Welcome to nerdpreneur where we have fun conversations with people making money from their nerdy passion. I'm joined as always by my co host, Frank. Hello. And today we have a very special guest. She's best known as discourse from her YouTube channels, Dungeons and Discourse and Discourse Minis. Welcome to Nerdpreneur. Hey, thanks guys. Lovely to be here. Very happy to have you on here as well. Thanks for coming on the podcast. So Discourse, what is your nerdy passion?
Oh, wow. There's too many. There's too many. There's too many to speak of. But I suppose my mid love is miniature wargaming, which is definitely extremely nerdy. I would say taking little toy figurines, painting them and then doing battle on Tabletop. Hell yeah, it's awesome. But as well as that, I also love the kind of the branch off from wargaming which is tabletop role playing as well. I really enjoy that. I have a ton of fun role playing games, running games and playing in them.
Yeah. And so by war games, to ground this in a brand, I know like some people are like not even sure exactly what that would encapsulate. Is it mainly Warhammer or Warhammer 40k that is your main area of expertise or are there other war games people should know about? Warhammer is definitely the biggest one. I think if you asked the average person on the street, it would be Warhammer 40K,
I think most people would know about. And that is definitely a game that I play a lot of, and it's what a lot of my content is about. But I play almost. I play a lot of war games. I'm just going to. Going to say that much. I play a ton of them. My preference for war games has always been smaller scale. So Warhammer 40K is like a big army game. You're going to have, you know, dozens and dozens of miniatures all spread out across the table fighting this massive battle.
But my favorite types of war games have always been the ones that I guess are kind of almost closer to, like Dungeons and Dragons in scale, where you've got a couple of guys on, like, your team against your opponents. So there is a game that I've played a lot of recently, which is called Carnavale, which is set in Italy in the early 1700s. And you play in Venice, and it's kind
of like Assassin's Creed. So there's, you know, the guild versus the church versus these Cthulhu fish monster men, and you're fighting to the death in the streets of Venice. So wargaming is a big tent. There's a lot of different games out there, but I mostly cover Warhammer 40K because that's what most people play. That's very cool. Actually, I did play Warhammer 40k way back, and I had to look at what edition it was.
I believe it was third edition, where it was kind of around for like eight years or something or something. Like it was a longer version that they had out. I love the modeling. I just never really enjoyed the gameplay that much at that point. It was like. It felt like glorified Risk a little bit, if that's what it was. Warhammer's rough because it's kind of a game where it's what is called. You go, I go. So what will happen is I will take all of the actions that I have available to me at a turn.
So I'll move all my guys, I'll shoot up with all my guys, I'll attack with all my guys, and then it'll go to your turn. And, you know, I've probably shot off half your army off the table before you've even gotten to do anything. That's one of the issues with Warhammer 40K. It's kind of an older game at this stage, and they've. They've kept the skeleton of that, you know, even though it's like 20 odd years later from when I first started, it's still the exact same game.
And a lot of other games do it a little bit differently these days, where they make it more almost like Dungeons and Dragons, where each individual unit will have a go. So you'll go with one guy and then you'll go with one guy, then I'll go with one guy and then you'll go with one guy. Like that. I have to. So I'm the person who has never played Warhammer and hear the audience right now. Yes. So I will be taking that perspective. I'm in that seat. But I wanted to know for.
I'm already very interested in learning more. When you start talking about mechanics, I'm like, wait, that is inefficient. Or that is not fair. Or it's like, okay, maybe it is. And you have to figure out strategy. So if I wanted to, or somebody else wanted to learn more about how Warhammers played. Do you have something that you can. Point people towards on my channel? No, I don't really do. So a lot of my content, I guess, appeals more to people who are. Who've played the game a lot more.
Just because what I cover is mostly the sort of business side, the wider hobbies side of things and stuff that's going on in the community kind of contemporaneously. I don't have like a ton of content that is focused on how to play Warhammer because there's already a lot. There is a lot of content out there and you'll find it pretty easily, honestly, especially these days as we record this. The 10th edition of Warhammer has just kind of come out this month.
