It's only game.

Why you have to be mad?

Hey, we're recording the podcast.

Shut up.

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is...

Morning September!

Or January 27th, 2006.

My name is Bernie Bergo. So late on that one. Sitting right over there.

Professional gamer herself, Ashley Burns. That's right, bro, 26, 27, 267. Are you a retired

gamer? What are you? I would say, I'm in class myself as retired professional. Right? Like,

now I do it purely on the weekends

and when the children want me to play something for them. You're living off that a esports pension

program they established earlier in the industry. Thank God for unions, am I right? Yeah, thank God.

When it was 12 of y'all doing professional gaming. In like hotel ballrooms.

What do you think was the number of people who were playing games professionally when you did it?

Would you say it was less than 100 people total?

100 is probably a pretty good range.

I mean, you had a decent number of teams.

There were also, I feel like a a lot more games, or the games that

people were playing at a professional level were very different, right? You had like pro-quake

players, you know, and you had pro-Halo players, and you had, like, there were a lot of, like,

sort of, the type of games was very different. There was like pro-Fifa players. I'm not sure if sure if there's still pro FIFA players, but now it seems like the focus has shifted very much to the Dota's and the League of Legends of the world for the big e-sports. What was the dude at the time, the big guy? Fatality, was that? Fatality, yeah, right? Had his own line of, like, you know, graphics cards and stuff.

...