all up here in my brain and then the things that aren't in my brain are online in various places. So I want to talk about the beginning of Talking Simpsons and unfortunately the origins aren't too exciting because it's something that was very inevitable. Because from the mid to late aughts, blogging about individual episodes of television really exploded.

And as writing found fewer and fewer places to thrive on the internet, podcasting really took over this brand of TV commentary. So we saw as the decade changed from the aughts to the 2010s, we saw the end of TV blogging or the winding down of TV blogging and then everyone starting their own TV recap podcast That was a phase one phase two is what we're in now and that's when the people from the TV shows recap their own television show yes, it finally becomes worth it to People who have like television residual money to then get into the podcasting game. And you know, I mean, you both love those, those TV recap articles from the odds so much.

So we've had at least two of the writers of those from the AV club on as guests as Emily St. James and Nathan Rabin have have we've had on as guests. They were very influential to us as AV Club writers. Yeah, we talked about it as TV-obsessed weirdos. Those things were very essential and very fun. Before we were listening to podcasts about television and making podcasts about television, we would go to the AV Club after something aired, read the whole recap, read all the comments, and that was a ritual. That used to be how things worked before everyone jumped onto podcasting, which I think is a better form of

That commentary because you can you can write a 300 word recap But then you can also make a three-hour podcast about a 20-minute episode of television And it's easier to just play clips in in in a podcast than it is in an article. I'd say yes So we were early on the scene But we weren't one of the first TV recap podcasts. And I can say in terms of how I came to Talking Simpsons, I was really inspired by April Richardson's Saved by the Bell podcast, Go Bayside, which launched just as I was beginning a very, very long period of unemployment in 2013. So it kind of went live the same month 1UP.com shut

down and I needed something to fill my time. I found that because she had a lot of folks from the LA comedy area on that podcast and I had watched so much Shaved by the Bell and I thought there should be a show like this, but for the Simpsons. And of course, I believed I was qualified enough to host that show, but it took a very long time to find the right way to bring that about. So it was just kind of stewing in, I did not create the show. I think it took a very long time to find the right way to bring that about. So it was just kind of stewing in. I did not create the show.

I think it was a collaborative effort. There was no like one eureka moment, but I feel that April Richardson really set me down the path towards wanting to do this. Absolutely. For me too, I was also a go Bayside listener and a big fan of it. Drawn to it for the same reasons. I think I had seen April Richardson on other podcasts or at comedy showcases, but I then came to it probably because people like Paul F. Tompkins had been on it and then you go back through it and yeah, it was such a fun, fun recap podcast.

Another one that I listened to a bit back then was the Kumail Nanjiani hosted X-Files Files and that was another early TV recap one at least for me as a listener that I was like oh okay I definitely remember thinking like this could exist for The Simpsons as that was like currently in the back of my head though I'm sure I back then lacked the confidence to even give that a try Yeah, this was a very new kind of podcasting and I was looking and things obviously predate us but not by much I was looking at that Kumail Nanjiani X files files and I think is from late 2014 So everybody was arriving at this idea around the same time and of course 2014 so everybody was arriving at this idea around the same time and of course

Allie Gertz and Julia Prescott there everything's coming up Simpson's podcast. I think predates ours by just a few months I think maybe they were like March of 2015 and we were June of 2015 right right yes I think that's a good one to mention too I'm glad thanks for looking that up too because I was like I thought I Figured we were very close to each other in launching our pals, Ally and Julia. And it does feel like 2015 is when everyone started a podcast, of course we were doing stuff before that, but not this kind of thing, but Blank Check started in 2015,

and also The Doughboys started in 2015. So it was a real prime time for podcast production in terms of creating a new idea. Yeah, yeah. We so many, it has been crazy this year, seeing a lot turned 10 that we enjoy and have had sometimes guests on from that were, we all ended up in the same, like, oh, all of us in 2015 and we're all also, well, at least with the Doughboys, we're pretty much the same age as them too. That we hit that crossroads. Yeah, all people born in the early 80s, let's say.

So this is more about the history of Talking Simpsons, because we've revealed things here and there, but never like in one definitive location. So I just wanted to get it all out here. So 2013, I'm unemployed from 1UP.com. Start listening to the Saveed by the Bell podcast, Go Bayside. This is when I met Henry,

and this is when we were recording with our former network, and I noticed that we were basically all on the same page about The Simpsons. And it basically took us two years to talk ourselves into doing Talking Simpsons. Again, there was never one eureka moment. It was everybody kind of arriving at the idea of a Simpsons podcast at the same time.

But I feel like we should have been a lot more confident in the idea. Having done this for 10 years, we were just like, oh, does anybody want to hear this? It turns out yes. Yes. Well, I mean, also in our defense, we both were already doing podcasts

as like secondary jobs anyway, like non RetroNauts, or also the game. I was a games radar at the time was the name of the website. And in 2013, when I first met you and that like there was a podcast after hours there too, that was taking time. And but I had, I was a fan of Bob's from Brett Furnat's as a listener, and I knew that we had a similar Simpsons love that could unite us for sure. Yeah, and when riding back on the train from those podcast recordings with the old network,

we would be talking about the Simpsons constantly, referencing commentaries, so we were definitely on the same page. We found the right people to make this kind of thing happen. So when the show launched in June of 2015, I do want to note that it began as a Patreon exclusive series for the Laser Time Podcast Network, and people reacted so positively to this that we brought the second season and beyond to the general public. So we took

a tiny hiatus between the end of season one and the beginning of season two, it was less than a month. But since then, we've been bringing you the show without any real breaks. But we were still unsure about the idea, so we wanted to release it to people who already liked us. And then we realized like, oh, this is very popular. Now everybody can take part in this.

And that was the right thing to do. Yeah, I think too part of a confidence we earned over time, reflects in this, but we also thought like, oh, nobody likes the first season of Simpsons. I think that was another mistake we made of like, oh, is the first season even that fun to talk about? Maybe we should save the second season for like a little later after we get through the first one.

Yeah, there was that fear too. Will anybody want to rewatch these? These are largely jokes now and you know will anybody actually care? And it turns out we were able to reference the things people liked a little more on the show and it really found an audience. So that's 2015. By early 2017 Henry and I realized our games press careers were doomed once again at another failing digital media company And this is when we spun off talking Simpsons into its own patreon in of June of 2017 And then we went our separate ways from laser time around April of 2018

And I do want to note here that we're super proud of our old work and these episodes will always be made available We couldn't be doing what we're doing now without those initial steps. But I do have to note that also there is a contingent of people out there who are still very normal about that split, which is now almost 10 years old. And we prefer to focus on this second phase because of that. And thankfully we rarely see anyone like that in our audience. But it is weird when they do pop up amongst the people that we are usually assume are going to be friendly and welcoming to us. Yeah, yeah, it's never, that normalcy is,

it's always odd when it pops out, that those very normal people who occasionally show up and replies. But yeah, I mean, we're proud of it. I don't like how the Simpson shorts are less available than they could be, for example, to make a comparison to what we cover. So I feel the same way, like that I've,

we've always had them available. Like we've never took anything off the Patreon. It's still all available in the Libsyn feed. And people like, people I've seen the metrics, people like going back to the old ones and listens, or people, I see the metrics, people like going back to the old ones and listens, or I've seen people sign up to the podcast and they wanna start from the beginning, which I have that same feeling

sometimes when I find a new podcast, I wanna go back. Yeah, I understand it, but then as a host, I'm like, no, no, the new stuff, the new stuff. But I get it, I see people online, they're saying, oh, I'm up to 2019, and I think, no, but what am I doing now? Look at what I'm doing now, And yes, we learned on our feed. We had already been podcasting, but I feel like we've gotten so much better since then.

And the circumstances around the recordings of the podcasts have gotten better. We have a lot more time to do things. And yes, we are proud of that work and it will be always available. But yeah, like with anybody, you're never proud of the earliest stuff you did. Maybe there's like a little more crazy energy behind it,

but now you're like, well, we've developed the rhythm, we've developed a procedure to everything, and we give ourselves a lot more time to do the work. Yeah, I think a major change just was it became our full-time jobs, and like that is a huge difference too. Plus, like another thing that feels different, you mentioned early 2018, like that's when I got married

and like that, I do, sometimes I listen back to those and I was a real sad single man before that. And I think that I, and also was living a very, well you saw my old apartment, but Bob, that wasn't a great place I was living. I think I got in a better head space after that too. Yes, yes, and I mean, I was not in a great place personally when the show started.

Things gradually improved for me, but I'm sure my rotten attitude would often come through on those early podcasts, or just being a little nastier, a little more vulgar than I like to be, I think. Yeah, plus we are like a more sober podcast now too, comparatively. Yes. Just from not doing it at nighttime for one thing.

I mean, it's awesome. Yeah, not doing it at nighttime after doing a full-time job. I recommend it, I recommend it. Oh, you know, I remembered another fun thing that early on, why I felt this connection with you, and I think back at it as like another moment where it felt like people We could do a Simpsons thing together was I made a post about like me and you talk about I on Twitter

I had done a post saying me and you talk about the Simpsons like baseball nerds Talk about like the Simpsons writers like baseball nerds talk about their favorite lineups of like the Yankees or whatever. Yeah that's a good comparison because I don't get sports talk but I could talk about seasons and characters and episodes and favorite lines like like nobody's business. Yeah that when when people were hitting like on that that it was another of those moments like oh people people really care about that or they there are people who would like to hear us talk more about the Simpsons than just on like one retronauts about Simpsons video games perhaps. But yeah, we are in what I think is phase two of the podcast, the guest driven approach,

the approach where we're given ourselves a lot more time and resources to make the episodes and I prefer to focus on that. But again, phase one still vital to what we're doing and still be made available. And before we go any further, here's something from a guy who might have something to do with the show we're obsessed with. Hey, this is Bill Oakley and I wanna congratulate Talking Simpsons

on his 10th anniversary, which is incredibly impressive given that shows like The Office weren't even on for 10 years, Mary Tyler Moore only on for seven years. Now the Simpsons, it's gonna be hard to catch up to. You got about 25 more years to go. And it's quite possible that you can do it. You guys have the most professional podcast

that is not boring, that I've ever had the pleasure of listening to and appearing on. Thank you for having me all those times. Thank you for doing the Mission Hill segments you did. And again, congratulations. Presumably you have a lot more work cut out for you and I look forward to hearing it. Thank you so much, Bill.

Bill was a big early get for us, I have to say. We interviewed him back in I think 2017 and then in 2018 he did a live show with us in Portland and then he came back for two more. So Bill has been one of the friendliest people to work with in terms of a former Simpsons staff Yeah, Bill Bill ugly is the greatest. Thank thank you so much, Bill. That was so nice to hear and the compliment I think that was one of his early compliments to us when when that they gave that really I took the heart to of him saying how

prepared we were how we weren't asking the the questions he gets from lesser Simpsons fans. And wow, that sounded very... You know what? No, I'm going to stick by that. Yes, we are better Simpsons fans. Not the superior fans like us. Yeah, but yes, he was one of our first interviews. Definitely our first interview was somebody who had worked on the television show, The Simpsons, I believe.

I know from reaching out to future guests we had on saying we had Bill Oakley on, that gave us a legitimacy that I think really helped out a lot with too. Yeah, Bill has met us. He can vouch that we're not weird. We did not try to smell him or make him feel uncomfortable in any way. So I feel like that he can vouch for us. He can vouch for us to other Simpsons writers.

Yeah, that was so, and to see that Bill, when we first interviewed him, he was online and we found him online and he was being a funny guy, because he is, but he has since become like a professional food vlogger like that is his that's his he still does write for television but it feels like his food journey is like what his big deal is now and that's so cool to see. Yeah I mean Bill's had a lot of successes but it's great to see him branch out into this

new field and be very successful there as well. So please check out the Steamed Ham Society for more from Bill Oakley and his great food reviews. So we talk a lot about ourselves on this podcast network, but I figured we could give the audience a little bios of ourselves so they know who we are and where we've been. I mean, we're constantly telling stories about our past. And I guess you could play Internet Detective and piece together all the stories and build a profile yourselves on both of us.

But I would like us to let everyone know where we've come from, where we've been in our lives covering media. So Henry, who is Henry Gilbert? We're all asking this question. Man, this is a big question. Well, yeah, I was born in 1982 and was born in Arkansas. At age eight, around when The Simpsons started airing, that was also like my family moved to the Atlanta area.

Then a few years after that, moved to Florida when I was 10 or almost 11. I do think of those big moments in my life as those were so turbulent for me of moving that then The Simpsons was a steady thing. I could watch all my friends. I had to make friends twice over in elementary school, but the Simpsons was, I turned on the TV in Arkansas and watched the Simpsons, in Atlanta and watched the Simpsons, and in Florida and watched the Simpsons. And so that was a steady constant in my life for sure. And along with video games too. And that brought me into the games press. Like when I finally moved out and moved from Florida

to my first apartment in Berkeley, California with like just a meager savings ready to move out. And honestly, I was insane and stupid for doing that. But I'm so happy I did because I saw that a lot of video game websites were based there. And that I was like, I can write about video games, I could do that. And honestly, through frankly, illegal practices and exploitative practices, I was able to

become an intern to work for free two days a week at a website called Games Radar. And after 10 months of that, and I was one of the lucky ones, I got a barely livable wage job working there. That eventually worked up into full-time, but I loved podcasts the entire time. When that place finally had a podcast, I was pushing and pushing, like, let me be on, let me be on, please. I love podcasts. Over time, I grew as a podcaster. I feel like I couldn't stand to listen to my first podcast appearance now

I don't know but from like late 2008. I want to say it was even yeah. Yeah you I didn't start until Maybe late 2010 early 2011, but you've got like three years on me Well, they were they were very controlled appearances of just one segment, and I was still such a junior employee there, I think, too. It took me a little while to get really forthright with my opinions, though then eventually I became overly angry with my opinions at times. Ever since I first listened to a podcast which was probably the probably the Ricky Gervais podcast to be honest, I

Became a huge fan of them and was listening or it was maybe that or EGM live or one up yours like those Those very early video game podcasts like that was certainly a draw for me into to podcasting too And then that leads you to Talking Simpsons from there. Oh, yeah after you leave Games Radar. Yeah, so a games radar, you know things grow and change there and Different bosses come in above my boss like my boss's bosses kept changing and jerks There were making it much harder to work at the highest level and then they killed our after hours podcast at it, which I had become like a one of the regular hosts, co-hosts of.

And yeah, then the Games Radar folks were doing side podcasts, as you mentioned before, the Laser Time Network. That then just became kind of the full-time thing just as GamesRadar was contracting. It was this feeling of like, I love podcasts more than I also... 2014, I was in a very ... I mean, I felt like I was losing everything at the video game website I worked at that I cared about and also I felt like no fun games were coming out there Maybe if the Wii you had been a more fun system. I just stuck with it But hey that was the year of Dark Souls 2 but you didn't get any of Dark Souls until very later in life You know, maybe I just stuck with it if I instead I was like I gotta fucking play destiny the early destiny

Yuck, and that was our game of the year that year and I but Honestly, that was that was a just a generally rough time for me 2015 I get let go from Games Radar and then go all in on podcasting But you know they even with Talking Simpsons. I did feel a lack of like stability It's not Talking Simpsons as a side thing, until it became our full thing. I was still feeling a lack of stability with the other podcasts I was doing, but I always loved networking and meeting other podcasters.

Those were some of the people I wanted to work with more and more. Then as me and you were working more on Talking Simpsons. Yeah, I loved how at the same time right as we were launching the the Patreon like literally I went on the the first date with my future husband as like he we we had talked in and hung out some before but when we went on our legitimate first date well he asked me out on it, and I had to tell him, boy, this month is really crazy for me, because I'm launching, me and Bob are launching the Patreon, so maybe in July it can happen.

So that's July 2018 was when we had our first real date. Yeah, that was a crazy, that was a very crazy month, getting all the ducks in a row to launch the, quitting our jobs together, and then getting so much stuff ready for the launch of that Patreon. And yeah, I mean, I, I grew up watching the Simpsons too with my, like so many friends and just talking with them all the time. And I do think like that's why I love doing the podcast because it is, it, it's, I love

talking about the Simpsons with friends and to get deep into it both with you Bob, my best pal, and also like any guest that we can all unite over a similar love of the Simpsons. And though also you don't have to be a white man in your 40s, we've had on guests who aren't and we've had a good time to them too. That's the benefit of a guest-driven approach.

