2025.08.07: All Our Base

Big ball, why don't you just go home?

That's your home!

Are you too good for your home?

Answer me!

Hey!

We're recording the podcast!

Gut up!

Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is MORINIC SUPWAY!

For August 7th, 2025, my name is Bernie Burns nailed that one, Ash.

Sitting right over there.

She's super excited.

It's Ashley.

Why is she excited?

Because we're going home.

Because we're going home.

Today is the day.

Big day.

Today is the day we turn back on rootistyarteeth.com.

It was there.

And then it was gone.

And it's back again.

Ashley, after its mysterious disappearance in May of 2024.

The root of your teeth.

Actually, not that mysterious.

It turns out.

It wasn't mysterious at all.

Yeah, so today we leave the

open

beta and we're going, we're turning on the WWW Ashley, taking it back old school, 2003 style.

I'm even sending out an email today.

That's exciting.

Very exciting.

Although, I guess this would be more accurately 2004 style.

Exactly, because one of the cool things was we were able to go back.

I don't know how much we've said about the site publicly.

We'll just say it all again.

So, if you get some repeat information here, guess what?

It's only because you were so in the know before.

We were so transparent previously, you're getting repeat transparency.

How do you like that?

This is double public transparency.

It's going to be transparent again.

So we were able to go back and in the massive, massive digital archives from Rooster Teeth, we were able to go back and find the old community site that had been shut down some point in the late 2010s.

I want to say it was like 2018.

In order to be a more modern video delivery platform, they turned off, they turned off, we turned off some of the community stuff.

And there was a lot of us in the company who were like, no, no, no, this is really important.

And you don't realize what we're missing.

And I'm happy to say we were able to go back, find all of that stuff going back to 2004.

And so if you join the website at any point before, say, 2019, you can go back and find your profile, assuming you still have the login credentials for it or the email you used that was associated with the account.

You'll be able to go and look at your profile.

It's all set to private.

It's not like restored and back up for everyone else to look at.

And then you can unflag it as private and put it public if you so choose, or you can just indulge in your own personal nostalgia cringe session, right?

Just to like take a trip down memory lane and then remember that, oh, right, we were all assholes when we were kids.

Are you curious what you thought about the new Avril Levine release in 2006?

Well, you can find out now.

Yeah, but uh, Ben even has tools to uh navigate a lot of that where you can go and see like what was the top comment uh in 2009.

I think one of the episode comments section for Red vs.

Blue, I think one of the highest ones is like 48,000 comments on the episode of Red vs.

Blue.

And so this is mainly today, I want to be clear, this is mainly like,

it's a big tech day.

Does that make sense?

Is that a good way to say that?

So this is a great day for me personally because this is when I'm kind of shifting from admin tech mode, which never quite goes away, but the focus of my life not being all that stuff, Ashley, to now where I get to focus on production.

Well, yeah, it's well it's not going to be like a hard line either though right it's like there's there's a line going down here where uh you can taper off some of this technical stuff like fewer conference calls about compliance and like technical requirements and do we have this in place and do we have this

way less of that and way more of like creative brainstorming and like yeah those kind of conferences

and doing like the writing stuff and you know like like picking someone's brain or like you know consulting an expert expert in certain things and you know doing your writing stuff creative calls are so much better than technical calls or business calls because creative calls you say stuff like hey let me tell you why all your notes suck

so much more fun yeah but it's been a it's been a long long time it's been the uh what we've called the digital archaeology mode of just like going through and combing through directories and finding uh this show like this version of this video and where is it and brush it off and put it up like where are these assets i don't know somewhere in here, maybe let's find them.

And it's going to sound weird to people who listen to just this podcast.

It's like, what do you mean you're going into

production mode?

You make sure you have been doing a production every day.

Once a week, and then a show on Saturdays.

By the way, the Patreon weekend show for at least a little while is going to be very heavily.

Rooster teeth-centric.

So just be aware of that.