And so that's a new addition, which means there is a ton of new content. Everyone's throwing up videos on how to play the. The new game. Honestly though, it is one of those things where I think looking at it from the outside in, it can seem kind of daunting and complicated. But actually it's not really that. It. It's mostly you move your miniatures with a little measuring tape and then you go, I'm going to shoot that guy over there.
And you roll a bunch of dice and you see if you get enough successes and if, yes, you've killed some guys, the end. That's. That's the general gameplay loop of the game. You're trying to grab like objective markers and things like that. Gotcha. Yeah, it is a very big ponderous tome whenever. If you buy the actual main rule book, it is a big old tome. But Half of that book is just filled with lore because so many people just love the lore and the fluff of the setting and the background.
They love to engage with that side of things. There's, I would say actually funnily enough, there's a lot less people who are interested in like the mechanics of Warhammer and playing the actual game of Warhammer as opposed to people who just love like reading the books and listening to YouTube videos like as they, they talk about the, the wider lore of the game. Yeah, I, I would agree. I mean honestly, I got back into a little bit of the
Warhammer content just through the lore. I was, I was watching some of the, some I didn't even know they had video games actually. And I probably should have guessed that they had video games. But I saw like they had Space Marine and I was like, that looks like kind of a cool game. So I kind of went down this Warhammer rabbit hole of 40k lore and trying to understand like what was going on in this universe where Space Marines have to come around and mess things up.
But yeah, it's a fascinating sort of sub genre culture of Warhammer and war gamers. And one of the things that I guess I came to your channel through actually the ogl. Cause I'm more of a D and D nerd. And when you were putting out all this around the OGL and you were really taking Wizards of the coast to task throughout the whole time, which was awesome, I was really excited to see your content. I kind of stumbled into your other Warhammer 40K content where you kind of do the same thing.
Looking at stuff for the business perspective against sort of Games Workshop, which is I guess the Wizards of the coast of War gaming in many ways. Right. Sort of the big bad evil guy, but also not always evil, I guess. But, but yeah, how did you get it? Like your channel is your, your main thing is that that's really. Your YouTube content is your main sort of business. Is that correct? That's like your full time gig. Yeah. Oh yeah. So I, I'm full time making content for the channel.
For the channels. So that, that's it. That's my day job, you know, a night job. Wow, that's awesome. Well, I would love to hear more about. Well one, how did you, how did you get started in that. Where, where did that like initial desire to get content instead of just playing the game? Where did that leap come from to go from playing the game, doing the game to now? I want to make content about it. Sure. So the first channel I had was the Wargaming channel originally.
So the D and D channel came. I only started that channel kind of this year because it was something that I wanted to talk about. And I had a little bit of a platform from the Miniatures Channel. But I started the Miniatures channel about, geez, two or three years ago now. And I originally started it as a kind of side hobby. Just a bit of fun on the side during the. During the pandemic. Pandemic during lockdown.
So I was kind of just doing a lot of hobby things on the channel covering a game called the Batman Miniatures Game. Mostly there is a. Yes, indeed, there is a miniature war game where you play as Batman and you play as like the Joker Gang and Stuff or Mr. Freeze's Gang and you go up against each other and Batman has to knock out the super villains and stuff. It's a ton of fun. And that is a proper, full, full war game. And for a while it was kind of. I have this.
These periods of time where I get really into a certain game before I then kind of hyper focus on the next one. And so I was kind of really into Batman Miniatures for a while. And I was do. I was kind of covering that on the channel. And then I did a video. I always have played Warhammer. I've always been really big into Warhammer. And there was kind of this situation that had developed during the. During the year of Games Workshop. And they were.
They were having a lot of issues because they were starting up Warhammer plus and they had essentially sent out a bunch of cease and desist letters, I think, to a bunch of creators. It's so long ago now I can barely remember, but they sent out a bunch of. They'd reached out to a bunch of content creators who were creating content for Warhammer 40K. We're talking content like animations, right? Like not just like people on YouTube kind of talking about the game.