It's not just white guys born around the same time in America. We can get a few other perspectives. Oh yeah, that, hey, that lets it differentiate even more. We've talked to white guys in their 40s who are from Ireland or England, yeah. It counts, it counts. Well, yeah, I could talk about myself briefly

because there's a lot of things that I did in my career that aren't just available anymore, so I wanted to make people aware of them just in case they don't know these things about me. And this is the one self-indulgent place to do it. So yeah, like Henry, growing up with the Simpsons, my friends always loved the Simpsons. I was there from the first episode onwards,

and my child life happens, and my adult life begins. I almost immediately start covering media. So in early 2001, I started reviewing anime on DVD for a website called the Jacksonville Film Journal. I live nowhere near Jacksonville, Florida, I want to say. But they needed people to review anime, they were getting boxes and boxes sent to them. They're like, we don't know what to do with this. And that was during the anime boom and I was there. And I did that for about three to four years. And really up until podcasting, my career mostly involved

writing. So I wrote an original comedy article twice a week for my college paper. I used that to get my foot in the door at Something Awful. And I wrote two articles every month for over 13 years. So I did a ton of comedy writing for close to 15 years. And that was like one phase of my adult life and a bit of that overlap with podcasting You're you're something awful stuff is so funny people should should look it up. I because I think a Couple years or so into knowing you like I would be reminded for some reason I'd come across an old something awful Piece I had read of yours and then I'd see your name

on the byline and I realized like, oh, Bob is the one who wrote like the, the detective who just had a stroke, I think is the one. Well, now that's the punchline. Metaphor Detective, I think, is what you're thinking of, yes. Yes, yeah, sorry, but that's one of my all time favorites. I love that.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking about putting together my favorite articles into a book because I've written over 300 of them and there's really enough to fill a book. But even just editing a book of existing material is a ton of work. So maybe that'll be a Kickstarter at some point. We'll see about that. When I was in graduate school, my freelance writing career started taking off. So that became a huge focus for me. I did a ton of freelancing for my favorite website, oneup.com. And after a few moves out west in a brief stint in game development, I worked as a localizer. I was hired to work full-time for OneUp in 2011.

And then while this OneUp stuff was happening, I did start my own friends goofing around podcast in either late 2010 or early 2011. That was just a fun thing for me to do to get my feet wet. I'm sure 20 people heard it. If you're one of those, please say hi. I don't even know where those episodes are anymore. But when I met OneUp, my new position gives me the chance, a huge chance, to host RetroNauts. So the former host and now current co-host Jeremy Parrish wanted to focus on other projects. And he essentially

handed me the keys to RetroNauts. And it was this huge new sandbox with an established audience for me to play around in. And I would and it was this huge new sandbox with an established audience for me to play around in and I would not be doing this today if not for that opportunity that Jeremy gave me. I mean I could have crashed and burned spectacularly but luckily I had a little bit of experience with podcasting and I went into RetroNauts as a RetroNauts fan so I think I was ready and I do stand by those early podcasts but now I am entering my my 15th year of podcasting in general But one up comm again shut down in February of 2013 I am laid off. I am kickstarting retronauts and

I am listening to podcasts on laser time and I hear this guy Henry Gilbert. I'm like he sounds funny What's he up to and I go on that podcast to promote the Kickstarter, to promote the new season of RetroNauts, and that's how we all join forces. And the rest is podcast history. And I will say, a large part of my early podcasting career is not getting paid. And I say this not out of resentment,

but as a cautionary tale, because when we kickstarted RetroNauts, yes, we kickstarted it for $40,000, but I think we each paid ourselves $500 for a year's worth of work. That was a big mistake. And I want to say that I did the first two years of Talking Simpsons at my expense because the podcasting studio was in a different city and I was not getting paid to be on the show so taking over you know some ownership of the show and also getting the patreon was a huge

step in the right direction and I'm very happy that I put in that work initially but I will say if you could help it don't do that do not do that because your passion might kill you and those are some hairy times doing two podcasts on top of a full time job for, uh, not a lot of incentive monetarily. Yeah. The, when we were, uh, I mean, the losing money definitely was felt when we were taking the train ride back to Berkeley from San Francisco and we're like, oh,

yeah, this was like, you know, a $10 train rides to do a podcast for free, which, you know, it does, it can start to sting a little bit, which is why eventually we were able to make it into something that was making money for us. Like I feel it does. It did really help that Patreon came into like, like real popularity in starting in 2015 or so, but really by 2017 it was more people were jumping on like when we did too.

Oh, for sure. It's now like the definitive way to give people your content, to charge people for it. And I could not be happier with it. I could not see anything replacing it. And I'm so grateful that it exists because I've done a Kickstarter and Kickstarters are great, but there is a period of interest. And when that period ends You are left to your own devices to manage a giant pile of money and that can be difficult

What's not difficult is having steady reliable income coming in every month. You can decide here's how we pay editors Here's how we buy new equipment. Here's how we pay ourselves We have an understanding of like what our revenue is. It's not just a giant lump sum And Bob, you know when you've got on RetroNauts, I was curious too, like as a writer, you already were very skilled at doing research. Like you're cited on a ton of Wikipedia is just for some of even your earliest, like pre working at one up articles, like as in like, you know, on on certain wikis. But did did starting on RetroNauts help you grow a lot as a researcher

because it certainly did for me well before we did Talking Simpsons too. Actually I will say that graduate school was a massive waste of my life although I am happy for the sense of stick-to-itiveness it gave me me the sense of putting up with a lot of research. I learned so many of my research skills through graduate school. You don't need to go to graduate school to get those skills, obviously, but my focus was in research. That's when they start being real sticklers about, what are you citing? Is this a valid source, et cetera, et cetera.

I really credit that experience with giving me a sense of just how, where to get started, what to trust, what to distrust, and how to build like a dissection of something via research. Oh, that's, I had to do a lot of catching up from that because I really was just a, I learned it on the mean streets. No, but I'm a community college dropout and so I had to, it took me long, it felt like a while to really learn. Like when I started writing features

for video game websites that I think I grew as a researcher then. I forgot to mention for a brief time, I did do a comic book podcast too. And when I worked on that, I gave myself like the job of the first segment, and it was, talk about more free work, a first segment, so it's like a history on a certain superhero, but that did teach me

how to research and then build that research into like a history story that can be like told out loud. Like that really helped me. Yeah, I should say that I do value that college experience undergrad and graduate school. And graduate school did give me a place to hide for two years while the economy was imploding. So I am grateful for that. But yeah, I really value those skills

and I love research so much. Probably as a result of just being taught how to do it properly and being able to have the professor say, I'm a very good boy when I do the right job. That always feels great. Yes. But yes, you know, I will say we've talked enough about ourselves for now. So let's hear someone else talk about us.

Next up on Choppo Trap House. Choppo Trap House is set up to wish Bob and Henry of the Talking Simpsons podcast a happy 10th anniversary on their show, but only one person can make them do it. A little sissy producer who's too scared to come forward. We gotta give a shout out to Bob and Henry, Chris. But I'm so scared, Menacher Garnigal. You gotta do this one for Bob and Henry. And me, Menacher Garnigal.

Okay, for you, Menacher Garnigal. Okay, for you, Menacher Garnagel. Well, Menacher Garnagel, Chris is dead. Bob and Henry slit his throat from ear to ear. Hey, I'm recording a podcast here. Happy 10th anniversary, boys. Thank you guys, love your show. So thanks to Will, Menacher Garnagel, Chris Wade, and Felix Biedermerman of Chappo Trap House.

Some of our big early guests were from that podcast and they've been nothing but extremely kind to us and have appeared on our show several times and have brought so much to our show. And phase two of Talking Simpsons, the guest-driven approach, almost like immediately kicked off with a big guest, the two big guests from Chappo Trap House. So I'm very grateful to them for calling attention to our show via their appearance. Yes, that was so big for us. Thank you so much, Will, Chris and Felix for that.

That was an amazing, amazing reenactment of the McGarnegal scene. And yeah, Bob, you're so right that that was, as we were going through big changes. Like again, I was going on my, I had just gotten married. I was going on my honeymoon that week and we were going through such big changes. And then we like you, you reached out, you reached out to, to our guests and, and, and to have like Matt Christman, like he, he is one of the nicest people in the world too. All the Choppo guys are so nice

for being some of the biggest podcasters around. Just look at their Patreon. They are such nice guys. They're super humble. Matt and Chris coming out to do SketchFest with us, asking for nothing, giving us everything. They've been so kind. That's the nicest, nicest guy. I always love podcasting with them. They're also like, get this guys, they're great at podcasting and know how to be funny and joke around and come up with funny things to say. Yes, often I am very intimidated when some guests are on.

I try not to let it show because I'm just thinking, they're so footy, I wanna be footy too. But definitely when there is a Will Menacher on the show or a Chris Wade or Matt Chrisman I'm like I need to get my funny bone in working order Yeah, I I often like wanna especially if with any choppo guest I probably over researched like man our first time with Matt Chrisman on When it was two bad, to talk about,

I was like, I can't get one thing wrong about a real person from political history because just on, with no preparation, Matt Crispman will know exactly who I'm talking about and that's why I can't get it wrong. It pushed me, stuff like that pushed me to be better too. Yes. And yes, please check out Chapo Trap House. They're great. Very nice to us. And they have a great podcast, which is now more important than ever as politically things are weird. And that's all I'll say. Things are very strange right now. You know,

it was an early another thing that I think deepened me and your friendship during 2016 which is the year that will never end but that in 2016 me and you were both like early-ish converts to Chapo Trap House like we were both listeners before pre-election day listeners of Chapo and we usually would be at that office we hated we would be going like oh did you listen to this week's or I'd'd say like, oh yeah, this is the thing Will said on this episode and it's so right, or Matt said this or whatever. Yeah, we were listening back in the Matt Christman

tin can era of Chapo Trap House. Right, yeah. But we've all grown since then, so thanks guys for giving us that little message for our show. And before we go on any further, I really wanted to stop and just survey the vast amount of content We've produced because we're always moving so fast We're always moving on to the next thing scheduling things once we put something behind us

We have to flush the information out of our brains and move on to the next project So I want to just gander at the vast landscape of media we've created in the past decade So I have counted up things as best I can and I do have a big number for everybody. So this is an approximate number, I'm not gonna say it's dead on, but I think it's right within, maybe it could be off by 10 either way.

So thankfully it is easy to figure out the number for Talking Simpsons because you just add the current episode number with the episode number that we've revisited up through season five, that's all you have to do. So not counting live shows or episodes of Talk to the Audience, so far there are 425 main episodes of Talking Simpsons. So nearly 500. Wow, wow, wow, man. And then, and Talk to the Audience, like that became part of our weekly or each month schedule like years ago too, so man, yeah,

we're easily over 500 just releases on the free feed for Talking Simpsons, but for 425 regular episodes, dang. So that is just Talking Simpsons. And in terms of Patreon stuff, by the way, if you're not on the Patreon, it's patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, because right there we have 212 miniseries episodes and 80 episodes of

What a Cartoon Movie. So that is 292 podcasts when we put all of those together. So we're still adding up. The adding has not ended quite yet. And then I almost forgot about this because there are so many things to add but there's the vanilla What a Cartoon, not What a Cartoon Movie, our now monthly podcast What a Cartoon. And there are 228 episodes of that and I want to thank the patron Freddison for putting together a very comprehensive spreadsheet that allowed me to count up all of these So if you add up all these numbers and you add in the 93 episodes of talk to the audience and you should We are sitting at approximately

1038 podcasts that we've released over the past decade. And I can't believe that either. I just thought maybe 800, definitely more than 500, but no, it is over 1,000 podcasts. Wow, we passed 1,000 like just a few months ago, I would guess that then means like that's wow. And those are, I would bet on average two and a half hours long just because of the movies moving up the average, I would think.

Yeah, I mean it is up to someone else. I will gladly enlist someone else to figure out how many hours and days and weeks that is if you add up all of those podcasts. But it's over 1,000 in terms of just the number of podcasts. Wow, man, that really does put it into perspective just how much we've done. Yeah, and that the vanilla just regular what a cartoon to also to think that man that we used to do

What a cartoon weekly which we we did love doing but man that's a lot like you you guys hear how much research we put into The whole yes, there's a reason why they are three hours long today, and they were an hour and 20 minutes eight years ago Yes, yeah, that's true. But hey, math is boring. Instead of talking about math, let's hear a nice message from an old pal. This is Maddie O'Duts-Rasbury wishing Talking Simpsons a happy 10th anniversary. I've been a fan since nearly the beginning and it's great to see all your hard work bring you continued success.

I'm also super grateful to you guys because I literally wouldn't be where I am today without your support. I met you guys at the first live show in 2018 when I was just at art school and I was super nervous but offered to do art if you needed it and you took me up on it. I also made a Twitter account and started sharing my art because of this

and through your support, I've gained both job opportunities and a strong following for my artwork. So both as a fan and a friend, I'm just really glad to see Talking Simpsons continue to do so well. You guys are so kind and thoughtful and funny, and I look forward to listening for many more years to come.

I just think you're neat. Thank you so much, Maddie. In case you guys don't know Maddie, she's been on the show a few times, and she's also responsible for a lot of our Podcast frames that we use for the miniseries everything except for Talking Simpsons Talking Futurama talking to the hill blab about Batman talking Mission Hill and what a cartoon all of those podcasts Art frames the for the cover art. Those are all done by Maddie and she did some of our Art for the tears of our Patreon.

That was so, man, I almost have a tear in my eye here from talking about tears. We're gonna be crying by the end of this podcast. That was so nice. I, yeah, thank you so much, Maddie. That meeting her at our first live show, you know, that whole day was a blur, like that first live show. Like it was just so many nerves. Like I get nervous every live show, but I like that first live show. It was just so many nerves.

I get nervous every live show, but I also love every live show. But to then in the afterglow of it, a million things are happening, but I always remember meeting Maddie there and seeing her art for the first time. To see her get so much deserved acclaim for her artwork and all that she's done. Even if you've never heard her on our podcast, like you've seen at least like five of her, if you use social media, you've seen at least five

of her comics because they become that popular and they're so funny and easy to share. It's been also great to see the rise of Maddie over the past seven plus years since we've known her Until she got more followers than us. Yes No, no, she her comics are great. She's done great works for merchandising companies as well She's she's been retweeted by Kojima multiple times. Yes ever happened to me She's become a super twitch streamer too of like playing the games like yeah

I I think I was just occasionally like she has entered now the Simpsons brain rot in my brain of like we I see things in life and it reminds me of one of her jokes like I I was just at a place where they were cosplayers dressed as Tifa from Final Fantasy in seven and Tifa's wearing her cowboy hat and in Seven and Tifa's wearing her cowboy hat. And I thought of her hilarious comic she did of it's Cloud and Tifa in bed together reenacting that meme of like, what's he thinking about? He's probably thinking about other women.

And he's thinking, why doesn't Tifa wear a cowboy hat anymore? So yes, thank you, Maddie, for sending in your message. We really appreciate everything you've done for us over the years. It's great to see your comics. It's great to see Maddie thrive. But I want to move on to talk about the rise of Talking Simpsons.

And in this section, I want to talk about everything we've learned about podcasting over the past decade and the ways that we've guided this network since the very beginning. So I'll say that, and I'll be repeating some things we've said earlier because I wrote these notes before we had this conversation, so some of this might be repeated. But before we spun this off into its own Patreon, we were kind of a mess. And by that, I mean as a podcast and personally, we were kind of a mess. And that made things not ideal in terms of what you want out of a podcast. I mean, Henry, you've talked about what was going on in your life, but for my own life,

I was working unsatisfying, stressful, unrewarding jobs that also weren't stable. So I was getting nothing out of that, worrying about my future, living in the Bay Area, it being very expensive. So Talking Simpsons and Retronauts were two things I was doing on top of a regular day job. So I was not operating at peak performance. And I'm sure you'll agree with me, Henry, when you look back at that time, you think, how? How did we do any of this? It's impossible to think, I'm so tired after one recording now that I can't imagine, okay,

work a full day job, go to another city, record two podcasts, then go home, wake up, go back to your full-time job again. I can't understand how we were able to function. We weren't even in our 20s. Yes, yeah, that actually is even crazier when you mentioned that you remind me of like, yeah, we were in our early 30s, basically early to mid 30s. It was, oh man, it was such a hard time because the workaholism like or just overwork, I shouldn't use a cute term like workaholism.

It was overwork and we were doing too much. Like I think that was something too probably that made us Chappo fans or just in general more to the left of just feeling like, why am I working so fucking hard all the time for nothing? To be paid shit and then to likely be laid off soon enough. It was insane. Yeah. We don't want to bog this podcast down with negativity, but when we were at Fandom, I thought, well, I tricked myself into believing this could be a stable digital media job And now I finally realized like oh there is no stable media job

And we've seen how that played out over the last eight years Everything is disappearing everything is shrinking and I realized then I need something to hold on to And retronauts was great, but I needed something with a larger audience, something with more mainstream appeal. And I love doing RetroNauts, but I realized that the audiences are different for a retro gaming podcast and for a Simpsons podcast. 100%. I mean, moving away from having less engagement in the video game space, I think helped my mental health as well to a degree.

And I still love video games, so I actually did need to go through kind of a cleanse of video games. It was like I spent two or three years playing less video games until I worked back up to close to my old level. But it was like the one expectation as a games reviewer just was, or as somebody who reviews games in addition to your other job is like, well, that's what you do at nighttime, like, or weekends. Your weekends are, and isn't it a treat? You just got an early release of this major video game.

