For this edition of Creator Confessional, I spoke with actor, writer, and producer Douglas Sarine. He’s been working in digital media since its inception, in both scripted and unscripted formats, both in front of and behind the camera. Perhaps his most memorable and iconic contribution to internet culture was co-creating and starring in the massively influential early web show “Ask a Ninja.” Sarine, his face naturally shrouded by a mask, starred as The Ninja, who answered practical, viewer-submitted queries in a funny, off-the-cuff, but always informative way.
The comedy series, hosted by Sarine and produced in collaboration with his friend Kent Nichols, became one of the most widely-viewed and recognizable hits of the early streaming video era and inspired hundreds if not thousands of similarly-formatted and paced imitators over the years.
When you guys started “Ask a Ninja,” I believe YouTube existed, but you were an independent video show. I don’t know if this is even possible anymore.
All the videos that I was watching online – “The Show,” “Homestar Runner” – were not YouTube shows. “Red vs. Blue.” None of them were YouTube shows.
It took more initiative. Today, you click a button on YouTube and you have a channel. You did the legwork. “We’re going to make a show and also a place to show people our show.”
We thought we were doing it the easy way. We had written a full feature-length animated screenplay about ninjas. We were so passionate about it and trying to get people to read this screenplay, and we were getting frustrated that we couldn’t get anyone to read it, and said “What can we do, the two of us, for free, in this apartment?”
It was, to use our limited technological knowledge and filmmaking capabilities and turn on a camera and make videos. We knew we could create and distribute those ourselves. That seemed like less work than trying to bang our heads against the walls of Hollywood.
So you’d make an episode and now it lives on your website. What were you doing to spread the word and let people know what you had made?
“Red vs. Blue.” We were in the chat room.
Oh, the Rooster Teeth Forums.
Yeah, that’s primarily where we were born. That’s where we would get questions. We’d be talking to people on those forums and say “Hey, what’s a question you would ask a ninja?” Then we’d do a video and share the files.
What was the moment when you realized, this was working? People love The Ninja and he’s famous now.
It was two gears. One of the first videos we did was called “What is Podcasting?” So this is 2004-2005, explaining to people what podcasting was. We thought, “Everyone already knows what podcasting is.” Come to find out, 95% of the world doesn’t understand the idea of RSS.
That was the first one that people outside of our little community started interacting with, and then we started doing more commentary about things we were interested in, in entertainment culture and Hollywood. I don’t know when this happened but, we did a review of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” and after we did that… [Disney CEO] Bob Iger said “the biggest threat to our company are shows like ‘Ask a Ninja.’” He named us in a public forum. It was at a shareholder meeting or something like that.
In that same month, US Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren quoted us on the floor of the House of Representatives. We were talking about net neutrality and how important it was for creatives and technologists, and anyone who was hoping to use the will of the common man to make the world a better place… we were really champions of this idea, and had described search engines “controlling” your search results.
Rep. Lofgren referenced an obscure joke we had made about bacon juice in our net neutrality video, and then she mailed us the Congressional Record where she highlighted it. So these touchpoints that were so far outside of our little sphere were incomprehensible to us. That anyone was even having access to what we were doing, that anyone was paying attention to what we were doing.
That came with a full list, everything from thrills and joy to anxiety to depression to fear to ambition to confusion. It was very exciting.
It feels, in some ways, like we’ve now entered the era when it’s very clear that [social media and user-generated streaming] platforms are not looking out for people. We used to feel like, well, if you have a problem, you call your YouTube rep.
Right, but even that was a fiction, though.
We were sort of lying to ourselves, but it was a comforting fiction. Now I think everybody realizes that these platforms are, if not predatory, at least out for themselves, not you.
It’s an odd conversation that’s had there because they’re offering you a free resource. And the trade-off is that they are running a business that uses that free resource as well to sell people things. The fact that YouTube owes you something… They’re giving you this free thing.
You can phrase that in either direction, though, and make the other side sound bad. “We’re providing you with this free platform.” Yeah, but M&M/Mars is paying you millions of dollars to put ads on those videos. So then you owe the people who made them… It is a symbiotic relationship when done correctly.
Yes, and in constant conversation.
Right, and there’s not really any kind of mentorship in this world.
Or there’s so much mentorship that it gets outdated very quickly and distorted very quickly.
It’s impossible to know who are the people who are really going to mentor and foster you, and who are the people hoping to capitalize on you.
One that I don’t align with is “Masterclass.” Wait, you are the most super-successful version of [your profession]? Why are you charging me to learn from you? If anyone should be giving me this knowledge for free, it would be the most successful version of it. And then I look over at Khan Academy, and it’s all free. “We just want smarter people on this planet.”
I produced a series for them about Pixar and we went through the entire animation process. Fully free, online. You can learn every single aspect of how Pixar produces animated projects. They don’t charge you a dime for it, and it’s really instructional things.
And it’s practical. It’s the most advanced level of going into YouTube and typing in the thing you need to do. “How do I change my shower head?” But for any topic, for any academic subject. “Masterclass” is more like those Robert McKee seminars. It’s almost a motivational speaker thing.
I just don’t like that it’s the most famous people, the tops in their field, and then they’re charging you money to learn from them. That’s what’s wrong with our university system. One of the biggest joys of the internet is free access. Relatively free, or as free as possible, access to all of the information.