Like animators and things who were putting up fan movies on YouTube and Games Workshop were trying to create their own streaming service like Netflix. They were trying to create a Warhammer Netflix. And so they didn't really kind of want the competition from all these fan animators. And this had caused this big issue in the community. So I did essentially an explainer about what was going on. And the video did a lot better
than any of my Batman content. Because people, I'll be honest guys, people don't really care about the Batman miniature scam. I'm going to be honest. The fact that you're just hearing about it for The. The first time I bet today is, yeah, War Games Super Nation. Yeah. I did look at your channel and I saw all of the original sort of Batman miniature content, which I was surprised if I thought that was a game. That's interesting. But then I saw the jump when you talked about Games Workshop
in terms of views and what it was. And also just your tone shifted because you were talking about something that directly, I think, affected you and what you were building. And also the whole community, it sounds like you just kind of became this voice of a community. Is that kind of the. Was that the objective or did it just kind of happen that way? So it kind of evolved.
What originally occurred was I have always had a problem with a lot of, oh, geez, I'm going to alienate a couple of people here. But I've always had a lot of problems with YouTubers who do not speak their mind. There's a lot of content creators, I think, who coach their opinions, and a lot of caveats. Because, honestly, you get a lot of comments from people who are very mean. We'll. We'll put it that way.
Very mean people who, whenever you say something they don't like to hear, they'll be very mean online about it. And so I often heard content creators kind of being very afraid of making direct points, of making, taking stands on things and having positions on issues. And so whenever that video first did well, I was like, okay, well, I kind of want to do more of this. My intention was always to do.
I kind of wanted to become a general wargaming channel as opposed to just about the Batman Miniatures Game. Because I play a variety of war games. It's what I'm into. And I do play Warhammer, and it's also the biggest war game. I mean, out of any war game out there, Warhammer 40K is the biggest. So I did want to cover it, but I was giving my opinions.
And my opinions were someone who has been playing games for 20 years now, who has kind of seen the cycles of growth and fall from a major company like Games Workshop. And I reported on them. I reported on the things that they were up to report on the things that they were doing. And my background is I have a background in law, and I have a background in working amongst people who are very high up in, like, kind of multinational companies.
So I kind of get how they operate and I understand the metrics that they look for. And so what I was trying to do was to explain to the community of a group of people who probably, you know, might not have as much experience with that, how those business minded people think. And it's not comfortable, I don't think.
I don't think it's great. You know, there's often a, there's often a parasocial relationship that is generated by these companies through their marketing to construct themselves as a hobby company. And you're into the hobby. Well, we are too. You know, Games Workshop, we're into the hobby as well. And we're all this big kind of group of just hobbyists who are all having fun together. Right. And Wizards of the coast operate in a very similar way. They try to create this very big par.
Social relationship with the wider community. But that's not really true, right? I mean like it's a company, they're trying to make a profit, they're trying to make money, they will do things that they deem necessary to, to make them money. And, and that won't always be in the best interest of the kind of wider hobby or the wider community.
And so that's what I talked about. And as much as it wasn't liked by a lot of people, I would say a lot of people don't like to hear some of the stuff that I say, but I always thought that it was very important say it. And that's what kind of built the channel. Because obviously there is an appetite for people to hear the types of things. Like they want to know why a company is actually doing something as opposed to simply trying to make the game the best it can be.
That's not always the answer, unfortunately for why sometimes changes are made. We always refer to our own angry nerds or the people that we might piss off with our opinions as our board of sweaty nerds. They, they do, they do get frustrated by opinions that maybe don't align, especially when it is around something they find precious, whether it be like the, you know, their precious war game or their precious D and D game or any other nerd hobby that happens to be that.
Which is also where these, these hobby companies can really step in it, like Wizards of the coast and Games Workshop have done and alienating their own fan base and you know, really pissing off communities or bothering them. And that's at least that's where what I saw when I was kind of getting through your content during the OGL specific.