Yeah, because that's what we're doing.

You even have to shift my way I talk about stuff because now I get to say stuff like the website again, which feels weird to say.

And even talking about Patreon, we do have the Patreon.

It's all set up and we've got it hooked in so you can go to Rooster Teeth and get all the benefits and just tie it in.

So if you want to stay on Patreon, that's totally fine.

But we have now First is Gone, which was the old membership layer of Roosterteeth.com.

It's now back to the classic, actually, classic sponsorship model.

And it's actually

because this is a little bit of double secret transparency again, but because were able to negotiate with credit card providers in a way that we can't when we're using a third-party service like Patreon, it's actually cheaper on the website.

Like we were able to like make it,

you probably have heard this, like when people say like, oh, if you buy it through

an app or something like that, it's a little bit more expensive to buy it through an app.

Well, this is the reverse of that in a way is like, as we have it first party and we have our own negotiated rates directly with a credit card company, we're not paying all these service layers, you know, then we can actually have it cheaper.

So that's why we can pass that along to you guys.

So if you're on the website, it's actually, I think, a buck cheaper a month.

But speaking of productions as well, there is some other new stuff up on the website.

If you've been on the beta version of the website, you may have found the new RTAA, which will now be publicly available to everyone.

And there will be a new new RTA.

Directed by Jordan Sweers.

For sponsors.

The 100% eat.

You should check out their podcast if you get a a chance.

Yeah, so Jordan has directed some new episodes of RTA.

It's one of those shows that

I think of, it's like, to me, a quintessential web show.

It was one person

deciding something was funny and how they can make it funnier and add to it.

And it was, it got on the Rushi website, it got millions and millions and millions of views.

And it was just one guy who didn't even know how to animate

making a wildly popular animation series.

So that's come back.

There's some new RTAs that are based on Morning Somewhere episodes.

We've got some of those to roll out.

We'll have tomorrow probably a Q ⁇ A.

And then, like I said, the Saturday show for sponsors and patrons that will be talking about like new productions that are coming and more stuff down the road.

We're actually probably, just so you know, we're probably going to save some of our publicity efforts.

for those days because as we roll out new shows, it's more important for us to be be doing press and stuff like that for those kinds of things than it is for something like this which is drawing people back in uh to the website that have used it previously if you could though it please share it let people know if you know somebody who was on the rucher teeth website back in the day let them know about it let them know that it's back online and that they can go and visit their old profile And that they can recover it and that they can look at all their stuff and, you know, share that stuff back with the world if they so choose.

And once again, a little bit of a look behind the curtain here.

Back, way back in the day,

when Red vs.

Blue was exploding in popularity in the first few episodes that it went online,

we were hosting all that stuff ourselves.

So I got the bill for the first month and it was like $13,000 to host all of this stuff.

It's a very, very different landscape.

It's not a thing that a lot of people would think about these days.

Like that every time.

It's cost to host.

Right.

That every time someone watches your video, you have to pay for that.

Yeah.

Everyone's like, oh my God, this is incredible.

I got such a viral hit.

Back to him, like, oh shit, we got a viral hit.

A A run for the hills.

As red versus blue increased in popularity and we came up with the sponsorship membership program,

I designed that so that it was an early look.

People could get the episodes on Friday.

Then the website forum members would get it on the weekend.

And then everyone else would get it on Monday.

And it was like, oh, this benefit.

This is the attempt at load balancing?

Yeah, it was load balancing.

It was like analog load balancing.

It was like, oh, then we don't have anybody slamming the server or hitting F5 over and over again at like Friday at two o'clock, waiting for the episode to come up.

You know what I mean?

And it was like,

there were times when it was impossible to upload something because everyone was bringing the server down, trying to see it.

It's fun because it's like a DDoS attack, except it's actually just everybody.

And a lot of people really heavily associate Rooster Teeth and Red versus Blue with YouTube specifically.