You're gonna play it all weekend and beat it, and once you then post a review about it, you're only gonna get negative comments for it the entire day. That ruins your entire day then, too. Yeah, it was a lot of working on the weekends and we pointed this out before yes boohoo we had to play a video game all weekend but that means you can't do anything else that is just your life and it does get old it is exciting at first I'll say. Yeah no I don't think I'd have had the the mental ability or free time to start dating like I would have made an excuse to not go on a first date with my husband if I was still at fandom, which was like, that was the lowest of the low.

We've mentioned this a lot of times too to each other, just like one reason we are unemployable at a game website, were those two even exist at all anymore, but let's say two years ago, was that we've been around enough to be like, well, one, we know what we're worth and you're not going to pay it. And two, we can't be tricked. We were tricked enough times, fool us, fool us four more times. Shame on us. We're not getting fooled again. Yeah. And to be kind of confessional here, like I said earlier, I was like Homer, I forgot to ask for money. That was my status with a lot of projects.

And with Retronauts, it was the same way too, where we were kind of giving everything away for $3. We were like, oh, exclusive podcast, that's kind of tacky, isn't it? We've since changed and we've since made a lot more with the standard model of podcasting, but it was having the confidence to say, I made something, but you need to pay me first

to listen to it Yeah, yeah to to find worth in your stuff to I it helped it helped a lot Like that's where guys like, you know, the choppo setting up there them setting a standard of you know An exclusive podcast every week and that's what you give them five dollars for each month. It's like, oh that sounds like a great deal I get double of the podcast I really enjoy. That's a great format to start from. But back to your original point you've made, Bob, is like, yeah, I can't believe that in between all of those hours of doing all those other things, for a video game job that included like, you got to write probably two features or articles a week,

and then you probably have at least one or two reviews that month that have to be played and written about afterwards. I guess one thing we're lucky is that back then, we weren't as expected to capture our own video as we would be later. They could have found other things for us to do, definitely, but yeah, we talked about it, but do want to underline that we were some of us were drinking during those podcasts because we were just Beat and we were self-medicating and there would be drinking during the podcast

They'll be drinking after the podcast because you just want to obliterate Whatever a sadness and tiredness is operating in your mind. And now this is a sober podcast I still drink for fun, but now my buddies are my black coffee and my big thermos of water. Yeah, no, and I think the podcast is as more fun now than when we were drinking regularly. I definitely think we don't have to, and yeah, you're right, self-medicating is like, well, it's nine o'clock, I've had a long day, I at least need to loosen up, but it doesn't also too if it's like a chemical Reaction, you're get so used to it's like well, it's not loosening you up anymore. It's just a thing

You're doing it just becomes a routine and then it stops being fun So yes sober podcasting and then occasionally like we have not recorded in person in almost two years But when there is a reunion we'll often often have a white claw with our recording, and if Nina's there, it's kind of like a party, we're loosening up, we're having fun, but for the most part, this is not our vibe anymore, the whole drinking and drink podcast, and I'm not sure if that still is the standard for podcasts.

It was what everybody did on a podcast. It's like you're on a podcast, what do you do? You drink and you eat weird candy, and that's the end of the story. You burp into the microphone, it's a podcast. That's true, it was like what, I mean, you know, we both were fan, you mentioned 1UP, like we both were fans of like 1UP Yours

and the other ones, and they were after work podcasts of guys having fun drinking, or their E3 ones, which would be a lot of fun, it would be like, you would hear, oh, somebody, you'd hear somebody open another beer, like you would hear, oh somebody, you'd hear somebody open another beer. Like you would hear, if you didn't hear a tab being pushed in on a carbonated drink, it wouldn't sound like a podcast back then.

A lot of clinky glasses. Oh yes, yeah, you could tell like, oh this one's the beer drinker, this one's the clinky glass, the guy who actually like mixed a drink or was drinking like, I guess just straight whiskey sometime So if I can be critical here I think a big problem in our early years was that we were so used to this incredibly hectic work schedule

That we didn't think to take advantage of self-employment to stop spreading ourselves so thin So even when we became self-employed we were just trained to work the same hours Which is why for the first few years, we were taking no weeks off. We were doing talk to the audience on top of that, Weeks Talking Simpsons, and we were also doing What a Cartoon is a weekly podcast, and What a Cartoon Movie on top of that weekly podcast.

So again, I'm not sure how we did it, but I think sometimes there were three or four podcasts a week on our network. We were the ones doing everything, including the editing too and all the posting and everything. Yeah. You know, that, that was also like early Patreon format too, back then I think was like if it was a lot more like goals based stuff, which was that feels, I guess I still occasionally see Patreons that have like, if we get to this much a month,

we do that, but that feels like such the old like Kickstarter way of thinking, you know? Yeah, and then what happens when it dips under that amount? Do you just take everything away? It's just such a, it's a weird old way of doing things, and we have moved on from that for sure. And, but we had had the promise of, cause we wanted to do a lot of cartoon,

but we're like, well, if we hit this amount, we'll do it. And we, yeah, we did like doing it, but we didn't want to adjust the schedule in any way or change things. So we're like, well, no, it'll just be another weekly podcast we do all of the time. And we'll just have more hours, they'll just exist. And now over the years, we have windowed down the schedule.

Nobody's complaining. If anything, people are like, I still have to catch up because even though we're not doing four episodes of What a Cartoon a month, we're releasing one three-hour episode that's still a lot to get through and that does not include What a Cartoon movie which is a six-hour podcast. So we're like choosing which jars to dump our energy juices in very effectively here. And we have also learned to delegate responsibilities. And I have to point out that, again, in these early years, we were doing all the editing ourselves.

And usually editing takes, basically, if a podcast is two hours long, editing will take four hours. That's kind of how it works out, if you're doing the correct way to edit. And now we have editors, and I will let everyone know out there, they are the secret saviors of the Talking Simpsons Network. All of our editors out there, we do talk to the audience

still because we need to have a quick turnaround on that. We don't want to burn in anyone with edit this today please. It needs to go live at nine. But Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon and all the mini series and What a Cartoon movie, those are taken care of by editors that we trust and we've given them guidelines and they never ever let us down. And I keep saying this, I don't know how we did it. I don't know how we edited

What a Cartoon Movie and kept a normal schedule. I think it's because we didn't keep a normal schedule, at least personally. Yes. Yeah. I mean, we just kept sacrificing ourselves for it and our free time, which also affected our loved ones too. And like that we, we, and very understanding loved ones as well. But like, I mean, I can recall telling my husband like, well, no, we can't like go to this thing tonight. I need to finish editing this thing.

And I, I insisted upon it on myself, I think a bit. And it took, it took, I'm also very bad at personally, I just speaking for myself, Bob, I think is better at delegating than me. I am poor at delegating and I think I've worked hard at letting go and especially when there are so many great editors out there like the ones we have. And there's a part, there's like a transition in your life I feel where you stop wanting to prove like, look how hard I can work. I can work for so long. And then once your work starts to suffer, you're like, oh, actually putting out good work is more valuable than proving to everyone

what a brave, strong content warrior I am. Yes, I know. I feel like I have earned enough badges of like proof that I could do everything myself, daddy, and I'll show you. Like I've proven, I've given my, I need to let myself know that there's good enough for that as well as, like you know, I think this is just echoing a thing

we talked about when we started it, it's like that, you know, we can hire a professional to do editing for us, we can't hire a professional contractor to be a host of the show, to, like, that can't be done. People would notice that. Yes, so spend the money on things that give yourself more hours, and as well, like, thanks, our Patreon.

We make enough money that we can invest back into the business in that way, too. Like, it is, thinking more like a small business owner, honestly, I think helped a little bit there. And it's hard because when you're running a business like this, especially when it has to do with entertainment, it's always kind of encroaching on your life where, oh, this could be homework, this could be a podcast,

and then it kind of takes things over. So it's important to draw a line between, this is my personal life, and that's where the podcast begins. And then, you know, often I will give myself a hard time, like, oh, I didn't do enough this week, or, oh, I should have spent longer on this. I will just go back and think, think of all the weekends.

Think of all of the late nights, and think of all the time that you already invested into a professional career. You've already paid your dues, it's fine. Just chill out Bob. Yeah, telling yourself to chill out is a good tip for everybody there. I think you know another thing, part of I look back on our transition of work styles. I think it went from being like we worked, we talked ourselves into working super hard at places that we thought had a future, which either in my case was eventually like the whole thing just turned into like the Brits took over honestly is what happened to Games Radar. Like you if you still happen to go to that website now,

you look at the masthead, this is no judgment on the people who work there. I don't even know any of them anymore, honestly, or maybe one or two people. But just they took it more under the British umbrella, like the Brits took over and they didn't want Americans anymore. But, you know, I honestly, I count myself lucky I didn't go through what you did of the multiple layoffs at multiple different companies as well.

Like I at least had like a horrible prison that was steady. Yeah, I mean, I, so there were tons of layoffs when I was at 1UP, and by the time 1UP was shut down, there were four people. But in the 20 months I worked within IGN Space at 1UP, I just saw wave after wave after wave of layoffs. So I knew I could never relax. I knew, well, there is no future in this.

I need to have fun while I can. And that's why I just was really silly with Retronauts. And I just tried to do every crazy idea I could because it just felt like every digital media place I went to, my days were numbered the second I got in the door. And I think once we got our own business, then it became my thinking was a little like, well, if I put 80 hours a week into that job now I can do the same But it's at least something I own so I'm like investing back into it You know and I think then eventually I've been slowly a lot with Bob's help and suggestions

To pushing that 80 like scaling back in 80 hour work week until as close to 40 We're getting close to 40. I wouldn't I don't know if I'd call it the under 40 work week until it's close to 40. We're getting close to 40. I don't know if I'd call it the under 40 work week. Some weeks are under 40. I think I try to hit 40. I don't clock in and clock out. Henry's not seeing my time card or whatever. We have a question later asking how long it takes to make an episode, but I feel like I usually work from about eight to four every day. Sometimes if it's a lighter week, I can take kind of like a half day to do other stuff. But these are like normal hours for me at least.

I feel like I treat it like a job and I keep regular hours and I can be more productive that way. And yes, I don't wanna just start thanking everyone because I feel like so many people have helped us. There's so many people involved that we're going to forget people Just because of just the sheer amount the sheer number of them. So we've we mentioned Maddie cop I also have to mention Nina Matsumoto. So Maddie she was responsible for our covers for our miniseries and some of our art

But Nina she is responsible for our key art and our posters and she was nice enough to marry me She entered that top tier on the patreon when it was available for a limited time, and she was able to marry me. So thank you so much, Nina. Yes, thank you, Nina. Man, I always forget where it like first started, where I first met her, but well, I know, I remember the first time I met her

when she came to the Bay Area, and we all hung out that night. But just her art, she gave us art, she did official art for us so early in our time. I didn't realize what a special treat it was for us to be. It was an honor to get that artwork for us. Nina's artwork as well as Maddie's, it gives us so, it added to our sense of like, legitimacy as Simpsons podcasters for sure. It was a great, her artwork was a great calling card to get our foot in the door, to get people to trust us

because you can have a Simpsons podcast, but if your art looks like the Simpsonize Me kind of website AI thing, whatever does it these days, people are gonna be like, well anybody could do this, but if they of website AI thing, whatever does it these days. People are going to be like, well, anybody could do this. But if they see Nina's art, they're going to say, okay, this looks like a Simpsons artist drew it because the Simpsons artist did draw it. Nina worked for Bongo Comics for a number of years.

So she was instrumental in just allowing us to sell ourselves as like this is, we are striving to be the definitive podcast of the Simpsons, even though we're not official. And then every time we've had on a guest who that she's done, you know, the official art for our live show or some of our crossover episodes, every guest is like, oh my God, like I, this is the great,

like they love it so much to be drawn as a true Simpsons character. Like you look like you are a Simpsons character in like season seven of the show. You look like a real Simpsons character. Like you look like you are a Simpsons character in like season seven of the show. You look like a real Simpsons character. It's so perfect. And everybody please check out the Patreon at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

Number one to sign up because you gotta do that. There's great stuff there. But also, if all goes according to plan, Nina's new art will go live as this episode does and she's aged us appropriately from our original designs. So there's been two art over just appropriately from our original designs. So there's been two art overhauls since our original artwork in 2017. There was a 2022 refresh and now there is a 2025 refresh where Henry has a beard now,

I have eye bags to signify my aging face, and there's some more props on the table. So as we get older, the art will continue to change, unlike the Simpsons who are immortal. I really appreciate all the work Nina put into drawing my beard and yes, and my hair as well. Like and also the fashion, like every time Nina draws us both in for a new one, like she, you can see how good she is at just noticing details in people's lives of like, oh, that is a jacket I wear all the time. Or when we did the podcast, the ride about the Simpsons ride,

and drew me, like I remember like, oh, that is the CM Punk shirt I was wearing all the time then. Yes, there's a lot of great details, a lot of Easter eggs in those drawings. So check them out. The new art will be online when this episode goes live. But before we talk any more about ourselves,

let's once again have someone else do that. Henry and Bob, hello. This is Will Sloan, several-time guest on the show. I'm calling in to congratulate you on 10 years of Talking Simpsons. If history is any precedent, 10 years is the point at which your podcast is going to take a dramatic dip in quality

before continuing in a sort of zombie state for another 30 years. Sorry if everyone calling in has already made that joke. I apologize. Bit of low-hanging fruit there. Anyway, because I feel a level of trust with you guys and because this is your special 10th anniversary and I feel you are owed something a little more than the run of the mill boilerplate, I'm gonna give you a confession. I'm gonna tell you something slightly embarrassing about me

that I don't think I've told anyone, which is I grew up feeling really sad for Herman of Herman's military antiques from the classic episode Bart the General. Every time I would see him in the opening credits, and the opening credits have him very prominently, they seem to bank on him becoming a major character, I would feel sad that he didn't become a major character.

And I would feel sad that he didn't become a major character and I would feel sad about the vague air of failure Surrounding Herman, you know, he never quite worked out He livens up every crowd scene that he's in as far as I'm concerned. I love his his minor appearances here and there But it's too bad because I liked him. It's nice to feel yourself represented on TV Anyway, embarrassing confession over happy anniversary boys Sorry, this is a bit late Shouldn't have stopped for that haircut

Thank you so much Will Sloan from Michael and us and yes Some revealing some dark secrets and that he feels sympathy for Herman as being put up there as one of the major characters in the opening and that he feels sympathy for Herman as being put up there as one of the major characters in the opening. And that opening persisted for like 19 seasons. Jacques is there. Maybe Dr. Marvin Monroe is there. I forget.

But there's a lot of season one losers that never really materialized into anything major. And in Bleedingham's Murphy, he's there too. Yeah. No, at first I thought that's, thank you you Will, that at first I thought he was saying his childhood self felt sorry for him because of his injury, or that however he lost his arm. But no, it was that he was supposed to be as important, he was on equal level, honestly more lines

than Seymour Skinner in season one. And then goes on to be like, in later of the classic era, he becomes the guy who does things that are too evil for Snake to do and then he just kind of goes away. Yeah, Snake or Moe, it's like we don't want to tarnish Moe with this activity. Yeah, we can't reenact certain scenes from Pulp Fiction with Moe, but we can do it with Herman, he can do it.

So thank you to Will. Moving on through the rise of Talking Simpsons, I we can do it with her, man. He can do it. So thank you to Will. Moving on through the rise of Talking Simpsons, I did want to mention live shows. So they're obviously on hold for the time being. And we were thinking about having a 10th anniversary live show, but again, things are weird now. I know that I am not really at risk when it comes to crossing the US border, but I also don't want

to endorse crossing the US border if you can help it, and that's really the main reason why I don't want to come to America right now. I am in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Canada, and that is the main reason. Again, yes, I know a white guy, straight guy with some spicy tweets, but that's about it. But again, I don't want to say, going to America is great. You should do it. In fact, come to my live show for it. Yes, yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, we had talked about it,

you know, even a year ago, we were saying like, oh, and then, you know, I think it was maybe the first time, the topic of it being our 10th anniversary year came up and we had done live shows, but yeah, it is like the crossing the border aspect, also just like America sucks. So America stinks, to quote Lisa. And yeah,

it's a terrible. Cesspool, cesspool, cesspool. It is a terrible time to like come to this place. Like I think we've had like we've had the rare international visitor as well at a US show. Like that's hardly what really happens for us. But just think of anybody, like, I would literally not tell anybody, like, to for real risk your safety to enter and then try to leave America again on either side. Like, it is, I hate to say it is a real risk.