You know, there was a time where every single week or every single day there was like a new video from different creators talking about this, this one issue that was going on across all of Nerd Dom. And it was just so, so huge. And it was really cool to see how many people rallied together to kind of be unified in that. But what's. I guess what I want to talk about with you is your videos were funny and that. Like. And I. Yeah, like,
have you always been funny? Because a lot of the lot of people I was watching were just pissed off and you were like, irreverent and funny and kept. I don't know. I just thought you did a really great job of keeping it light and engaging. Have you always been funny or did that just sort of emerge through the channel? Honestly, I couldn't tell you if I've always been funny for sure. But in terms of. I do try to make the videos entertaining.
Like I write them, right. I don't just. I. I know a lot of people just turn on the camera and they kind of speak to the camera and they can go off and they can. They can improv like that. I can't really do that. I like to write my videos, which means that I. One of the things I was really trying to do over the last six months was get better at writing videos, was being able to make my points, but also keeping it entertaining and also keeping the piercing going.
Because I often know what I want to say in a video, but it's. How do I get that across in a way that actually people might listen to? And I've. I've always had the kind of issue of being a little bit strident, I think. So I've been trying to moderate that a little bit and make them just a little bit funner. I talk about a lot of things that I think are ultimately quite critical. I'm very critical.
And ultimately that can lead to a little bit of a negative experience for people, you know, And I don't want people to feel bad coming out of the videos, even if I'm talking about something that is bad, even if I'm talking about something. Because unfortunately, the fact of the matter is there is often things that are bad that are happening that need to be talked about, but I still want people to have a good time with me,
if you know what I mean. So I'm often really trying to make the videos fun, as fun as possible, even if they are by something that is serious and not great. When you made this change. So kind of, I guess taking it back a couple minutes here when you made this jump from Batman War Games to Games Workshop, so sometimes when people make a leap like that, it's scary and it holds them back. And you talked about how for you, it was, you'd kind of always wanted to go in this direction.
But I have a 2 parter first one. How did you feel when you were making that shift? What did it feel like for you in that time when you were going through it? At the time, it was, it was, it was, it was thrilling, I guess is a good word for it. It was exciting in the sense that for the first time I'd had a video that was performing well. Right.
I was having a video that was, that was getting more views than maybe like the couple, a dozen people who were interested in hearing about the Batman Miniatures Game. And that was exciting. It was exciting to actually have my opinion be heard by, by a lot of people. That first video that I did that kind of took off was almost more of an explainer. It wasn't really me necessarily giving
like much of an opinion. It was, you know, there's this problem, here's why there's a problem, people are annoyed, here's why they're annoyed, you know, and then addendum, here's my thoughts. Bye. Bye. You know, that was kind of the video and it was, it was serving a purpose. But I knew that I wanted to pivot into having a more of a kind of opinion critique based channel because that's just kind of who I am. Right.
And so that was, it was exciting to have content, but it was also quite scary as well. It was frightening because you have an opportunity and it's one of those things where, you know, you have an opportunity and you don't want to let it kind of slip through your fingers.
So the very first thing I did was I had been working on a series for the Batman Miniatures Game where I was kind of laboriously going through every single faction, really highly edited, like tons of effort, spending hours and hours days editing these videos and they weren't getting very many views. And I was almost, I was like 95% done on one of those videos when that video took off, when the game structure video took off.
And I just stopped working on that one completely didn't release it and just started working on a new video. I just dropped it because ultimately at the end of the day, there wasn't really much of an audience for it. Yeah, I'd imagine. Yeah. So I just, I went with what was working, what people were actually interested in hearing about. And it was Games Workshop. And since then, I mean, my opinion is basically I have to talk about Warhammer because most people want to hear about Warhammer.
And there's lots of interesting things to talk about Warhammer, but that doesn't mean that I can't then use my platform to talk about other games. Right? Like, I've already. I've already gotten people hearing about Carnivale on this, on this podcast. So when you started that, what was the. When you started this pivot, the shift? What was the public opinion and how did you react? Or what did it. How did it change your strategy, your. Thoughts
in terms of the videos? I mean, I. If I. If I remember correctly, I remember them being received well enough, I think I. I do. I. The. At the time, I was operating from a little. I had a chair with, like a green screen, you know, like a little bubble green screen that was attached to the back of the chair. So I had the zoo. The camera really in. I had to have my hands like that because I couldn't. I couldn't go any further.