We weren't on YouTube at the beginning.

We were three years before YouTube.

But then even after YouTube started in 2006, we didn't just jump on it.

It's like you wouldn't just go all in on a social media platform that starts today, like, oh, I'm going to abandon everything I'm doing and join like ho boo or whatever.

You know what I mean?

You wouldn't do that.

Right.

You're just like, oh, look, Janet Jackson's nipple.

I should upload RVB here.

Right.

I mean, look at Blue Sky.

Everyone's like, I'm on Blue Sky full-time now.

I haven't posted in 12 months.

Hey, that's me.

Slowly, that's everybody, actually.

And so that was the way we were back in the day with

YouTube, too.

And I think the first time we ever posted anything on YouTube was like 2009.

And that would have been around season six or seven of Red versus Blue at that point in time.

So even though it gets really heavily associated with YouTube,

we're not like, I don't, I don't personally do that.

I'll just say that.

Sure.

But for those who do heavily associate with YouTube, you've also been doing a lot of work with Red versus Blue

and with moving a lot of the seasons of Red vs.

Blue back in front of paywall.

You have had to sort of like undo or rework a lot of things that were done in anticipation of Rooster Cheese winding up last year, where they moved a lot of that stuff back behind a paywall and it's just been sort of locked up ever since.

I think the reason why they did that makes sense because they were trying to sell it before they shut it down.

So it made sense to put it in a format where then whoever had it later would be able to do what they wanted with it.

So they really changed at the very last minute the way that everything was organized.

And even on YouTube, things were behind like the membership barrier on YouTube.

And people have noticed this, but over the course of the last like two weeks, we've been moving all of that stuff back into its classic format.

So, if you want to watch all of Red versus Blue, I think we still have a couple seasons we have to transition, but we've got everything out episode by episode the way it's always been.

You can go view it on the Rooster Teeth website, or you can go to that upstart new platform, youtube.com, if you want to.

Yeah, you can check it out there if you want to and watch them all back to back.

And if you want to watch like the big movies all glued together, then you can become a sponsor or a member on the YouTube channel or a patron, whatever you want, actually.

Pick and choose as you see fit.

Choose your own adventure.

Choose your own adventure.

But yeah, so a big thing, too, in the Q ⁇ A that's coming out tomorrow.

One of the questions that somebody asked, and I get why they would ask it, was

something along the lines of, are you concerned about the future of Rooster Teeth?

And the short answer is no, I'm not, because we've done some work to approach this as efficiently as we can,

to put the videos back online and reestablish the archive and the catalog, if you will, in such a way that it leverages our own proprietary video serving and then also some major platforms that are out there in the world today.

And it puts it out in a way that I think really secures it because that was my main goal when we announced this back in the spring that we'd reacquired the Rushdie brand and a lot of the shows.

A big motivation for me was to secure it from just basically digital abandonment, which was going on and is still going on to this day.

It seems like every couple of months, you're hearing about some major part of the internet that is just being turned off, never to return again.

So I was really concerned about things that I had worked on for a really long period of time.

And then, of course, things that were very important to a very large group of people for a very long period of time.

So I'm also happy to say today that is done.

Like that feels very secure.

And I feel confident in that.

We are going to be making tweaks, of course.

We're going to be developing things on the fly, fixing errors and things like that.

But I feel confident about where we are today.

As soon as we finish this podcast, we've got to go like get some like final assets and try to bolt things in place.

It's one of those things, right, with production where it takes as long as you have.

Takes as long as you have.

Literally every minute that we have.

And probably then some.

Like I mean, everybody knows this.

If you've ever worked on a group project or just had like a solo assignment of any kind whatsoever, you know, if you have a week, it takes a week.

If you have a month, for some reason, it takes a month, you know?

So setting deadlines for yourself is important.

You know, we need to, we need to have a finishing line.

And like you said, I'm looking at this.

and saying like this is now when I get to shift into full production mode and you're saying but yeah but things will be this or that But it's like, part of that is me telling myself, right?