I don't feel like it is being hyperbolic or worrying too much, so yeah. Yeah, and this is really putting this podcast directly in a certain timeframe, and I hope that changes. but I didn't go to Midwest gaming classic for the same reason I'm probably not going to go to Portland Retro gaming expo this fall for the same reasons I hope things improve they seem to be not improving at a spectacular rate So really hoping that changes for the sake of everybody not just for the sake of future live shows I want to make that clear

But I do want to say that these live shows were a huge part of letting us know that we weren't just doing our own little nerdy thing that no one was paying attention to. So we mentioned this, or Maddie mentioned this in her message, but our second live show in January of 2018 at the now defunct piano fight in SF, that was a huge factor in me wanting to do this

for the rest of my life. Because we had that first show, and yes, Dana Gould was on it, but it was kind of weird. He was super nice, great stories. But we did it in a science museum with horrible acoustics. I don't think they ever did that again and I appreciate the invite. It was a nice first show to do, but it wasn't until that piano fight show in a proper venue that I thought like, oh my God, the room is full of people and they're here for me and they're laughing.

And that was just such an important moment. And then we met Maddie. She became a great friend. She did so much great work for our podcast. We've hung out with her a number of times. It was just, that was so fundamental to us realizing what we had, I think. For sure. I, uh, that sketch fest also a very good friends of our podcast.

We, you know, me and you had gone to many SketchFest things both separately and even together a few times. We went to some SketchFest shows over our years. It was some of my favorite times of the year in San Francisco. And to get to be part of SketchFest for several years in a row, but that first time was such an honor. And then yes, they gave us such a nice treat of so early. Like we had booked that one live show that was our first proper one. But and then they invited us to like, Hey, do you want to do a podcast live at the Science Museum thing? We even can get Dana Gould. He's going to be there to do stand up in a room with horrible acoustics as well.

And and yeah, that's where we got to meet Dana Gould, who was extremely nice to us as well. Yeah. But that and andiano Fight, they were a great partner. I think them, the people working there were great. To have our first real live show be with their technicians there at that venue, I think also was a real confidence booster too. Yeah, it made, I mean, we were doing the show for two and a half years before our first live show,

but it made us think, oh, this is real. This is not just some little conversation we're having and then we see comments later. These are real people that are out there listening and they really care. And it's always so great to see a room full of people whenever we did our live shows. And I assume they'll continue into the future at some point, but it was always a great treat for us and bringing on great guests. And again, impossible to thank everybody, but Bill Oakley was so essential to some of our live shows we did, especially the ones in Portland, because again, he's our first interview as a Simpsons writer. And so far, he's joined us at three different live shows in Portland. They've all been so great. So many great and new stories coming out of Bill. And again, Bill asked for nothing.

Bill was just like, hey guys, are you in town? I'll be on your live show, sure. Yeah, and even when we did some of those SketchFest shows, he recorded original videos for us as the introduction to the show. When we covered with Ali and Julia, the principal and the pauper, he recorded an intro for that, which like that also I felt early on. Well, he knew us all right by then. But that showed

the level of trust he had in us because he had seen fans like us were very negative to that. And he might have thought like he could have assumed, oh, you guys are just haters on that episode too weren't you but he he gave us an awesome video for that one yeah it's really good and that's on the patreon as well so yes bill has been so great to us at every live show he stays uh afterwards assign everything for people and he's just been so nice to us in terms of uh i mean so many people from the staff has been have been nice to us and again i can't name everybody but bill was that first vital connection and he has worked with us the most in terms of live shows and interviews

and we've asked him questions through email to clarify things so just very responsive and very supportive. Yeah I loved our most recent up to our most recent one that poochie one is one of my like favorite ones because I felt so in sync with him when he was saying, he was unknowingly setting up clips we had prepared ahead of time. That was so great. And seeing him just tickled by the clips that he worked on, on the clips of the show that he worked on was great.

Just like, oh, I can see Bill watch this and enjoy this as a viewer 30 years later. It's so touching. To see the look on his face of happiness, but also stunned happiness of when we played the Bill Clinton speech about being a baseball, and he could see the audience, say it along with it. I think that was a level of enjoyment with his work

he never really got to have until then, I think. Yeah, and those are all on the Patreon as well, the live shows, and I think we release most of them to the free feed if not all of them. So live shows are very important for us. I do want to cover the pandemic because we all live through it. It is a distinct phase of Talking Simpsons and the world. We have to cover it. And I think that we and a lot of other podcasters were at first worried that COVID-19 would

change people's podcast listening habits. Yes, primary on our list of concerns was death and death of loved ones and possible apocalypse. But then after that, it was like, well, people still care about podcasts. But weirdly enough, this got more people into podcasts and introduced an entire new audience of people in the podcast. It got people listening more. And I feel like after COVID, I no longer explain, I had to explain what I do for a living to strangers. They're like, Oh, a podcast. Got it.

It was nuts that at the start of it, we were thinking like that our podcast would go down, like that people would like, Oh, everybody listens on their commutes, but they're not commuted anymore. But we, we underestimated how much more time people would have available too. And yeah, that era was when a lot of celebrities and famous people who had a lot more free time, they couldn't do anything. They all started podcasts as well. And it's easy to make fun of, like, oh, the smartless guys who just started a cell phone company just showing up. It's easy to mock them, but even the bad ones, I give them credit for in 2020, they

made many regular people aware of podcasts. Yeah, yeah. A rising tide lifts all the boats. They're not competition with us, but potentially they are getting more people into podcasting and more people might want to hear our substance podcast. That's always nice. And I feel like when we first started our guest space approach in mid 2018 or early 2018, we were very wary of having too many remote guests. And a solution to that was to go to LA a bunch to record people in person. And that was great. But I think once COVID happened, people were just used to all guests being remote. So that was no longer an issue. And yes, the energy is a tiny bit better if you were in the same space with people and it

is preferable. But I think it just became the default setting for podcasts is everybody is in a different city and nobody is really in the same room anymore. Yeah. I think it's flattened out a bit that really helped to get you part of part of that horrible time where many, many bad things happened in 2020. But it taught people how to like Zoom in general, like it was early, pre pandemic of our many great guests. You know, there we would have on remote guests who were used to doing,

some were more used to it than others, but everybody kind of had to catch up to like a near street, like a streamer's ability to record themselves in person, or locally and share it with others. Yeah, before the pandemic, I think we bought and sent microphones to like three people just because they didn't have them. And now everybody, you have a microphone, you have to do remote stuff for something.

And also, you know, I think by 2020, that was when there were more Zoom kind of normalized things, like our remote guests, prior to us getting the setup we have now, we would record them via Google Hangout and it wouldn't sound like you couldn't get separate tracks, it was harder. That could hurt the quality too. Yeah, yeah, for a long time we weren't using multi-track recording and I think that's fairly new

as of, I don't know, when was Zencaster, that was probably like 2022 I'm guessing, when we picked up Zencaster. Yeah, 2022 or 21, maybe late 21. Yeah, yeah, it was. So, Henry and I were in the same COVID bubble. We literally had nothing else to do during COVID. So even though things were miserable, we were incredibly productive to the point where we were working ahead like three or four months ahead of time. And I should note that you've heard this if you live through that era and we're listening to the podcast,

but me and my now wife were separated thanks to the closing of the US-Canada border because we were dating, we had planned our wedding, COVID canceled that, and from March until, I believe, December, that's when I could not see her at all. There was no crossing the border, March, December of 2020. So with those nine months, I had a lot of time on my hands. I played a lot of video games, but you can't just do that.

I bought a lot of hard liquor, but you can't just do that. You have to spend a lot of time podcasting, and we did. And I think I'm happy that we made the best of that time because unfortunately, you know, some people didn't do very well during that time period and I feel really bad But we really buckled down and I think we should be proud of ourselves for not just Giving into depression and sadness and feeling like horrible shut-ins. Yes, that was I felt very You know, I felt very bad for you Bob and Nina at that time

Like it was so I could see how hard it was for you. I you know, I felt very bad for you and Nina at that time. Like it was so, I could see how hard it was for you. I, you know, I was, by then, you know, obviously me and my husband, we were living together and he, but I felt bad for him that he had to my, my husband, Darren, that he are my hubby, as I say most podcasts. I do want to say this moment like he's very thankful for all of his support he's made it this podcast very possible for me too, but That you know, I was at least cohabitating with him while he was working from home then but that that was So so rough for you to see like your your marriage your wedding delayed the did the just looking at daily news. The news cycle headlines about Canada border lockdown extended to X day, it was so sad

every time I saw it. I knew you would of course saw it before me and were already brought down by it. Yeah. It was really an era of new bad news every morning and we're living through another one of those right now, except there's no giant disease. So at least we have that going for us. And you know, yeah, talk about wanting to not just fall into depression. I should also say thanks to the support of like my husband and also you and Nina, like I was very worried at the start of lockdown that I was the heaviest I'd ever been at the start of lockdown and

that it's an easy recipe for I'm not going anywhere and I may as well eat even more all of the time and not be active. That is when I started my morning workout routine and my my walks that I do every day and expanding as well as like Eating counting my calories better and it's it's been it's been ups and downs on it over time, but I have pretty much Now especially in the last year I have because I did my last big weight loss before we did our Doughboys recording in June. I pretty much have leveled out.

I still want to get farther, but I have not, I was always worried I was going to gain it back, but it's been like five years now. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was a huge change. If you look at pictures of you from 2020 and earlier, you look like a different person. It's kind of shocking. Like, this is the guy I was podcasting with.

I'm holding the two pictures up next to each other. And that also is when I grew my beard as well in, uh, in COVID lockdown. I didn't, I didn't want to be a bearded podcast for the longest time, but I have to say I like, I look, talk about those old pictures. Maybe it also was just how big I was, but also like my facial hair. I've liked the construction of my face with a beard now. I don't know. Henry's always sunning and fluffing his beard.

It does give me another thing to fidget with. I'm holding out as the one, Jeremy Parrish and myself are holding out as the two non-bearded podcasters. Pretty much every man on a podcast has a beard except you guys. I think Nick Weiger does not have a beard anymore, right? No, that's true. Yeah. Oh, no No currently does have a back actually. Okay. It's back. Yeah, he's He's in and out of it, but though neither of us have gotten tattoos yet I've had tattoos. Oh, yeah, you're already the tattoo guy on this show. I need to get more of them actually

It's been it's been almost 20 years But yeah, that was you know another thing that I at least was able to enjoy because me and you were bubbling kind of just with each other that having you come over to record in person like three times a week I think was at least a minor stress relief in such a stressful time of like, and again, I also felt like a lucky one. I was not separated from a loved one, or not from my spouse. I couldn't visit my mom or stuff like that,

but also, and you know, I didn't lose anyone to COVID. I count myself very lucky for that too. Yeah, same here. Yeah, we were very fortunate, and we were in a business that was, I guess, kind of COVID-proof. Yes, a business that was, I guess, kind of COVID proof. Yes, yeah, that was and I appreciate all the people who joined as listeners during that time because they had a lot of free time and needed something to listen to. Like I hope that was

always, and this counts even before and after the lockdown, like always hearing from people that like, oh, you fill my hours, you make this job easier, you make this commute easier, you make this part of a stressful time of my life easier. Hearing stuff like that always makes me feel good because that's what I loved about podcasts, love about podcasts. Podcasts have always served that function for me

and I'm so happy to hear, like, this helped me get through a very boring time in my life. This helped me get through a work shift. I'm like, yes, thank you, this is why I'm doing this. Exactly. So before we talk about our current era, let's hear from someone who isn't us. And now for my favorite part of the show.

What's that say? Wish Talking Simpsons a happy anniversary. Oh God, this is always death. Hey, Bob and Henry, it's Nick from the Found Footage Festival that wasn't actually Krusty the Clown chiming in to wish you a happy 10th anniversary. You guys are so good at keeping it entertaining, keeping it fun, keeping it informative.

I've learned so much about The Simpsons. Seven or eight years ago, we were doing a show in Sydney, Australia of all places. And there was a Simpsons trivia going on after a film. And the host told us afterwards, you have to listen to this podcast. It's called Talking Simpsons. These two guys go through every episode.

And I listened to that night. I listened on the plane back home and I've been listening every week ever since. So fellas, keep up the great work. That ought to hold the little SOBs. Again, still Nick, not Gabbo. Thank you so much, Nick Pruer and Found Footage Festival. Great in-person guests, and they've been back on the show,

and you must see their live shows. They are so much fun, so many great clips. You'll laugh, you'll be grossed out, you'll be crying with laughter at the many weird clips they have to show you. And they have so many great DVDs available if you're interested in what they do. They put on a great show. Yeah, Nick and Joe, both great guys, both great guests. Thank you so much, Nick. Nick has been a very nice, I mean, we talk about it so much, but we wouldn't have gotten to

go to that table read if not for Nick hooking us up with Mark to get to do the the table read in late 2019 That's right. Yes, Mark Malkoff. Yes, Mark Malkoff. We went with him. It was his invite He had invited Nick and Nick was like well, I can't make it But I know two guys who would really love it And yeah We're that Nick has always been and Joe both fair giving with their time every time they come to where we're living they are always there like Nick will send us an email like guys months ahead of time guys we're gonna be in your city this time you want

to I'll get you on the list and it's always so cool like say hi and meet them and then talk talk about Alf among other things there's no so cool to say hi and meet them and talk about Alf, among other things. There's no one better to talk about Alf with. And also, they have a really great documentary called Chop and Steal. I love that doc. That was so great that we got to... I hope we spread the news about that when it came out and I always tell people about it too. I will say, it is about their characters they would play on morning news shows that would eventually get them hit with a lawsuit, but also it is about being a weird content creator in this very strange time we live in.

And I appreciate that aspect of the story as well. How do you create your own job? How do you explain this to people? How do you live with doing this thing and trying to make it viable? It's such a great story with that aspect as well. Yeah, and I love any story about two weirdos who are friends who find their passion together and make this together. Chop and Steal is also about Nick and Joe's

friendship and relationship too. I really love seeing that in a movie. Very sweet and sometimes very gross, but a great time, chop and steal. So now we can talk about our current multinational era of Talking Simpsons. What are we in, a phase four, era five? I don't know. Yeah, I think so.

This is what we're doing now. Henry is in Bellevue, I am in Vancouver, and a lot of things have happened over the past five years. So during the pandemic, I got married. I was working on my permanent residency in Canada. While this was happening, Henry, your husband got a job where you are now. He moved out first and then you moved out. And we both moved out of our respective Berkeley homes like within a month of each other.

So it was perfect timing. And we are now like 150 miles apart with that pesky border in the way but we are still fairly close to each other as far as things go. Yeah, yeah. We get to experience similar weather in the same time zone and so it's yeah it's nice. My husband, it was very funny timing the way it all worked out. My husband got a dream job of his that happened to require moving here, but when he first got it, it was a contract gig and you don't want to uproot your whole life for a contract gig necessarily. For six months, a little over six months, I got to experience what you went through for much longer which was like a long-distance relationship But I had never been in and it you know, it was it it was hard at times

it wasn't but it made it it made it all worth it that like just around the same time as my husband getting the full like Salaried offer was when you were able to finalize your move as well. And so it was just such funny time I'm like, oh hey Bob by the end of June. I'm gonna go when you were able to finalize your move as well. And so it was just such funny timing. I'm like, oh, hey Bob, by the end of June, I'm gonna go, I'll be moving and everything out of this apartment, which is our recording space.

And you're like, well, that's good. I'm already, we're moving in the later, a little later in the summer. And so it all worked out. I think we took like six weeks off in terms of recording a ton in advance. And I think we were both big fans of where we live now. So in terms of how things are different, I will say that I do miss some elements

of in-person recording. It's like fun to be in the same space with a friend and have that in-person energy and maybe you'll get to hang out before or after the podcast. That's always nice. But remote recordings, I'm sure it's the same for you, Henry. I can be a lot more productive now because I no longer need to walk for 35 minutes to get to your apartment. And that kept me in great shape, by the way. I go to the gym now before I used to walk the podcast recordings. But Berkeley, mostly a temperate place, but a few weeks out of the year, it would be in the hundreds and I'd be just sweating like a miserable hog after showing up and just feeling disgusting. So the needs to have to like physically move to a recording space, I'm glad that has been

eliminated from my life. This is the first time in my life that I've had a podcast studio. So like 13 years into podcasting is when I finally get a room just for podcasting. And it's been amazing. Same for you, Henry. You've never had a room just for podcasting. And it's been amazing. Same for you, Henry. You've never had a dedicated room for podcasting. So I feel like I miss being in a space with a person, but it's gotten a lot easier.

And I think we were able to make more and record for longer because we can just turn off the computer when we're done and then walk into the rest of our living spaces. Yeah, I like it at first. Well, if you told me, you know, years before the pandemic, you know, oh, we'll do it almost entirely remotely, I'd be like, oh, but that can't be good or that that can't have the same chemistry. I do think if we were starting from zero of just like me and you do this remotely from the beginning it'd be harder to build up the chemistry that we're able to you know still do I think the same

or I'd say 95% the same remotely now yeah I think most people can't tell it's remote most people don't even think to you know judge between was this remote or is this local because it's just a podcast and Nina has told me I forget you guys are remote sometimes because it's just the chemistry is there and also the editing helps if there are awkward pauses between things or some overlapping The editors take care of that to make us sound more like we're in the same space with each other And and I was on the luckier side of the equation for you know It was nice that like ah Bob is here now I'll let him in and then we'll record.