Otherwise I got cut out of the camera and all my videos were me basically with a scrolling Reddit background that, like, was super busy and you couldn't really see anything. And I was cut. I was cutting myself. So there was. It was a very amateurish kind of content at the time. But I was also doing things like I was adding skits in and stuff too. I was really trying to bring a little bit of extra value. The way I see it is in any niche. And this goes for, like, anyone who's
looking to try and do something. In YouTube, you can either do something that no one else is doing, which is really hard. It's really hard to do something no one else is doing, but they're out there. If you, if you've got an interest in it, you have to do something that no one else is doing. Or you can do something that other people are doing but better than everybody else, right? You have to. The way I view it is you. You don't get given views, right?
You have to earn views, you have to win views. You have to get people interested, and that might be through exciting titles or clever thumbnails or, you know, really interesting premises of videos. Or it might also be having people enjoy your content when they do watch so they'll click again the next time. That's another big one. So I was just trying to raise the bar on what I would do, and that included writing scripts at the time.
It was very rare at the time for most content creators to be writing scripts. So I started writing scripts and I actually started structuring my thoughts in a way and thinking about jokes and stuff. This leads into really the business side of Say, being a content creator and a YouTuber, and you mentioned a bunch of things that are really important, say, dynamics to say, creating content that people will view. What you said, okay, creative taglines or your visual images, like,
I guess it's not thumbnail. Is that what they call it? Thumbnail? I guess, yeah. What your thumbnail is, or even just what you're creative. How you come up with your ideas for your videos and doing something different from what other people are doing. Could you speak a little bit on maybe some of the tactics or some of the strategies that. That you have discovered that work for people to be able to build their own channels or they're kind of like the science behind the business of YouTube.
Oh, wow. So that's really tough. Honestly, I don't think there is necessarily a science. And it's still, even to this day, like, you know, having done it for like two and a half years, three years, I'm still not sure sometimes what will work and what won't work. And there's been times where I've kind of overstepped things as well. So it's kind of tough. What I would say is that something that can help is to watch YouTube yourself.
It's just one of those things. If you're somebody who wants to get into YouTube, you have to watch other. And what I love to do is take what's working in one niche and then apply it to my own. So I've gotten full video ideas by watching somebody, you know, like, who's maybe a video game content creator. And I watch them do something. I'm like, actually, you know what? I think I can translate that well into my own niche. And it.
You just have to watch wildly widely and watch a wide amount of creators. I think they kind of basically steal. Basically steal really good ideas and use them for your own. One of the things as well is that it's really. I think it's toughest at the beginning, and it does get easier over time as you. The channels have a little bit of a momentum behind them. It's very rare for a channel to go from, you know, having a lot of views and then suddenly no one cares anymore.
If you're consistent, you'll often get views. If you're already getting views. If you get me, there's kind of like a, you know, winners continue to win. It's really hard to get that audience in the first place. To win that audience in the first place. So you're trying to turn out a real banger, I think, the first time. Yeah. And it's really tough. There's no science behind it. It really is a little bit more like an art, I guess or kind of a little bit of magic, honestly.
You're sort of just hoping that whatever you've done will make an impact on viewers and it's something that they are interested in and will want to watch, I guess the best. I've always thought that quality over quantity as well, you know, try to make the videos as good as they can be and that will, that will get people. If you're putting a lot of effort in, it shows through in the videos and people will, will respect that. I think. Yeah, that's apparent in your in depth analysis and explanation
Videos like that quality is there. Yeah. And I definitely. Because so the last one I was watching, I don't actually know when it was from, but it was the Pineapple one. You start off and I remember being like, this title has Warhammer in it, but she's going on about pineapples. And I was like, this, this, this transition is going to be good. It's going to be good. Where is it? Where is it?
And then it was great. It was like, I'm not going to ruin it for people, but like it was a good tie in that became this common thread that was woven throughout the rest of the, of the. I think it was an 18 minute video. And I just remember thinking like that was fun. That was a fun tangent that was informative in a totally unrelated niche. And then it came back and now I know a little bit of nerdy history that I didn't before.
