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Anyway, so that's the pitch. If you go there, you get 20% off. If you go to macweldon.com and use the promo code recode, that's macwellden.com, promo code recode. This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That's me. It's powered by Digital Media. I'm here with Bernie Burns, the co-founder of Rooster Teeth.

Normally, Bernie, powered by digital media. I'm here with Bernie Burns, the co-founder of Rooster Teeth. Normally, Bernie, I say digital media is a real company with a funny name. Right. Now I have to say, Bernie Burns is also a real person. Right. With a funny name. It is not a real name. My real name is Michael Burns. But when I moved from New York to Texas, you wrecked my whole opening. There were too many Michaels, so. Rooster Teeth is a real company. Rooster Teeth is a real company. Also a funny name. Also a funny name. And an early nod to the early days of online video is the first catchphrase that our audience ever latched on to. I was doing some serious Googling before I came here. Yeah,

trying to find the origin. Yeah. Yeah. Can I, well, you, you tell me what the origin. It's a great mystery, right? So everyone always asks us that, what does Roottyty? And there's been a number of times over the years where I've actually regretted the name of the company, Rooster Teeth, because it's just such a silly name. But can I go a little blue?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I want to elicit the words from you. I didn't want to say them. I want you to say them. So the very first video we ever put out for Red versus Blue, which is, was the trailer for Red versus Blue. The voiceover guy who's doing the trailer gets in an argument with the guy who's doing the subtitles. And that's the joke of the trailers. They start arguing back and forth. Subtitle guy calls the voiceover guy in

subtitles, of course, he calls him a cockbite. Audience latched onto that. And they started...

Good thing to latch onto. Yeah, exactly. And then they started calling themselves that.

Cockbiterers. Yeah, exactly. They called themselves the cockbites.

So when we formed the company, Rev. versus Blue took off and we wanted to form a company that was over that, I went to the state of Texas. I live in Austin, Texas. And I tried to register cockbite production. The state of Texas said, you're not doing that. So I came up with rooster teeth. That's something you cannot do in Texas, even though it's a free republic.

Yes, exactly.

Weird.

Well, there's limitations to me. So now that we've talked about cockbiting, let's back up and talk about rooster teeth, what rooster teeth is for the handful of the people in our audience who do not know what the company does. You guys make videos. We do. primarily. We have probably been making videos for the internet longer than just about anybody. So you guys are sort of pre- YouTube, if I have my facts right. We started the first video we ever had that when viral was in 2001. Pre-Y YouTube. And then we started our long-running web series, Red vs. Blue, we started in 2003. That's three years before YouTube.

So you started off making a web series, Red Book versus Blue is based on, uses the characters from Halo. That is correct. And you sort of create your own comedy based around that. It's actually, it's a little distinction, but it's not, we don't use the characters from Halo.

We use the graphics from Halo.

So we don't use any of like, Master Chief is the well-known character of Halo.

We don't use the characters from halo we use the graphics from halo so we don't use any of like master chief is the well-known character of halo we don't use any of those characters and repurpose them

we just use the images of the if you were a casual gamer or even less than casual gamer just go those look

like the halo dudes right that's the idea or they look like robots yeah you might even think that

there was a there was a guy who told me he discovered Red versus Blue because he found a CD at his local pool. Somebody had burned our episodes and he went home to watch it. He thought it was a cartoon about drunk robots. It's like the AOL distribution method back in the early 90s. They've always fascinated by how people. Exactly right. Exactly. So let's pull even further back before we go into red versus blue and everything else you make. So broadly speaking, the company today makes videos for a big audience of people who are what age, what kind of stuff? Just describe it broadly to someone. You run into someone on the street. What is rooster teeth do? We can go over the big numbers that everybody does.

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