Like though, you know, the biggest downside for me in that old equation was I lived in a one bedroom apartment and it does help that I now were in a two bedroom. Like there wasn't, it was the bedroom and then the living room. And so having the podcasting equipment in the living room, it did like make the living room basically the workspace, but not the workspace,

because it's also my living room, and it just made compartmentalizing way harder to do personally. You don't think about that mentally until you do have, like, when I leave this room and close the store, work time's over, because I'm not in this room. Same for me, too.

It's really nice to have the room in which work takes place and then I often will go out to work at a cafe just to separate work from home as best I can. But yeah, having the dedicated room is so nice and I'm happy we moved to a place that really supports this because this podcast room, not to dox myself, it does not share a wall with anybody's living space. So I feel very comfortable in here. Nothing is going to bleed through from my end or from the end of another resident of this building. Yeah, it also it

helps that my apartment complex too has like a generalized workspace and gym space too. Like so I can occasionally like I when weather permits to I can or doesn't permit outside exercise like which and there's tons of great nature trails around here too that I've I've really started to embrace but I can just do the treadmill and same with like there is like a it's it's like a bigger hotel work area like with a printer too. So now in the rare cases I need to print something. I can just do it in my apartment complex instead.

So we love where we live, and we have really too much to talk about. We're an hour and a half in in our recording right now, and apologies if we didn't cover something essential or if we forgot somebody, I really apologize for that. But is there anything else we need to go over before we begin responding to listener comments and questions?

Oh, you know, one more thing I wanted to thank my husband for was I mentioned earlier, but like the some of the sacrifices he made. One is that when we had the Chop-O-Guess on and they were only in town for like that day, I was on my honeymoon and I was in you were like, ah, it's okay. We can we can do it some other time. And I was like, yeah, it was my husband who said, no, you, I demand you go and get, do this episode with, that I really wanted to do and would be so big for us. So I like flew in for one day from my honeymoon back to Oakland.

We recorded with the Choppo guys and then I flew back to my honeymoon after just one day. We don't recommend you abandon your honeymoon for work but in our case that was a very important podcast for the future of our network. So I would say I'll allow it. Yes, no and it was again, my husband, he loves telling that story when we were like chatting

with the new people we meet like, oh you know our honeymoon, if a honeymoon comes up, he's the first to bring it up. Like you know on our honeymoon, I told honeymoon comes up, well, he's the first to bring it up, like, you know, on our honeymoon, I told him to go record a very important podcast. Like, he, it is a sweet story. I still, and then I'll always go like, I'm sorry, and we had a great honeymoon.

We did, we went to Disneyland, went to a wrestling show, we did a lot of stuff, but yeah, it was, that's just some of the sacrifices he's done for me, and he's, I couldn't do it without you, babe. I love you, Darren. So before we go on to questions and comments, I did want to mention our new theme. This is not a theme exclusive

to talk to the audience, by the way. What you heard at the beginning of this podcast, and what you hear at the end, are new opening and closing themes to ring in the next decade of Talking Simpsons. And we worked with a composer, Miles Morquery was our composer for these themes, and for the bumper themes you're gonna hear in the standard Talking Simpsons and we worked with a composer, Miles Morcury was our composer for these themes and for the bumper themes you're going to hear in the standard Talking Simpsons.

And we thought that while we've grown attached to those old themes, they don't belong to us number one, that is music that is from Konami. They own that music and we don't. And we also wanted something from an original, we wanted an original composition and we wanted something that wasn't tied to gaming as much as the old themes were because if you're not familiar with the Simpsons arcade game, when you hear that music

you're gonna be like, oh my God, what is this? It's like a dentist drill, it's like an alarm clock. When people like us are like, oh it's great, some people, it might be a little too shrill for them and we wanted a more welcoming, rounder, bouncier intro for the show. Yeah, no, in 2015, you know, especially with both of our backgrounds, but especially, you know, Bob from from RetroNauts, like retro game and music was such a big part of our podcasting personality and style. Back then, you know, on another podcast I was producing,

like retro game music was kind of the normal thing we used as like even just bed music, you know, behind people talking, which now seems very different from what I would do. I would not have video game music play the entire time everybody is talking, which I did on some old podcasts I produced. Yeah, I mean, we had conversations about changing the theme,

and it was difficult to let go, but we decided we want to bring Talking Simpsons to the standard of modern podcasts, which don't use music beds. They all have 15-second opening themes, and they have their own original music. They're not like just grabbing video game music off the shelf and plopping it down into their podcast. That was a great place to start, and that was the practice at the time, but we wanted to

make sure that we sound like a modern day podcast. And just like with the editors too, you know, we also it's, it's an investment back into our podcast, you know, like back into more quality and, and, and bringing us up to the bring up the opening to the level of how much we've advanced with other parts of the show too since then. Yeah. So thanks again to Miles and we are developing what we're going to call like a formal credits segment for Talking Simpsons at the end of the podcast. And we will definitely mention Miles when we put together our credit segment. And I think I'll link to Miles's

page in the body of the information of this podcast. Yes. Yeah. Thank you very much, Miles. It was great work and great to work with you page in the body of the information of this podcast. Yes, yeah, thank you very much, Miles. It was great work and great to work with you on executing this music just how we liked it. And I know it's good because it's in my damn head. I can't stop thinking about the opening and closing themes. It's what just starts playing in my brain

when I let it wander, so I know it's good. It's already caught on in our brains, and we hope it does the same for you, just from this one episode even. So moving on to questions and comments. So thanks to everybody who wrote in. I asked people to give us some questions and comments about the last 10 years of the show.

I read all of them and I really liked them. But you received about 100 replies and I grabbed 20. So if yours doesn't get read, keep in mind that I did read it and answered it in my own head. So there was an answer, you just can't hear it. But I appreciate all of the work everyone put into their questions. They were great. So let's start off with Visa Valtteri Pimea, who says, would you ever do a longer deep dive into life in hell as a joke concept episode? I've often wondered what you guys think of the various different repeating ideas that Matt used in the comments. Thank you, Visa Valtteri. And I'll say upfront, I like the idea a lot. And Henry and I have a lot of the life

and hell books. They're very out of print now, unfortunately. But I feel that without a visual component to the podcast, it might be difficult to convey some of the ideas. I mean, we often talk about the visuals of The Simpsons, but we do have audio at least as a way to let people in on the conversation and in on like the actual subject matter. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I really, I like that idea too. Especially the last few times I've visited Portland, Oregon, it is very easy. It's one of the easiest places to find Life and Hell books at used bookstores. So I have picked up a few and every time I read them, it was my first time in the last

like five years really reading Life and Hell as an adult. And it gave me such a greater appreciation for Mac grading as a greater appreciation for Matt Groening as a singular artist, because not just as he was a self-made artist who like was an independent guy who then got his swing at the bat and knocked it out of the park, but also that sometimes people I think say Matt Groening had not very much to do with The Simpsons from the beginning, or they say like Sam Simon had all this impact on it creatively, and that's why it's so much better than the shorts,

all that. You read those original comics of Life in Hell, you will see so many recurring ideas or joke concepts, or just character designs that are like, oh that was in the show, and then in the show in like season three, not season one I'm talking. If you read enough Life and Hell, you can easily see things in Futurama and the Simpsons that are definitely from his brain.

Like this is a real pet peeve of his. This is a kind of idea he's fascinated by, etc, etc. And if you look at his art and you think, well, technically, I guess he's not a good artist. That's irrelevant because his designs are just so iconic, obviously the Simpsons. But so many of the other characters that you don't see on the Simpsons like the Life in Hell rabbits, Akbar and Jeff, a lot of one-off characters. It's such a good eye for character design, I think.

Yeah, yeah, it really does. I would suggest to anybody check out Life in Hell to the original comics. There's tons of them scanned online. You don't have to find the old printings. And you will see just what a funny, There's a reason Matt Groening became famous. You're not like cartoon boy who got lucky and his quality doesn't matter either way. I've considered when we redid the first episode on one of our last LA trips for podcasting, we talked a little about Matt Groening's background

and we did when we covered the shorts too, but I don't know, maybe if we did like a dedicated shorts episode or something as a regular episode, not as a video, maybe we could spend like 30 minutes on life and health perhaps, but yeah. And I think, I mean, we did a video commentary on the shorts like eight years ago, and I think we've grown so much

and learned so much since then that we could really do something else with the shorts. That's so important. Oh, totally, yeah. So perhaps more context, Life and Hell, but I guess it would also be hard to, part of it is watching along too, and I can't tell somebody, go buy just this one

Life and Hell collection and read that and we'll all talk about it. Maybe we could put together like 20 comics that we like that are like that I take a photo of them from my or we each like scan them from our own copies and say okay these are the 25 Life in Hell comics we're going to talk about this episode. Read them now and we'll but that it's that is homework to give it a listen. Yeah, and it's hard to tell someone go out and buy them when they're not in print. And it's like, well, go to every used bookstore in your town and hope they have one of them. So maybe when they go back in print, we can do something. I think they're just not available

enough. And I'm sure if you go on Internet Archive, somebody has scanned every Life in Hell comic that you can read. But it'd be nice if they were republished and we're hoping they are at some point. Yeah, Matt Groening should do a deal with Fanta Graphics and reprint them like the the Peanuts comics, you know? I know Life and Hell's not as big as Peanuts, obviously, or Garfield, but it is as big as Garfield, I'd say, just thanks to it being the Simpsons comic. Our next comment, though, is from Emily Smythe,

who says, how much time do you spend on research for each podcast episode? What are your methods of collecting information? I think that Henry and I have our own methods, but there are just like broad strokes that are uncommonly. So Henry, how would you break down your method? You know, now I try to separate it out more, but it used to all just be in like one day. It would be basically a two day process. But I, so I rewatch the episode cold sometimes as a way to capture the audio, but I'll rewatch it cold then commentary watch. And then I will start seeing if there's like, especially if it's a classic season, like

one to eight Simpsons Somebody might have even done the the workforce of doing an oral history But if not, then i'll also like look into interviews and you know the wikipedia pages sometimes are very helpful with even links to to specific things but It is really like a whole day can be spent or at least two to three hours spent. Okay, watch this, 20 seconds, oh, they reference something, pause, look it up, go to the Wiki page for that,

and then from there, journey to other links and read about it, or find the clip of a movie they're talking about. So yeah, I would say for a Simpsons, probably like six hours, no, okay, probably at least three to four hours. Okay, yeah, I was gonna say three to four hours too, because I mean, it depends on if we're producing,

we take turns producing, not Talking Simpsons, Henry's the producer on that, but I usually do the mini series episodes, Henry takes Talking Simpsons. For Talking Simpsons, I'll say roughly around three hours if I'm really focused, because I'm not doing any audio or having to capture anything. So I'll just do a watch through

and as I watch I take notes and it does take me about three hours to get through an entire episode while stopping to look things up. Often if there's like a big topic to talk about I'll go to Discord and tell Henry like which one of us should take this because it would be a bad use of time

for us to do redundant research. So we often break it down that way. So yeah, three hours for Talking Simpsons and maybe like three to four for a miniseries episode, because for those, because I'm producing, I capture the audio for the entire episode first, and then I sit down and do my normal notes watch, and as I'm going through the episode, if I feel like a scene is great for a clip, I'll mark the time codes. And then when I'm done with that part of the prep, I will go back into that giant audio file and grab the different clips I need based on those time codes. And that's how I do it. And yeah, about three to four hours, but that is just the sitting down to watch part. That does not include the recording, the writing, the description,

the posting, the working with the editor, all that stuff is on top of the initial three to four hours to get through the episode. And then what a cartoon movie is like, I think like three to four work days of an entire week if I'm the producer on an episode. Yeah, yeah. Those also, like not just that going through the whole movie can take so long. In our process of doing it, pause, write a thing, pause, write a thing, also to watch the movie. As well, we read whole books for these sometimes.

Bob reads the source book in some cases, like on Bambi or Pinocchio. For example, did the Roger Rabbit episode Bob read the original Robert Rabbit book and I read the entire like book on the making of in addition to then reading like on the movies to a lot of those movies will have very in depth interviews with multiple people who worked on it either video or that I like listen to while working out or like full oral histories written up. Just on Lilo and Stitch recently I read two different, at least 5,000 words of text on it.

So yeah, those can get really in-depth in movies. Yeah, we do online research a lot. And you start with Wikipedia, branch out from there based on the links that are cited. I found that we were both using the library a lot more. I should have used it more in Berkeley, but Vancouver also has a very good library system and I've been able to get out a ton of books on the making of certain films that are now like horrendously out of print and hundreds of dollars if I wanted to buy

them on my own. So yeah, the Vancouver library system definitely very essential in doing research for a lot of things. Yes, yeah, I use the Bellevue library and before that the Berkeley library. I would use the teeny bit, but I also want to say the Internet's library, Internet Archive, where that to go away also would be really rough because I have found multiple art books of like, oh, this Disney art book is $800 if you wanted to buy it online, but instead it's somebody scanned the whole thing and you can read it there. Disney art book is $800 if you wanted to buy it online, but instead it's somebody scanned the whole thing and you can read it there.

I mean yeah, it's essential for that. It's essential for so much. Internet Archive retains the work that I did in the past because the website owners don't care about keeping it online. Like all of my old retronauts, we did pre-independent run, pre-2013. Those are all on Internet Archive and they're nowhere else because what is IGN going to do? Run one up.com like a normal website? No, of course not. Yeah, yeah. Internet Archive, even for our own work is essential, but even just like,

oh, here's this Wikipedia would link to a dead article from 2009 on this topic. Fortunately, it's in the way back machine. It's saved for us. Yeah please give to the internet archive when and if you can. It's like so important. And Wikipedia honestly. These are some of the few websites that have not been purchased by evil conservative think tanks or people or whatever to corrupt true pure information. So moving on we have Jeremy Hawkins who says, outside of finding coincidental connections between the two episodes, in what ways

has jumping back and forth between the 90s episodes and the odds episodes every week changed the way you view the show? And thank you, Jeremy. I feel like it's given me a lot of perspective. It's taught me what I appreciate more about the classic era, but it's also shown me that some of the things people point out as flaws in the later episodes,

I see those in the classic era, but there's so much more good stuff around them that we kind of overlook them. There is Jerkass Homer before the Jerkass Homer begins episode of The Simpsons. We see things like that. So it is nice to say that, yes, The Simpsons is a perfect show in this era,

but it wasn't completely perfect. We just are willing to say, well, that joke wasn't good. We're gonna move on to one of the best jokes ever written next. Is that okay? Yeah. Another interesting thing is bouncing back and forth. It's made me a little more forgiving of them

reusing a joke because now I do feel, now that I've aged 10 years and have told stories over and over again sometimes and not remembering it, I'm not as bothered by like, now guys, you just did this episode in an episode I just watched. This season 14 episode has a season four joke, but in 10 years of time of writing The Simpsons and being very funny comedy writers, you can forget you told a funny thought you had once before. And I think I've gotten a little more forgiving of that, seeing them side by side. I think it's also shown me that the later seasons, by later I mean the ones that are

21 years old at this point, they do have moments of humor that are as good as the golden era. And it's nice to walk into these episodes as a stable 43 year old man and not a grumpy, angry person in my early 20s who just has their knives out ready to hate the new episodes. I like approaching it from a more reasonable standpoint, I feel. Yeah. Yeah. People were scared that we were going to be just become an extremely negative only podcast when we got to these later seasons. Or people would tell us to our faces, well, you guys are going to quit before that point.

And then we're like, ha, showed you. I have more to say about that with our next question. And one last thing I've noticed about bouncing in between is that execution in animation is a huge part of what makes a joke work or not. And you can see as the not the animators got worse or bad at their jobs, but honestly budget wise and stretched more thin and it turned to digital like you can see that they don't some jokes just don't work that would have worked great in season five if they had had the budget or time from the animators.

Oh yeah, definitely. It's a case of them getting less money for animation and because of that they make things much more on model because, oh, if something is experimental, overseas could screw it up so we don't want to have this even attempted. Let's keep things very straight and on model. Andrew Pittman says, do you feel the Simpsons fandom has changed a lot in the time you've been doing the podcast and do you guys feel you've been a part of that change? I'd say so.

I think so. Oh yeah. I think in a major way. And you mentioned earlier, Henry, the fact that people were saying, oh, when are you going to quit your show? Are you looking forward to when the Simpsons starts to suck in your chronological coverage? And I feel like we had that opinion too in the early days. Like, yeah, we're not going past season nine.

Are you crazy? And I think we've become more positive about the show because we've learned to appreciate so much more about it. But I also think the fandom has changed. When we started the show, everybody, including us, we were in the zombie Simpsons mindset where it's like, well, this is the line in the sand and after that it's no man's land. Who cares? Let's never go there. Let's never talk about this.