Yeah. You know, the way I approach videos is I always want people to come away from them either having. Because there are some throwaway videos I do like either having had fun with them and laughed. I always want to get like at least a laugh during a video or have come away, haven't learned something new or maybe looking at something a completely different way. One of the things I loved at university, whenever I was studying law was the philosophy of law.
And my favorite part about that was getting to look at things and then looking at them from different perspectives and coming at them from different angles and really testing something. And that's something that I employ on the channel. I'm always trying to maybe get people to look at things a different way because often we're kind of rehashing the same arguments that are happening all the time.
Or maybe there's a common response that I hear, you know, like a business is a business, it's going to have to make profit. And I like to go towards those common sayings and examine them and really test them and think, you know, like, well, is this correct? Is it not? You know, on that note, talking about what you did before this and as far as your profession, because you were doing war games for. You said, like,
20 years. So, I mean, first off, that is an amazing amount of knowledge to bring into this, which is awesome. So from the law side and law school, what do you think you did? Just talk about the philosophy of law, but I'm curious if there's anything else that you've brought in that you think regularly about that has given you a unique, almost competitive advantage, but more so just part of your own flair and value.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think it's one of those things where I think getting like, maybe like an educational law, for example, while I'm not really looking at, like, you know, the statutes of how to sell miniature or anything like that. But there is definitely an advantage that comes from having had to, like, I had to write a lot of essays, you know, I had to do a lot of exams. I had to learn a lot of facts and then immediately forget them the moment they were no longer useful. So I had to.
I had to do a lot of stuff like that where I couldn't say whether or not that's giving me, like, a huge advantage over other people. People. But I do write my videos, and I do spend a lot of time writing them, and I definitely, you know, it's helped me understand things a lot, you know, maybe a bit better. It definitely has had an impact for sure on the channel. And it's one of those things where even though I ended up, I. I never enjoyed practicing law as much as I did do it.
It's why whenever I do get into the legal arena in my videos, because I do sometimes talk about fake legal issues that are going on, I tend to dress up as a client because I don't. I don't want to do it anymore. Okay? I don't. I don't want to do law anymore. I'm doing YouTube now. And so every single time I get dragged back in, I dress up as a clown. Just so everyone knows I'm on YouTube. All right? Don't take this as legal advice. Chill out. That's great.
I'm dressed as a clown, you know, you can't. You can't cite me in a courtroom. That's awesome. I still remember that ogl, or at least the OGL video where you were doing the clown thing. I thought was a great way in which to. Yeah. Bring people into the lens of what you're looking at and how silly everything can be when you, when you're. When we're talking about, like a fantasy game. And it's all very, very important to us. And the thing is, right, the law can be very dry as well. So you
got to make it fun and fun and engaging. Right. That's what YouTube's all about. Honk, honk. Yeah. Well, you, You. You are very well researched too. Right. Like, I feel that you. At least it seems that way when you talk about these things. I think to myself, well, I'm glad she's done some research on this because I would probably hate digging through all the
Google or articles or whatever it is. Like, do you have a philosophy around or tactics around research that you bring to each of your videos? Yeah. So one of the things is I tend not to be like, breaking the news. I tend to come a little bit later because I do, I do. I look into the things. I've given myself kind of a schedule now. It used to be the case, and this is something I used to do whenever I first started the channel was.
I was always in a rush to try and be like one of the first people to get the video out. But I've had to understand that between writing and editing and like the amount of kind of effort, like skits and things like that, I just can't. I can't get the video out the next day that a news story breaks. So I like to get. I often just give it a couple of days and I do research in that time and I see what other people are saying and I kind of get my own perspective on it and I present it
essentially at that stage for research. I mean, it's one of those things where if you're working in a niche that you are already, that you already love, then the research isn't that tough because I'm already reading these articles. I'm already doing this research in my spare time. That's where a lot of this comes from. I'm. I'm. I'm connected in a lot of different spaces. So I'm seeing this stuff as it happens.