You know, and telling myself, as of now, your focus is on production, which I'm really happy about, dude.

It's a really great day.

Really happy, really happy.

And I want to say thank you to everybody who has helped get it here.

There's been a bunch of designers who had worked on a lot of the assets for Rooster Teeth over the years.

Of course, Ben has come back.

Adam Baird was hugely influential.

Josh Meehan, who helped us both find all of these little nooks and crannies in the digital archive that had been built by literally hundreds of people over dozens of years.

All with their own organizational systems.

I mean, and when we go back far enough, I'm one of those people.

Like you go back to like 2012, I get my hard drives that are organized the way my brain thinks they should be organized.

And I'm like, this makes sense.

You get to those ones and you're like, whoever put this together was smart.

Oh, by the way, all the platters have failed on this hard drive.

But we've got everything up there.

So I hope you'll go check it out.

Go check out your profile and then go check out our profile with all the different shows and take a look at it.

Tell us what you think.

Check out the new RTAA and then listen into morning somewhere on the website.

And the other thing, too, actually, is I want to say before we go off and rush and do all of our last minute little things we have to do before we push go on this thing is August 7th was actually something that started to show up on the calendar.

as a date that we could possibly turn the website back on.

And we were actually looking at earlier this week on Monday for doing it and setting that as our date.

But August 7th showed up and we thought this would be

an important day to do it because August 7th, 2015, which is exactly 10 years ago, was a very important date for the Rooster Teeth community.

We were at RTX

and we learned about these five kids who were taking a road trip down to RTX from the East Coast.

And in the middle of the the night outside of Dallas, they were hit on the highway by a driver going the wrong way.

And three of the kids

died on the scene.

One of the kids, she miraculously walked away without really any injuries besides a seatbelt bruise.

And then the fifth young lady in the car, she was in a coma in Dallas.

And you and I, as soon as RTX ended, we got in our car and drove up to Dallas.

And that's when we we met Hannah and her family for the first time.

And

going back and pulling this community, you know, out of the archives was important to me.

And I realized also it was important to a lot of other people.

And this was an incredibly tragic event.

And it also harkens back to a time when I think about when I was a young person and I had groups of friends and we could all pile in a car with all of that energy and camaraderie and go do something.

And I think that's a harder thing to have these days.

And this event ended an incredible tragedy, but I'm also happy for those kids that they were able to have that experience.

I say kids, they had all graduated high school the year before.

And I was just happy that they could have that experience in their life.

And

I've been very grateful.

that I have been able to maintain a friendship with Hannah over the years.

And actually her family was the, I think, the first people to come visit us in Scotland.

They had made a trip

here and after we moved here in 2020.

And I was talking with her earlier this week and she was, she was talking about the accent.

She never, ever talks about the accent.

We just, we just don't talk about it.

And

we were talking about it, talking about the anniversary of it, the 10th anniversary coming up.

And, you know,

I knew people would be curious about how Hannah's doing.

And she just said very simply, she said, if anyone wants to know, just let them know I'm doing my best.

And I thought, wow, what a, what an incredible thing to say.

She said, I'm doing my best.

And it made me think about

so many people in this world now, just like,

they're all trying to do their best.

And it's at a time when it's like so difficult, I think,

to do our best.

It's a harder time than ever.

I feel like that.

So,

you know,

it's all part of it.

And so I'd like to dedicate today.

It's a small thing, but I'd like to dedicate this day and turning the website back on to Dale and to Holly and to Kyle.

And

it's a little thing to do, but sometimes, you know, you do enough little things, they add up to a big, good thing.

And it's a day for looking back, and sometimes it's important to look back and remember.

And this is a day for doing that.

All right, everybody.

That does it for us.

August 7th, 2025.

Tomorrow's another day, Ashley.

We'll be back to talk to you tomorrow.

Bye, everybody.