Let's never move past the year of like 1998. And that's why so many people assumed, uh, people that, you know, the, with good intentions, they assume, well, you're not going to do this for that long. Right. And then as we started like getting into that territory, we noticed, Oh, people aren't dropping off. People aren't going away.

People aren't angry that we're doing this. If anything, they're happy that we're kind of providing a service in that a lot of people have not seen these. And they're like, oh, you guys are watching them for us. And actually, I kind of want to dip into these myself. So I feel like I've been nothing but confident about the the newer seasons. There's the yeah, I guess, newer again, 21 years. Yes. Yeah, no, I we've even had we've had guests Come on who say like I never watched this episode I stopped in season 9 or whatever and every go to these ones and they had a great time talking about it with us because they found either something they could humorously complain about or

Things that actually were funny and good in it, which it can happen. I think, I do think it helps that younger people in the Simpsons fandom and what has changed is that people who grew up with the, like season 16 as their childhood episodes, for example, like they are now adults who also have an impact on Simpsons fandom. And I'm not totally buying into the,

oh, we're in a new renaissance of the Simpsons. I feel that I respect that opinion and I respect the Simpsons being experimental, but often I think they are being experimental in a way that feels a little sweaty and I wish they would kind of get back to normal stories and I understand how difficult that is, but I am very confident about

Even the ones that are airing today. I'm like I can't wait to get to these when I'm 60 It's gonna be so great to talk about Bart's birthday I do think we've helped shift things a little on just like certain episodes of like oh this this episode Wasn't the one that killed the series or or the very least even on a one that like let's say I still didn't like The the mod death episode and still makes me mad for the reason it does at least we have a little more context For why it happened the decisions made too And I think we've had at least some hand in changing people's opinion about principle on the popper Because I don't hear it brought up that often as oh this killed the show As much as I used to and then when I see it appear I'm I'm like, oh, I thought, I thought we had disposed of this

idea. There are still some people that hold that deep in their hearts, but I feel that our coverage of it and us being champions of that episode so often, I think we might've turned the tide a little bit on that episode. And you know what, two other things really changed the fandom of Simpsons, I think. And one of them was something that launched within six months of us after, which was Frinkeac. Frinkeac was a huge, huge change for it.

Frinkeac was, I think, I don't know if we'd survive without Frinkeac, not just in terms of sourcing screenshots, but Frinkeac got everyone online to talk in Simpsons quotes visually. You no longer had to do Google image search to find some crusty old gift made in 2004. You could immediately find the thing you wanted and post it to let everyone know in Simpsons language what you mean. And I swear to God for like a year after Franky went live, and I appreciate this.

But once once a day, I would get a reply on Twitter. Have you guys seen Franky? Yes. So everyone was so excited. Thank you for bringing up Franky. I can't read. I forgot that we predate Frinkiac. That's crazy. Yeah, just for, I remember making the artwork for the first time I took one from Frinkiac, I think was the dead putting society, I want to say was the first, and it felt so great. And that is why everybody, it is why social media got so many like steamed ham things or why even today? Something will happen in the political news and people will get thousands of reposts

From having it quote tweeted with an accurate Simpson scene. We wouldn't have Simpsons predicted it as much as we do. I think without Frankie act either. I'm so grateful for Frankie act I'm so happy that Disney has not shut it down, even though they really could have with their power. And I remember back in the day, when I would get screenshots for The Simpsons, I would literally put my DVD in my computer, open up VLC, go to the scene,

and do like VLC screen captures, and then go into Photoshop and edit those. I feel like a grampy. I feel like a very old man by saying this. There was not just some magical website with every Simpsons frame that ever existed on it. Yeah, so that was big. And I also think, too, that thanks to horrible corporate consolidation, The Simpsons being on Disney Plus everywhere did make it so many more people watch regular

Simpsons episodes that don't pull off DVDs from their shelves. That's another great point, Henry. I never thought of that, that we were concerned people don't own the DVDs after season eight. How are they going to watch along with us? And then I mean, I'm not a fan of Disney buying everything, but it made the Simpsons 36 years of it immediately available to anyone who paid like 13 bucks a month or whatever. So yeah, I think it's a combo of like frankeac and then dizzy plus thing really gave us a firm foundation for our podcast. Yeah, really, really helped. And that has definitely shifted the and expanded the

Simpsons fandom. When we, when we first had on Bill Oakley, one of his things he said was he wondered if the Simpsons would become more irrelevant because like his kids couldn't easily watch it and Now they can like and all millions of kids did because because of that Yeah, we heard that from Dana Gould pre Disney Plus where he's like my my kids watch Bob's Burgers. It's on Netflix They can't watch The Simpsons. Yes. He he had that great example. He's like, hey, that's the character that you like this I made I wrote a character in the show that you and she's like, yeah, whatever, whatever. Back to Bob's Burgers.

So before we move on to our next question, let's hear from another Talking Simpsons well-wisher. Hey, Bob and Henry, Mike Drucker here. And I wanna say congratulations on Talking Simpsons 10th anniversary. 10 years of Talking Simpsons. It is an amazing accomplishment to have me on your podcast. And I wanted to to first of all,

say 10 years is also good. In fact, having me on your podcast is so great that I will take, I don't know, a third of what you make, I'm guessing 100 million a year from the Patreon. I'll just, you know, or a fourth. I'm willing to accept a fourth. But honestly, congratulations on Talking Simpsons. It is one of the best television podcasts there are. And I learned more about the medium I work in by being on episodes of the show and listening to it. It's so good. And thank you guys for making it. Congratulations again. Ten years. Awesome. Thank you, Mike Drucker.

Instead of sending you a portion of the 100 million we make every year, I will buy a copy of your book, A Good Game, No Rematch in stores now. I will do the same. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Yeah, Mike has been, he's been on many over the years. We've, I knew him just as one of the funniest people on Twitter and then he's become very well known. He's on freaking, I believe it's this, in the next month he's on, or maybe the next week, he's on Seth Meyers, like on his show. It's funny, Mike worked in the IG, he's on Seth Meyers, like on his show. It's funny, Mike worked in the IGN offices with me.

He worked for IGN, I worked for OneUp, and I knew his pedigree, I knew how funny he was, and I was so intimidated by him, so when I met him, I apologized for never introducing myself, he's like, no, that's okay, I was an idiot too. He said something along those lines, so it made me feel better, like, oh, we were both kind of terrified in our own ways.

Oh, that's so nice. He's a great guy, such a funny guy, and he's hooked us up with other cool people too like Mike Lawrence that we've had on more recently. That was thanks to a Mike connection from Mike Drucker. Mike to Mike. All these Floridians getting together. I don't like it. Oh yeah, only bad things can happen when a bunch of Floridians agree on something.

Let's move on to Peter Frazier who says, "'As far as a question, what are your favorite episodes "'from the angle of ease of recording? "'Where it was all a fun time and didn't feel like work. "'Also curious if there is anything missing "'from the podcasting process you wish you had, "'like better tech or easier interaction with fans "'or some paradigm change.

Do you have any answers up front for this one, Henry? I have to stew on this one a little bit. Oh yeah, I mean, well, you know, better tech or whatever, I guess. You know, there's always fancier microphones out there or, you know, better internet connectivity. Though I think we've, we had some bad connectivity problems early in our days.

We did, yeah. And same with like, we had, I remember we had a laptop that crashed a couple times during an important podcast as well. All those worked out. So tech is improved for us. I guess we could get a fancier thing. If we could teleport into the same room that would also be fun. If we had portal technology, that would be ideal. Yes. But, yeah, no, I think missing from the tech, I mean, perhaps if there was an easy way for all of us to show the video of a clip instead of just playing the audio, maybe that could

be another step up, but it feels like an extra tech hurdle to figure out that would be difficult. Yeah, I think a lot of our success in terms of having stable equipment is to invest in ourselves and our network, where we have to buy a new MacBook, it costs $2,000, and we're going to have to pay for it because otherwise we're going to have a crappier computer or get a lot of crashes and oh we need new microphones we both had to buy new mixers for after the move to do multi-track recording and those were a little pricey but it all results in better podcasts that people want to listen to and I guess yes portal technology would be good and in terms of

ease of recording and the most fun, I think some of the most fun episodes were where we had kind of crazy topics. Like I love doing an episode we love of Talking Simpsons, like Deep Space Homer, but it's also fun to do Teen Angel or Simpsons Sing the Blues or the Yellow Album. I like when it's like a curve ball and I'm not completely prepared to

talk about it. It's like oh man talking about music this is new for me what do I do? Yeah yeah those those have been a lot of fun and going through like you know one of our live shows with Mike Drucker at the that packs that was fun of just the challenge of like finding video game scenes to talk about and also to find fun ways to set up a conversation with Mike. Those were always fun. The in-person recordings in LA, some of those were also very easy and didn't feel like work. And then other times it can just be like, oh, this is such a classic episode that has burned into my brain, I can replay it in my head at any time.

And it's, I don't, note-staking is almost unnecessary. There's some where I really dislike them and they put me in a bad mood, and then those episodes end up being very, very long because we're just looking for all the ways to fix the problems. And I think they result in funny episodes, but I'm like so grumpy afterwards. You're right, for all the ways to fix the problems and I think they result in funny episodes, but I'm like so grumpy afterwards

Those you're right. Those those are the ones that can feel a little like work Yes, or there have there have been a couple of times where fortunately you listeners wouldn't know it because of the the editing We're like, okay this person, you know, we're all in the room together But their mic isn't working or this person had like drops out at a certain point and we have to reset everything. Like there's those technical ones and you do your best to have them not. And I think everybody gets back on the same page, but when you're getting started as a podcaster,

those things can really throw you off. Yeah, I mean, things are fine, but then you've already sweated through your clothes. Yes, also that. It's like, oh, It's like oh everything's fine everything's fine but could you just say yes I've had those statements. So Mr. Strubb says will you guys ever go back to doing miniseries or even bring back polls for the movie? And I think the answer is no although I appreciate the interest. I feel, I'm sure, Henry, you'll agree with me on this.

I feel like we have found the perfect output for work right now in terms of what we're doing, how thin, I think we're spread pretty thick right now. It's a nice, healthy dollop of Talking Simpsons on your cracker. And although I will say that I recently invested in some handheld mic technology to make recording with two people in my podcast room easier.

And I've recorded one thing with the NFR Retronauts, and I think this will make it easier for us to do talking Japanese. We launched the pilot for that last year. It's hard for us to record in the same condo because we were doing it remotely, and that was kind of awkward. But now it's very possible.

So I would say look forward to more of those, but I don't think we're gonna be launching a proper new mini series just because it would kind of kill, uh, the role we're on in terms of productivity. It would be really hard to fit in. Like, you know, ones we've mentioned in the past that, uh, like we, we love Duckman, we love Daria. It be, you know, they, they, they would be easy to do at least from like a creative standpoint.

And we'd like to. But yeah, once we started doing Futurama and King of the Hill once a month, instead of like, basically, the old mini-series system of us doing 13 weekly episodes of a season at a time, that made several months of the year very extra busy for us. Needlessly so. I think it was confusing for patrons because you're enjoying Talking Futurama and then suddenly it's over and we're like, well, if you vote for more, we'll give you more. And people just were kind of bummed out by that.

Same with talking of the hill as well. Yeah. Yeah. So once we found the now the perfect, I feel it feels like the right way, I wish we'd have been doing it from the beginning of just, you know, a certain day of the week, each week, you're going to, in a month, you'll get an extra podcast, whether it's What a Cartoon Futurama or King of the Hill, and then the other day of the week,

a certain day of the week, you get Talking Simpsons, and I think that's a nice balance. Yeah, I think it's like a healthy podcast diet. In terms of bringing back pulse of the week, you get Talking Simpsons. I think that's a nice balance. Yeah, I think it's like a healthy podcast diet. In terms of bringing back polls from the movie, polls for what a cartoon movie, I did like the polls to get us out of our comfort zone, but I think we figured out a pretty good strategy for doing weird stuff that we like

and doing popular stuff which we usually like. And the reason that we're so heavy on Disney and Pixar is that's what brings people to that tier. And we found that we don't do a lot of anime on that tier because we assume our audience would be like us and love anime but anime often pushes a lot of people away so we have to be very careful with that $10 tier because it is a big earner for us in terms of like our business in general and we have to make sure we're drawing a line between what we want to do and what our audience wants.

I mean we worked just as hard and just as passionately and it's excited to cover things like Akira or Project Ako but yeah it's the audience, the people who liked it really did like it but we noticed they got fewer comments, we'd get fewer subscribers. The interest wasn't palpable comparatively to Toy Story, which obviously, it makes sense when you say it out loud. And even things you think would be a home run like How to Train Your Dragon, I think that was kind of, people liked it, but it didn't get the reception or the sign ups that Lilo and Stitch would get, or even like a bad Disney

movie would get. Yeah, yeah, I was a little soft on that too. So yeah, it's kind of the polling got more in place with us using different metrics that we have internally and externally to like measure interest in general for ourselves. And still, I mean, I could see us doing another general for ourselves. And still, I mean, I could see us doing another Hayao Miyazaki film at some point or other ones that are like, no, I really want to do this one. But we are much more selective with it, with the ones that we expect less engagement on. Oh, definitely. Yeah. So Shy Ranger says, what episodes of The Simpsons do each of you feel your opinions have changed the most over time? Started loving now hate, started hating now love, or flip-flopped many times? And I'll say it is fun to go back to hated episodes and realize that, oh crap, a lot

of this is funny. Like when we covered Homer versus Dignity, I say until the Panda Love, and then even after that, I'm laughing my ass off at some of these John Swartzwalder jokes. Absolutely, it's a very, yes, that episode is very funny and it was a lot of fun to talk about with Nick Weiger as a guest on that one too. Like that one I lined up on except on the Panda Love. I hated it more than ever, that part.

But I did think the other parts were funnier than I remember too, yeah. And in terms of starting as Loving and now Hate, I don't think I've gone that far, but revisiting season four a few times has shown me that the back half is some of the best jokes ever written, of course, but also guys who are so tired, they're all quitting as soon as they can.

They're leaving the show as quickly as possible and a very tired staff and brain drain results in some very weak jokes and weak plotting compared to the season three and the first half of season four. So I feel like season four is not really the golden boy it used to be in my heart. I'm really now a bigger champion of season six and season seven as my favorites.

Although again, season four, some of the best jokes ever written for television, period, ever animated for television, period. Yeah, I think two examples of that for me were both the front and Homer's triple bypass, which were always as beloved by me. And I still love rewatching them. They're full of some of my favorite moments ever in life. However, I looking at him so closely, I'm like, these are clearly freelance scripts that waste a good concept on a not as good script that is helped by having perfect animation from

the animators working at their highest ability. These they're all, these are like B minus scripts that are saved by it. And I think I flip-flop, even on something, a recent one when we did iDobot, I remembered only hating that because I hated the stuff with Snowball 2 so much. But it was such a small part of an episode that also had some of the best animation of the whole season in it that I actually walked away from going like, oh, you know, that's pretty good. That was pretty good. Yeah, definitely noticing and appreciating

Laura McMullen's brief role on the show as a director in the ones we're covering now. Oh, and tangential to Simpsons, I also talk about a thing I flip-flopped on was, I remember thinking every critic episode is amazing and by the end of that second season I was like, it's a little rough here. Yes, we've had a lot, Talking Critic was eight years ago

and maybe we would have reevaluated some stuff now, but I feel like doing every episode back to back made us realize like, oh, there's only like three critic plots and one of them is Jake gets fired and they do that about eight times. And there are so many great jokes, so much good animation, but the critic is very uneven. And I would have loved to see it go on further

for it to iron out those flaws, like every animated show does, but unfortunately we are stuck with like, essentially a season and a half of the critic. Yeah. Eric Schumann says, curious to know if, due to the outrageous amount of research you've done,

you're still able to watch The Simpsons purely for fun. Do you find it difficult to switch off the professional Simpsons podcast or part of your brain and just enjoy a favorite episode? A little bit, I have that, I mean, though I had, even before we started this, I had watched Simpsons so much to the degree that like, even putting on a Vanilla Simpsons,

I still would just be hearing the commentary in my head watching a regular episode, you know? Yeah, I mean, I assumed it would be challenging to watch Simpsons casually, but as a Simpsons civilian, I really have enjoyed the show as a non-podcaster. I'm able to turn that part of me off because I've gone to Simpson's Trivia in Vancouver and they will show episodes between rounds.

I'm able to just chill out, drink my beer, laugh with the crowd and not think of like, oh Mike Scully wrote that joke or, oh this is great animation by David Silverman or whatever, however I sound on this show. And then like we've gone on some trips lately and we're in the hotel and my wife is showering or we're just chilling out And I'll put on like a random episode and recently those have been

Homer the great and Burns is there and I'm able to just like just take it all in and be like I love this so Much I've chosen the right path in life. I can enjoy this just as a TV viewer So I'm glad that it has not just become the Simpsons comes on and now it's a work mode I'm glad I'm able to turn that off the the nicest times where I can do that now as a Simpsons Just general viewer is my husband has not seen every episode of classic Simpsons And so I then get to do the spouse thing that men have to do which is show their spouse Simpsons Which unfortunately you miss out on Bob by having a Simpsons expert wife. I've done it with previous partners.