And one of the things I actually had to kind of get over or understand was that not everybody is right. There'll be things that happen and I'll. I'll think to myself, well, everybody knows what's going on with, you know, with the ogl. There's no need for me to make a video on it. But that's not the case. Actually, there, there's a lot of people who maybe aren't as connected, connected to things. And even if you're not, you know, it doesn't have to be RPGs or war games. It can be anything.
If you're someone who has a massive interest in a certain area, then not everybody has that interest. Not everybody's going to know the same things that you know about it. And understanding your own mastery of a topic is really tough to get because your only perspective that you have is your own. But you might know a lot about something that maybe other people don't know anything about. And that might be a surprise to you, how little they know. Like, I'll. Sometimes I'll talk about games.
Like I'll talk about Dungeons and Dragons and I'll mention, like, Call of Cthulhu, just another rpg. And people will be like, oh, I did. Like, oh, what Call of Cthulhu. I'm like, yeah, it's been around for like, since the 70s, you know, like, this is a game that has existed for a really long time. But I'm constantly having people tell me that they'd never heard of this game or that they've been exposed to a game that I thought was
common knowledge through my content. And yeah, it's the same with research as well, you know, and it's the same with, like, most topics. There's an interesting compounding effect also as you're doing your research and as you're doing more work on this subjects, you know, that is, those are tidbits that one keeps. And so then it carries over into the next project. And I think that can't be underestimated for content creators in general.
Oh yeah, you create, and you create a continuity as well in your own, your own channel. You can refer to incidents that have occurred in the past. This is good and bad, though, like, for content creators. One of my issues is I have a big bugbear with things like exclusive miniatures, which is where maybe Guinness Workshop will sell this big box set filled with miniatures. And they're all miniatures that are old. You know, you might already have them, except for one.
There might be one miniature in there that no one has that's totally new and it's designed to incentivize you to buy into it. It. And I hate this. I hate this so much. I. It really frustrates me. And over the last couple of years, Games Workshop have gone from never really doing this to doing this with every single release now they'll. They'll Always have exclusive miniatures locked inside a big box.
And then you'll have to wait months and months and months or maybe it'll just never come out for it to come out separately. And this really frustrates me. But I've talked about it so many times now on the channel that at this time, like I can't really talk about it anymore. Like, I mean I've said, you know, it's been belabored by me and nothing, nothing is cheap. Tangent really. So what kind of price point are we talking here? Because I don't, I don't know what.
We're talking hundreds of dollars. We're talking hundreds of dollars for a. Box if you've never played Warhammer or bought Warhammer. Eh, yeah, it's, it's not a cheap hobby. My parents were so excited that I was getting into Warhammer right in my teens. They were not like I remember going in and buying the box set, right. Like, which is what they always sell you at Games Workshop. When you walk in, it's like get the box set right. It's got all this. It's the biggest thing.
It's the big bottle, it's got the most value. But the problem is it's like you're never going to paint all those miniatures. Right. Which I think you've talked about in channel too. But I still have miniatures I've never painted. You know, 30 some odd years later. Right. And it's. Yeah, there's a, it may not even be the armies that you want to actually play, but they make a lot of money from being able to put that together and incentivizing people to buy the, the best value
set for new players coming in. Yeah, it's. I mean we could, we could wax on wax podcast problems of games workshops, business models if we wanted. But I feel like we should just go to. Yeah, we should just direct people to your channel because you have lots of content around that. I wanted to go into your story a little bit more because you do this full time and I think a lot of people who listen to us are interested in making their own nerdy passion into a full time career.
So I'm curious a couple of things. One, did you actually have a job where you working at the time when you started this channel? And at what point did you make the leap, the transition to being like, no, this is what I'm doing for full time. I don't need this other job or job anymore. So yeah, I did. The reason why I was able to work on the channel at all was because of the pandemic and the fact that I was working from home at the time during lockdown.
And because of that, because I was home all day, I was able to spend time on the channel and do things that, you know, if I was in the office, I just wouldn't be able to do, like record videos and write them and respond to comments and things. And it was only because of that context that I was honestly able to spend the time in terms of going full time. That was a really tough decision because I did take an immediate pay cut. When I went full time, I just, I immediately understood.