In the early days, when we were all figuring out what these platforms were, it was a community of people. We were all kind of working together. One person would figure out a trick that works, and other people would start doing it. It was competitive. Everyone wanted to get the most views. But it wasn’t cutthroat like maybe it is today.
It definitely was competitive in an unhealthy way for me. That was very difficult for me to navigate. I was looking for a tribe and looking for people, and feeling constant competition. A lot of it might have been distorted and competitive in my own mind.
It’s competitive in terms of survival. If you want to keep working and keep doing it, you’ve got to hit a certain viewership threshold. That’s a constant. But I feel like there was a time when I could have just asked a question and I would’ve gotten a lot of helpful answers. Today, where do you even go?
But what is it that you think that you’re asking? I don’t know, I struggle with that. I think that there have been so many huge offerings out there. If you typed in any question, “How do I do this?,” YouTube’s going to give you 100 possible answers. I think the stuff that I’m looking for is conversation, a personal conversation. Where am I getting that conversation?
I can get an answer on Reddit, but I’m not creating a conversation that’s going to be valuable for my personal growth or something. Do you think it is the expansiveness of it?
There are so many more platforms, so many more voices, there’s so much more noise… Every piece of information, every insight, it’s already out there. If you could only get through everything else and pinpoint it. We’ve spent so much time creating so much content, at this point, it’s all out there, but how do you find it in the sea of everything else that’s out there?
That’s going to be a stress for our little monkey brains..
We do have a technology that’s useful for doing things like that, but we’re using it to steal people’s art. What AI can do really well is curation. Organizational tasks.
Finding that intersectionality is challenging. Wouldn’t it cut both ways? For the person who maybe doesn’t have as many creative instincts, they could be using it that way. “Hey, make something really creative for me.” And the person who doesn’t necessarily have the administrative side of things, that person is asking the questions like “can you help me handle this logistical problem?” I think it’s being used both ways.
I think the major disconnect is a conversation about how we infuse AI with as much humanity as possible. How can we invest and implement humanity into any tool that we use, but specifically AI, so that no matter how it’s being used, it’s a tool that represents the best goals and aspirations of humanity? I think that’s a conversation that I always wanted to be having, and that I’ve always wanted to have since I first got online in 1993? 1992?
That sounds about right.
I think I crashed the phone lines in my neighborhood.
That’s taking it way back.
I was, I want to say, 11 or 12. I took one of my computers to a neighbor’s house and we tried to have our computers call each other. We were in an unincorporated neighborhood, so we had second-tier phone lines, and the idea of two computers calling each other on the same tiny little phone network was too much for them. There wasn’t enough data to transfer.
This was when a T1 line was the most massive amount of information that anyone could imagine. My dad had phone couplers…
Like, you’d hook the phone into a charger-looking thing.
Two little cups, and you put your phone in there, and you’re basically doing fax machine conversations.
Any ‘80s tech movie is gonna have those couplers, where they’re hooking the phone in.
I think they use that in “WarGames.”
To go back to what you were saying, I’m skeptical. I like being open-minded. But I struggle with the idea of a computer, as we now think of it, making anything creative or artistic. I feel like creativity comes from a weird place we don’t really understand in human consciousness and you need sensory experience and emotion to process it and put it together.
I like your use of the word “creativity” rather than “art.” Creativity is a process.
A computer can create “art.” We can right now tell it “paint something,” and a robot arm could paint something and we could then hang it in a gallery. By any definition, that’s art. But I don’t think a computer can think. That’s a thing conscious brains do, so when you ask a computer to do something creative, what it’s really doing is recycling other things that creative people did and making it look new. It’s pastiche.
But can you prove that you’re not doing the same thing?
Well, we know how chatbots work. We don’t know how Lon’s Mind works.
Do we know that Lon doesn’t work that way? Do we know that your mind isn’t just a collection of inputs?
I think so. We can make new ideas that computers can not. If you read what a computer writes, or you look at Sora video, it never comes up with a new kind of shot. If you go back and watch old movies about AI, that’s what they’re saying. Computers are gonna be so much faster than us, their brains are so much more powerful, immediately they’ll answer every question we ever had. They’re gonna make things that are 100 times what we can do. What we’ve really seen, so far, is the opposite of that. We can come up with new things. A computer’s just copying what it sees in old movies.
I do think, still to this day, the influence of Ze Frank’s “The Show” and Kent Nichols’ editing style on “Ask a Ninja” are still massively used. What the two of them did editorially is still in use. I still see them and recognize things.
I used to blow people’s minds with Ze Frank. I believe he invented the way YouTubers narrate, to this day. Still today, when you watch a YouTube video, anything science-y or a history explainer, the narrator still to this day will often use a clip, nasally presenting style, and you can track it right back. Philly D also used it, but he pulled it from Ze Frank.
So did Ray William Johnson!
Now it’s filtered through five generations. The people doing it today may never have seen Ze Frank.
I bet the Greens know Ze Frank.
The Greens were the first generation of guys doing the Ze Frank voice and style. Then Nerdfighters came along, and now we’re 2 or 3 generations beyond that. But I still watch video essays and recognize his inflections. Even his kind of tone, a little bit.
Isn’t it wild to watch those reverberations? 8 billion hours of content later, that thing still endures.