So I do get to show it to him and I try to not be just like, now you know why that's a funny joke, right? And explain Crystal Pepsi or whatever. So just tell him we have a podcast. Yes, yeah. He does occasionally get it from that too. But so, yeah, I can, though oppositely, I do watch a movie and sometimes walk away from it going, like, well, I did watch that classic movie and it was good,

but also I bet I'll use this information on a podcast at some point. It's always nice to have some facts up in the old dome. So before I move on to the next question, let's hear from a Talking Simpsons VIP, and hey, all you listeners are VIPs, but this person's been on the show. Hi, this is Drew from Gayest Episode Ever. And I could tell Bob and Henry how much I like them and how much I admire what they've done with Talking Simpsons, but they know because I mention all the

time that not only do I think it's really impressive, but I actually ripped off their business plan, which is the highest compliment I could possibly give them. So thank you, Bob and Henry for not only giving us entertainment and education, but also showing us that, Hey, podcasts can be something you can do and actually make some money. I don't make as much money as Bob and Henry do, but maybe one day I will. And I'll still have them to thank for this, for just being the coolest nerds who... Drew, are you recording something in here? No, I would have told you if I was recording something in here.

So you're sitting here talking to yourself? Yeah, voice notes. That makes sense. Yeah, go back to your room. Okay. Congratulations. Thank you to Drew and Glenn from Gayest Episode Ever. I love the podcast.

And if anything, we all owe money to April Richardson. So if this is anybody who played April Richardson, you're stealing my bid. Yeah, thank you so, so much, Drew. Love you guys, Drew and Glenn. That was great. I was glad to hear from them. Drew thanks us too much on his podcast, honestly.

Every time, it's like, you know what? It's fine, Drew. I learned things from your podcast, and it's why I often say like, oh, Bob, on a gayest episode ever, they just explained the Jeffersons or whatever. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of great TV podcasts, but gayest episode ever is the only great TV podcast that thanks me often. That is the difference. We'd endorse more if they thanked us more often on those other ones, but no I they they just got back from a brief sabbatical of episodes and I am I

Gotta listen to the venture brothers one that just came out. I need to give that one a listen I'm a little behind myself. That one's very very good. Let's move on to our next question. This is by tl who says You guys first started your podcast before fox and the Simpsons were owned by Disney. It doesn't seem like it's slowing down anytime soon, however, what do you think the future holds for the Simpsons, especially theme park wise? I've actually seen Disney fans argue Simpsons is not family-friendly enough for the Parks. Well, Henry, you are the Parks expert. I will let you handle the Parks aspect of the Simpsons. Oh sure, well you know this family friendly thing, I often don't engage with Parks people who are not Simpsons sickos,

so who would come at it from the angle of like, well it wouldn't be because of this or that. When they say the family friendly thing, I mean it's true even at the California Adventure, they don't feature too many things that are like adult, but they have an entire Gal Guardians of the Galaxy ride Which was the first? Marvel movie to have the f-word in it

So it makes me think that they'd be lighter on the Simpsons if they were part of the California adventure section or say Epcot Now I do think that it will be a defanged Simpsons Compared to it'll be them on their nicer behavior. There won't be, maybe Homer won't even drink all that much. But like, if you just even pull up videos of the Simpsons ride, like original animation they did for the line, there are jokes about like, sneak food into the, you better sneak food into theme parks

because food is too expensive. That was like, they never would get to do that joke. No, I mean, there are some great moments on the current show. I think Disney has slightly defanged the Simpsons. It's unfortunate to say, but I feel like they are not allowed to bite the hands of their masters in the way that they did with Fox.

And that's a damn shame because the Simpsons being snotty to Fox resulted in some of the funniest jokes on the show and I feel like they're a lot more afraid of Disney and one thing I don't like about their pairing is how Disney is using the characters as a promotional tool and it's very embarrassing to see that and I hope when and if there are more shorts they are not just like a way to advertise something else. And Rupert Murdoch, despicable human being, awful, awful man who's made the world

worse. And yet it seems he at least had a better sense of humor about himself than say Bob Iger does. Yes, Bob Iger would not let himself be depicted as a prisoner on The Simpsons. He wouldn't play himself and call himself a billionaire tyrant. That's not the joke he would do on a thing. I saw it at D23 last year, a clip of Bob Iger joking around with Deadpool comes on stage and Deadpool does G rated Deadpool where he just lightly made fun of a ride that people were underwhelmed by. And afterwards, Bob Iger goes like, well, that was a little rough. Anyway, like he, he seemed to be to be like oh that was too mean what G rated Deadpool said about phantasmic. And you know not to get too morbid about the

future of the show but the actors are all aging some of them were born in the 40s and I think we're going to really understand the future of the Simpsons when the core cast starts passing away. And we're already seeing reduced episode numbers. I don't think they'll ever let the show end. But a key indicator of the future will be how they handle the passing away of one of the key five or six cast members. Yeah. You know, as a Flintstone fans had to go through it sooner than us because

they're their cast members love to drink and smoke a whole lot. And they, they all passed away much earlier than by the 30th anniversary of their cast members love to drink and smoke a whole lot. And they all passed away much earlier. By the 30th anniversary of the Flintstones, like Mel Blank was gone, maybe, was Betty Rubble's voice actor still alive? I think she might have been the only one. I think it was only Wilma. I think the Wilma voice actor lasted the longest.

But everybody else gone by the 30th anniversary of the Flintstones. So it's like yeah, that's how short lived those voice actors were were spoiled by the Relative longevity of the Simpsons voice actors, but yeah, it'll be but Disney recast voice actors That's that's they've been doing it as long as voice acting has existed in animation, honestly So all the trophies says I think you both have an idea in your mind of where your cutoff will be for hopping back and forth between coverage of older and newer seasons is. Care to share?

Would it be around season eight? Or do you foresee a point in time where you'll just restart the coverage of the series all over again in tandem with season 24 or wherever we are by then. I would say good question. We don't want to tie ourselves to any sort of definitive plan this early on, but the revisiting episodes were just something that we did as a goof, as a lark perhaps, thinking well now we have time, this is our full-time job, and then we liked it so much we kept

going and I don't know if we'll do another lap, it's hard to say, but I feel like by the time that we reach that point, we'll have lived another decade. And I feel like that life experience, that decade of podcasting and research does add a lot to another attempt to cover the episode. And I feel like so much time will have passed that you'll have forgotten those conversations on those old podcasts. So I feel like this is a format with longevity and I'm not sure what the future is except for the fact that we're not going to stop. So we'll have to figure out something to do, but we have no plans of stopping.

This is my job forever. The end. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I'm with Bob forever job. Repeat. Like the Simpsons gets to go on for 40 years. were gonna go on like we can do the same. I I think too with Yeah, I don't want to commit to anything. I I do like the idea

I like right now the 10 years separating and it gives you a good, you know ability to appreciate Differences in time I could see Like I also think of in real life how everybody rewatches the first ten years a ton but then we'll revisit the other ones like just having a ten year group of years and just bouncing between seasons like that I think that can work as as a degree though the season one's the only tough one again where it's like well that's the same it's not 20 ish episodes that's the only yeah yeah I where it's like, well, that's the same, it's not 20-ish episodes. That's the only difference.

Yeah, I mean, we stumbled into this idea and it's really worked because we put everything else on hold to do all of season one. And then I believe with season two, we were bouncing back and forth between season two in a newer season, if I'm not mistaken. I think, or yes, or was we did all of season, no, yeah, that two was when we bounced between 2 and 12

Yes, that's when we started and I feel like that was a nice mix and I feel that is giving classic fans what they want but also giving them a taste of some episodes they might have missed so I feel like We found the kind of perfect balance between those two and you know This has been so stable that I just feel secure and no matter what we cover people will show up for it. Yeah even when we get to season 24 of Simpsons or after we've done or even if there's some people are holding on for our 12-hour discussion of the Simpsons movie then they'll still be

around even after we've covered that. Tom Bryan says I like hearing the stories of how shows or movies get made. Working on cartoons for so long though, do you get tired of how silly and immature they are? A show as honest and meaningful as King of the Hill is very rare in cartoons and I'm glad I'm free to watch things not animated. And for my own opinion, I'll say that it's nice to take a break from animation and children's entertainment every now and then because that is a huge part of my professional life. So I read a lot of

books, I watch a lot of movies that aren't animated, I have other interests outside of this. So it is a nice break to make to read something that's a little more artful than a comedy made to make you laugh at a butt crack or to watch a movie made just for adults. So I find like in my personal media diet, I'm able to shift between those two worlds pretty effortlessly. I think too I do push, especially in the last year or so from getting more series and letter boxed. I think that I challenge myself to go back to my criterion worshiping days and watching more adult fare, like going to see Ron in the theater and watch a whole three hour film and just enjoying

it the whole way. I think same with, you know, I watch TV shows that are not in the cartoon mode as well. I do think too that, you know, we try to vary the style of cartoons we do too, but often it is, if it's not an adult sitcom, then it's likely, it might be an action show that was meant to sell toys originally for good or bad, or it's a classic cartoon from the 40s or something. But we've also gotten a lot

out of covering live action a couple times a year these days. Yeah, I love doing that. I love to do it maybe a little more, maybe twice a year would be nice, but I like being able to take a break with the live action. And doing King of the Hill is great because it is just a different flavor entirely than Futurama or The Simpsons. And I just love digging into the writing, how subtle it is. Like doing this series again, I am discovering so many new jokes. I just took for granted as, oh, that's exposition. No, look at the secret joke hidden in there. They work so hard to just fill this show with jokes that are not always obvious. So that's been such a treat. I'm glad glad that has remained a consistent mini series for us. Tyler M says, when did you two start to feel

you had made it with this podcast? First Bill Oakley interview? This is when I discovered you all. Or was it the first time you got someone from Chapo? I think I mentioned earlier, the Chapo and Bill Oakley both were big time ones for us, I think. Definitely the Chapo one was like, they were so big and it happened during my honeymoon,

so it also was this major turning point in my life too. So it probably felt even bigger for that reason. Yeah, getting them on was a big deal. The second live show, the one I talked about where we met Matty and it was a traditional show at a venue, that was great. I will say that when Eric Nagel asked us to be on his radio show I believe we later had him on for home at the bat, but very early on he was a known quantity he had his own radio show on Sirius and

He was an early fan of ours with a big platform and we were able to appear on that platform to promote ourselves and that made Me feel like oh we we've kind of made it. We're not just operating within the games journalist space where interest can kind of branch out a little. There are like normal people who will listen to us. That's right. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yes. Thank you to Eric Nagel as well for that big early boost for us. That did feel special too. Yeah. So those were, those are all really, and then once, you know, with Bill Oakley, I remember I want to say one of the first after him was Mike Scully and being able to say we had Bill Oakley on like that helped us get Mike Scully, who was very,

very nice to us too. And then Gonzalo says in the back of your head, did you guys ever entertain the idea of a fallback profession? What would it be? Well, I've got an answer for did you guys ever entertain the idea of a fallback profession? What would it be? Well, I've got an answer for this because everything in my life has been a fallback because it's like, well, I'm going to college, I wanna write movies, so I'm gonna enter

the telecommunications, oh, this is not a good path to that. But I still like writing, so I will go into, you know, being an English major, and maybe I'll be a professor. Oh, this isn't working out. I like freelance writing, I'll be a professor. Oh, this isn't working out. I like freelance writing. I'll be a writer. Oh, there are no more places to write. I'll be a podcaster.

So we've reached the end of many fallbacks and I feel very confident in the future of this medium and I feel like this is it for me. Like I found exactly what I want to do. It combines all of the skills I believe I have and have honed over the years. And it's perfect. I think it's perfect for me and no job has lasted this long for me, uh, including retronauts, I have been doing this for, uh, nearly 14 years and the longest I've ever had a job was maybe like three years.

And it's always been getting laid off or having to move or graduating and that's just been it for me. So in terms of stability, this job has given me faith in that I'll be able to do this for a very, very long time and there will be no retiring. No, no, no. I, I this, uh, yes, I, I, I, man, I mean, I entertain idea of a fallback profession. Like I, of the skills I've gotten, I mean, I always think that if Bob teleported away by space aliens someday, what would I do? But it would be like, I feel like I could be a podcast producer for something, but also the networks don't pay anybody anything.

I'd have to be a freelance podcast producer or I could fall back on my video game connections. Maybe I could get like some sort of PR type job there. But also I like being a real person on the internet. I'll just say that. I like to say what I think on the internet. Yeah, yeah, me too. And I mean, I feel like there's no business that would hire us because we have been independent for so long

and they wouldn't like that. And also, they don't like to hire people who make things. And we are living through a very scary transition with AI, generative AI, where we are seeing more and more creative roles get reduced. And frankly, there's no space for us, people with this much experience in creative roles. They don't want that at all.

They're like, we want robots to do all of this. We don't even want to hire 20 year olds who are very naive out of college. You're right. I couldn't be like the position of falling back to be copywriter or whatever. Like that's not a thing that they would pay a human for anymore. They don't despite they figure, well, the, the techs never mattered to some clients anyway, or your bosses. So now that AI can generate it. Yeah, you're right. So even fewer of those fallback positions are there.

If I was forced to at gunpoint that said, I am legally forbidden from podcasting ever again, I guess I would try to, or I would camp outside of scarecrow video here and just try to become a video store clerk once more at the only video store that exists in this area. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're totally right in that those jobs don't exist anymore. And the jobs I was doing to get my foot in the door, they're not done by people anymore, those writing jobs. And the PR jobs, those are probably also just right. Not that I couldn't do a PR job because

I hate doing the things you have to do to be a PR person either, which is pretend to think something bad is good to sell it. That's what I can't do. So Frank Willis says, being significantly older than you guys, I always perk up when I hear you mention animation from my era. What TV or movie animation do you enjoy

from the 70s or 80s, if any? Well, thank you Frank Willis for making us feel slightly younger and I'll say The 70s and 80s are really like a forsaken era for animation. So there's very little I can pull out unfortunately but things like the the Ralph Bakshi Mighty Mouse cartoon and Toietic cartoons that were allowed to be good, like the real Ghostbusters. Those are some of the few instances I can think of. And then we have some Disney stuff, like the Great Mouse Detective and the Little Mermaid. But man, this, I mean, I'm glad I was born when I was,

because as soon as I was like eight or nine, animation got a thousand times better. And I pity you Gen Xers for having to live through the era that we all started making fun of around that time. You know, there's also some Japanese animation from the 70s I enjoy, like Future Boy Conan. Oh yes, that's true. I was only thinking of Western stuff,

but yeah, Japan, they were doing fine animation wise in the 70s and 80s. And I should explore more international animation that's not from Japan from those eras. I occasionally see clips from Russian or French productions. I'm like, oh, this looks amazing. I really should broaden my horizons more. But 70s American stuff, I have a personal attachment

to the stuff that replayed a ton on Cartoon Network in my youth, from my youth, like Scooby-Doo, especially the Scooby-Doo movies or the Laugh Olympics or Wacky Races, stuff like that I did have some attachment to just for my own nostalgia, but every time I re-explore them, I'm like, these are so cookie cutter and repeatable and empty a little bit. It's hard to go back. We live in a better time. Not as good as the 90s, but still better. Timothy Burleson says, I've been to every live show

going back to Piano Fight in 2018 and wondering if given the state of US relations with the rest of the planet, there's ever a chance for more live events in the future. And we did handle this earlier in the podcast, but just to sum it up again, we're keeping our eyes on the news. Right now it's like new bad news every day,

new horror stories every day of people crossing the border. Unfortunately, we now have like secret police in America who don't have to have badges or show their faces. You just have to trust that the man being dragged away by someone in a van is working with the government, sure. So when that scary stuff starts to die down, and we're all praying it does, I feel like the shows will start up again,

but we are comfortable with putting those on hold as this situation continues to get a little worse. I mean, me and Bob recently talked just theoretically about like, oh, well, what if I came up to Vancouver kind of thing, how would that work? And then even just me thinking about like, well, to get back into America, I have to then cross the border back into here. And that did feel, I, again, I also am not in the targeted community so much now, but it still is like, why interface with the fucking SS

if you have to, you know? And we both have non-white spouses. Also that. I mean, I would love to bring Nina to America for more live shows because I love having her there and she helps out a lot, but it's also very patronizing to be like, oh, you'll be fine, you're with me. Exactly, same deal for me too.

