Steve Burns remembers his small paychecks from his time on Nickelodeon‘s Blue’s Clues.

Burns hosted the first four seasons of the kids’ mystery show from 1996 to 2002, with the animated dog Blue. But even though the show was a hit on the network, Burns recalls not making much money from it.

“Every waiter I ever knew made more money than I did for the first many seasons of that show,” Burns told Rainn Wilson on a recent episode of the Soul Boom podcast. “Blue’s Clues was my side hustle forever. My real gig was — I was a voice-over guy I fell into that early.”

Then, Burns recalled that when he received the audition for the show, he originally thought it was for a voice role on the children’s show. “If I had known that it was to be the guy on the show, I wouldn’t have gone not only because I was a pretentious young man at the time, that was part of it,” he said. “But also because children’s television had never occurred to me.”

He continued, “Because I thought it was a voice thing, I went to the audition, and when I got there, there was a camera in the room, and I thought, “Oh shit, I better do something. And so I looked at the script, and I figured … I’m going to act the shit out of this.”

To celebrate the show’s 25th anniversary in 2021, he posted a video acknowledging how leaving the show at the time was “abrupt”, but it allowed him and the viewers to grow up and start their own families.

He ended his message by saying: “I guess I just wanted to say that, after all these years, I never forgot you … ever. And I’m super glad we’re still friends.”