My husband has to remind me sometimes like, well, you are white, you deal for me too. It's, uh, it, I, uh, my husband has to remind me sometimes like, well, you are white. You know, that's why I was like, oh yeah, that is why I assume that I, I, I apologize. Sorry. So yeah, I, uh, like you said earlier, Bob, that, um, wait and see on any future live shows. We, we do love doing them. But in lighter news, Thad Komorowski says, when are you doing the Cleveland show? And honestly, we have done the other McFarland shows. It feels like we should. Yes, actually I put this in here to let people know we're getting more McFarland friendly now that the you know he's proved himself. He's now like a legacy cartoon creator and we love

American Dead. Cleveland Show is the one thing we haven't looked at and I know like Bill Oakley wrote an episode. I know there are talented people behind the show. I just never gave it a chance because I was like in peak hating McFarland mode. But I think in the future, within the next year or so, we can jump into Cleveland Show, do an episode of that on What a Cartoon. I've always been curious about it.

I feel like that is taunting us to do it, but you know, I was just in Las Vegas and one of the things advertised coming in August, Seth MacFarlane and his orchestra will be playing in Vegas for a few dates. Well, that's the aspect of Seth MacFarlane I don't like. Make all the cartoons you want. Do the Rat Pack thing if you want. I just won't be part of it. Man, I wonder how much, those tickets can't be less than $100, right? No, they have to be very expensive. But Cleveland Show, someday, sooner than later, I would bet.

And also, back to the Cleveland Show, I forgot about this because I wasn't a viewer, but I've seen the clips. David Lynch was a somewhat regular character, playing himself as a bartender. Right, I forgot about that aspect too. That's interesting. Yeah, he's a fun weird guy, or he was. Moving on to MathNet who says, how do your moves to BC and Washington

affect the minutiae of actually recording? As a former radio jock, I'd love to hear some behind the scenes technical aspects of how a recording worked in Berkeley versus One Now. And I think MathNet, we've kind of gone over the logistics, but we do remote recordings. We use ZenCaster, that platform, as a backup and a way to communicate with each other and see video of each other. But we also do local recordings via GarageBand for a more high quality recording that we then send to our editors. They mash them together, edit them, and make the final product. And the

only real thing that's different is that we are not in the same room anymore. I think that's essentially it. And we're very close to each other. I have a fiber internet connection and there's never been any lag or anything. I feel like we've been very fortunate that way as well. Yeah, once I was trying to do it on Wi-Fi at first, but once I switched to wired on this, my internet has been perfectly fine too. I think another minutiae thing, it was a slight startup issue for the first day just to figure it out, but finding the right mixer for our new needs of like, we both had to, I had to buy, I had a mixer for the you know in my possession

for when we recorded before but that one wasn't up to snuff so that's when we got our ZETI of one and I got one first to make sure it could do the multi track the special way to get the to play the clips right honestly that was the big change yeah and then Bob got the same one. Yeah, a big, this is getting technical and complicated, but you've listened for this long. A big challenge was, and Henry did a lot of the figuring of this out.

You sent me like a big tutorial that I followed that you hand typed out, so that was essential to me setting up my end, Henry. But a big challenge is like, how do you capture your audio, but also not the guest's audio at the same time? And how do you get things on but also not the guest audio at the same time and how do you get things on different channels it's all like it's all a big juggling act that the mixer is doing but you have to figure out how to tell the mixer to do certain things and once you nail it the settings are locked

in and you're good forever but figuring them out can be a real trial and error hell nightmare. And as we've mentioned many times here me and Bob you know we're writers who learned to be on the, like, who had to learn on the fly to be audio technicians, our own audio technicians. Like, but I guess that's kind of what our games jobs were, too, of just like, they told you, well, you need to know how to get your own screenshots,

you know how to capture, you need to learn how to capture your own video or to make a webpage. Like, you just, you had to learn everything. And it's like, we're not hiring a video person. Here's Adobe Premiere. And then you just kind of turn as white as a ghost when you see the many options in front of you. God, yes, so much.

So that, again, these are things that shouldn't have been our responsibility. We shouldn't have, we were just the crabs who clawed our way to the top of that bucket we were forced into. And then by learning how to do everything, we were overqualified for anything else. Yes, oh, what a wonderful, wonderful business that was. But hey, it worked out for us, it shouldn't exist,

but it worked out pretty well. Giovanni says, is there a what a cartoon or what a cartoon movie that you could do a better job in 2025 after years of being in the podcast game. I mean, I say look at the first year of What a Cartoon, and I'm proud of all those episodes, but I feel like those were done with way less resources, way fewer resources, way less time.

And some of the things we've done in the past, like Dexter's Lab, that was the first one we ever recorded. And then when we did the movie Ego Trip, I sat down and I was like, okay, I have time now. Let's do the real Dexter's history and where it came from. And before it was like, we don't have time. We're doing a million things. Get the basic facts and let's roll with it. Have a discussion about those. But I feel like look at the first year, those are all viable candidates for being revisited. And things like Ren and Stimpy, we did revisit a few more times.

Yeah. Yeah. the, you know, the Steven Universe one is another one I think of, though that also, like that would feel different now that we've had like the creator and the executive producer of that one multiple times as guests on. So it'd be, I feel like it would come from a different standpoint or feel,

or we'd just have them on, though that also would be weird too, to explain our format of like, you did this into 2011 and then you did that and like just to explain their lives to them would be kind of weird Oh, yeah, and venture brothers we returned to as well Yes, that was for one of our longest regular water cartoons ever because that was a double episode The listener request one that one was was, which was a patron request, but that was a fun one to redo again. The Venture Brothers is so freaking dense,

though fortunately we didn't feel the challenge to do a Venture Brothers ourselves, because our friends at Duck Feed, they already did it great. Yeah, they have a great podcast main series called Orb, I believe, that covers all of the Venture Brothers episodes. And yeah, I'm reluctant to return to an old series

because we only put out 10 water cartoons a year now and they're all very, very long. But every once in a while, I think we can set aside time to cover something that we didn't have enough time to cover in the past or something where a lot more information has been unearthed about, shows that didn't have a lot of info to begin with. Maybe when there's more Bucky O'Hare information available,

I can do a proper Bucky O'Hare. I did as much as I possibly could with that IP. And I was just recently struck with, in my memory, we did a six hour podcast about a goofy movie, but when I look back on it, it's like, wow, it was barely three hours. So I don't know, maybe now there's been tons more information about

a goofy movie since then. That could, but we, uh, there's just, uh, 12 movies we do a year as well. We don't need to, there's many other targets to go for before. Yeah. I feel like covering a movie again would be very, very rare. Maybe like 15 years in we can go back to mask of the phantasm or something or kicky's delivery service But I feel like that would be not a great use of resources No, no, especially when there's there's so many movies and we only do those 12 times a year So dang says you often mention what people have said on the commentary track of certain shows Particularly the Simpsons and Futurama, but you never play audio clips on those commentaries

Is there a reason for that? Legal, technical, editorial, et cetera? And that is from Dong or Dang. And I will say the most logical reason for us is that takes extra work. And because the people in commentaries are not doing a performance, we don't feel it necessary to collect those clips because we can just say, here's what Matt Selman said,

here's what Al Jean said. And I feel like you wouldn't get more out of it if we got the clips. I think we've got a commentary clip one time and that's where Delroy Lindo had to nope out of a recording and it was kind of awkward. But unless something very funny like that happens, I don't think we're gonna be grabbing commentary clips.

You know, the only one I can remember, now you mentioned it, I did do it for that iDobot episode just because I was frustrated but also didn't want to feel I was mischaracterizing Matt Groening and Al Jean dumping on Principal and the Popper. I wanted to be like, no, you guys need to hear how negative they are on this. Yeah, yeah. In those cases, I feel like that's a valid use of capturing a clip on a commentary, but I feel like it's like a death by a thousand cuts thing. Like, look, we could do this and we could do that,

but all of that adds up to less productivity for other stuff. And people have asked this before, and I do like to answer this question, and they say, well, how do you get away with playing clips? And the answer is, we don't know. Technically, this is fair use, although that means nothing if a company wants to

sue you and they're as huge as Walt Disney. So we're lucky that they are not aware of us or they don't care. This is just promotion for something they own and they're fine with it. If Frink yet can exist basically showing you the content of the show without commentary with that's not transformative then we can exist as well. So yes, this is just what podcasting has always been like. Yep. Yeah, you just have to go under the radar on that stuff.

I mean, yeah, I agree with Drew. Drew and Glenn always mentioned like, yeah, it's fair use. It's covered under fair use. But we're not going to... People don't... Podcasters don't actually defend this in court. They have to. It's a huge problem in our country but you can also see like that on YouTube we have a YouTube channel that technically operates as an RSS feed

for our stuff but YouTube does not like clips no it mostly doesn't like music and I feel like the addition of a new theme song will make this podcast more YouTube friendly, but YouTube is not something we're ever going to rely on. It's just, here's another way to find us, here's another way to find our Patreon, here's another way to become a listener. Yeah, so legal, not so much. Technical, not really, but it is like an extra hoop to jump through.

More so, the commentaries are just editorial. Us saying this person said this on a commentary, I think gets it across pretty much. And you trust us, right? Yeah, of course. I know by now. And our final question we have here is from Asterion or Asterion who says, a question for you. For the What A Cartoon episodes, are there any movies or shows that you'd like to get to but are logistically impractical for the podcast format? Namely, stuff in languages other than English or What a Cartoon movie suggestions with not enough production info online or in print.

Yeah, I'll say that, I mean, anime is not popular with our audience. And at a certain lot, I said at a certain point point we had to stop being so weeby and play clips of the dub even if we didn't like it. And some dubs have grown on me, I've become more friendly towards dubs, but we need the audio clip component even though that's not how we watch it in the original language usually.

So that's been a concession, but even with that, we find that people aren't too into it. Yeah, yeah, it's the dub, you know, again, I don't wanna, it's not just a weeby thing, but definitely I feel it, but it is that like, the original voice actor is the one the director cast in most cases, and it is part of the artistic intent that you wanna view on the most base level.

But yeah, I think what a cartoon like regular episodes I've wanted to cover some are usually more like esoteric anime or even like the Like something a paranoia agent. I think we could end up doing someday, but it helps that that one is a Satoshi Kon show So I think that has more public info, but it's especially from Japan, many things the creators never talk outside of an early promotional aspect about it and don't tell you the truth or what really happened. Yeah, and a lot of the research is done in the Japanese language and it's hard for us to access and then thankfully I know a native speaker who's fluent in Japanese, but it's hard for us to access. And then thankfully I know a native speaker

who's fluent in Japanese, but it's also me asking my wife, can you look at this entire book and pull out things that are interesting? That's a big ask for somebody who's not an employee. No, yeah, and same with on the Whisper the Heart one we did. I used company funds to pay Maddie to translate a couple interviews for Whisper the Heart that I found in an art book that I could tell like, oh, these three pages are an interview with the

director which are not in English anywhere. And so I got her to do it and she did a great job but like nobody nobody read it. It felt like it was I did it for myself more than anything and I wanted more people to be aware of it. So it does hurt that like, unless it is a major Miyazaki work that often gets professionally translated and is publicly available in some cases, it is rare to find a lot of production info on less popular Japanese stuff. Or insane with overseas and same with the so but I think with movies usually the movies are so dense that even like Bob just had it with extremely goofy movie not much info out there on its production but I think we still had

a really good time talking about it. Yeah yeah I think we had a question earlier that was like what do you wish you had and I think this is like far off in our future but having another researcher or having a researcher who's not us would be essential because blank check both Griffin and David have day jobs. They both do other things. So they have their researchers who give them the dossier. And I don't know if I would need to go that far, but it would be nice if I could just be like, okay, I need to look up these five topics. Can you do it and give me everything there is on it? That would be amazing. But that's not realistic right now.

And maybe like five years from now, as our revenue grows, there could be some room for a researcher, we can throw a few things at to lighten our load a little bit. Yeah, at the very least to find us the things we need to read, but instead of the finding, that could just take out at least like several hours of our day, of our weeks as well for help for that.

So yeah, that is, we've talked about that before off of Mike, of the pie in the sky, or not pie in the sky, an approachable dream of a research assistant. I feel like I can see this within the next five years. Well, that is our last question, and that is the end of our 10th anniversary podcast, or it? It's not because I have one more clip from some friends of the show. Hey buddy it's the Doughboys Weiger and Mitch here. Wow. Wow. You know what? We just wanted to say congratulations to Talking Simpsons on

10 years of the show. We've loved doing the podcast with our good friends, Bob, and of course, Henry. And we look forward to guesting on many more episodes in the future. It's a great podcast. It's one of our favorites. One of our favorites. Yeah. Anyway, congratulations once more to Talking Simpsons on 10 years.

See you next time. And one last thing. Icarumba. Thank you, Nick. And one last thing, I caramba. Thank you to Nick and Mitch. That's great. Also, I've not shown you this yet, Henry. They sent a video and audio. So thanks to the Doughboys.

I will be posting the video the day after this goes live on the Patreon. So you can see the video version of this. And there is some sort of visual component to the way they're delivering these messages. But I was laughing my ass off at this and I really appreciate them taking time to record a video for us. Oh, God.

Oh, thank you guys so much. Nick and Mitch. That's so nice. Wow. You got me with that one last thing. I was so great for the yeah, the both both still boys have been so nice to us. They've been multiple time guests. We love we had them on both just this year and and I just did their podcast and even we got a shout out on their 500th episode at the

very start of it even. Yeah, they've been great to us and for as big as they are, they give us their time. We've been on their show. I totally appreciate it guys. They they spent a good amount of money to pay for our meal at Universal, which was tickets to Universal Studios Hollywood. And then several meals on top of that. Yes, yeah, they, great guys. They are also an inspiration in how to, you know, invest back into your business and hire people

to help with things that you need help for. Yes, absolutely. Well, it's been a three hour recording, and that is now the end of our 10th anniversary special. My quote is, who knows what adventures we'll have between now and the time the show becomes unpopular. Yes, I hope to be a long lost triplet at some point. We find one of them for the podcast.

Henry gets a cell phone. I have too much cell phone as it is. No, I, yeah, this is, I'm so happy with looking back on this and remembering what it's all about and why we do this. It's just so, to take the time to reflect every, is it at least worth it every 10 years? Yeah, it's impossible to end this podcast without turning into a rambling mess

because I'm just thinking like, who should I thank and what should I say? But I will say, to try to sum it up without sounding like an idiot, I am eternally grateful to everybody out there for supporting us. This is all I've ever wanted to do. This has been life-changing.

I've been able to get a home in Vancouver. I can afford health insurance. I'm much healthier and happier and more productive than I've ever been. And it's because of your support for this show, and I promise to do the best I can every day to keep this going for as long as you'll listen. And my plan is forever.

Like, I want them to be recording me when I'm in hospice or whatever at the age of 93. I concur with all those points, Bob. I do, but I, so to think about like what this was I concur with all those points, Bob. To think about what this was and how it started and feeling like that this was just a hobby or a side thing to now having it be my full-time job, it is like a dream job. I think one of my favorite movies is High Fidelity because it reminded me a lot of working at a video store, working at a record shop in it.

But there's an important scene late in the movie where the lead character is asked to name what his top five dream jobs would be. And he names four that are like, oh, a record label producer, all these things. And one of them was just the thing he made up that like, no, I just did that as filler. And his, his partner tells him like, well, no, but wouldn't owning a record store be one of your dream jobs? And he's like, oh yeah, it would be. And like that, I need to remind myself, like if I was making that five list of dream jobs I would have had, one of them would be a podcaster talking about the Simpsons. Like I am doing my dream job. And it is thanks to listeners like you who support us.

To know that there's so many shitty people in the world that we've interfaced with who tell us, you can't do this thing, or why even have a podcast? This has nothing. To know that just having a few thousand people who support you on Patreon alone makes this a career I can have. It's beautiful, I love that.

Yeah, it's given me so much confidence because I look back and I look at how non-confident I was about podcasting in the past and I feel stupid where we kickstarted Retronauts, everybody wanted to hear it, and then after doing that, I was like, well, time to find a real job. And then I did that for another four years until we launched this Patreon.

I was thinking now, reflecting like, why didn't I think, no, podcasting is the thing you do. I know, and it became, we've had to, after, on the other side of it, we could tell friends, like, no, this really was the most secure job we've ever had, but I wouldn't have believed it either when it started, like it does. Sometimes it is, not to sound like a grindset mindset guy,

but it is a little bit of finding the confidence in yourself to give something a try and be able to do it, to imagine you can and give it a chance. It can pay off sometimes. But thank you again to everybody for listening and we will see you next week for a new episode of Talking Simpsons and over the next 10 years for 1,000 more episodes of Everything We Do. Take care. Honey, I know you feel a little silly saying the same four words over and over, but you shouldn't. You're making people happy, and that's a very hard thing to do.

You're right, Mom. I shouldn't let this bother me. I'm in television now. It's my job to be repetitive. My job. My job. Repetitiveness is my job. I am going to go out there tonight and give the best performance of my life. The best performance of your life? The best performance of my life.