But you know, I wasn't enjoying my day job and I knew I wasn't enjoying my day job and I didn't really want to continue on in my day job nor kind of, you know, follow the traditional, like get promotions and move up the kind of the ladder and things. So I wasn't satisfied in my current job and I knew that I wanted to work on YouTube. It was something that I had wanted to do. And so I decided just to take the risk on it. Honestly, I decided just to
take the risk and it did pay off. But I, I didn't do it like immediately. It wasn't like I got one video, I was like, okay, that's it, I'm done. Okay, here, let's do it. I, I did. It was like I had been making videos and they had consistently been performing well, or at least well enough for me to get to the stage where I was like, okay, I, it was like six months or so. I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna do a try. I'm gonna try and do this full time.
And at the time I wasn't making like a lot of money at all from this, to be honest. I'm still not. But I was, I thought that if, if the growth of the channel was continuing, I could get to the stage where I could make enough to live off. And so I had a little bit saved up, so I decided just to go for it and try it out. And worst comes to worst, I would, I would, you know, just try and look, look for another job. I guess was, was kind of my, my thinking.
And it happened to, it happened to work out. It happened to work out. So I kind of got lucky that way. In terms of trying to make like your, your passion, your nerdy hobby or you know, into a, into a full time gig, I will say it's really hard. You know, it's one of those things where it is really, really tough. It's not a case of.
I think if you're just watching videos, it might seem kind of easy because ultimately it just looks like somebody's turned on their camera, they're talking to the camera for like 20 minutes and then they turn it off and you're like, damn, I could do, I could do that. And you might be able to. I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, I saw people before I was full time and I was like, I could do that. And yeah, I can. So. But there's a lot of background work that goes on and there's a lot of.
There's a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Those first six months that I was working, honestly, the first like year and a half I was working on the channel, I was not getting very much sleep. It was literally I would be up one day, I do research, the next day I would write the video, I would record the video and then the next two days would be editing and then the video would go out and then it would be the next day I would be researching and writing, then recording. And it was just.
There was no break. There wasn't a weekend, There wasn't like a day off. There wasn't even really much of an evening. It was 24 hours spent on the channel just trying to keep to this. I was on a four day schedule. Every four days I was getting a video out and that was it. I was that for a really long time. And it took me a really long time to get to the stage where I was able to manage my time a bit better. So I moved. Firstly, I hired an editor.
I hired an editor because frankly spending two days on every video just editing them and I really didn't enjoy editing and I wanted to focus on other stuff. So I like writing, right? Like trying to actually spend more time on the scripts and get better at writing and entertaining video. So I hired an editor. That really helped because at that stage I could kind of afford to do so. And then, and then that allowed me space to open up the second channel into the, into the D and D channel.
And now that's performing even better than my Miniatures one. So I kind of, I kind of lucked out in that sense, I guess. Was, well, you got into some of this around like the change and shift in schedule. I was going to. What was going to be a question of like, you know, what was the schedule when you switched? And it sounds like it just became everything was this, right? And it was all focused in creating the Content. I'm curious now, like, that you've been doing this for a little bit longer.
It sounds like maybe you have more of a rhythm around what it is. You also have more of the skill sets or what you really need to focus on. Could you give us a little peek behind the curtain of what a day in the life of discourse is to be managing a. Doing your channel? Sure. It's kind of wild, honestly, because I don't. I don't have a great. Like, I'm not very good at schedules. I'm not very good at schedules. And don't get me wrong, it's not as crazy as it was because
at the time I was a really bad friend. Like, I wouldn't be able to make any engagement whatsoever, you know, because I was too busy working on the channel. No, I can. I take. I take one day off a week that I just don't do anything at all on channel wise. I take one day off and I play in an. In an RPG game that I then use as content fodder. So it's kind of taking the day off,
so I do that. I. I kind of have a schedule where I have one video come out on a Tuesday, which is for the miniature war games. Then I have one video come out on a Saturday that's for. Well, Friday for the RPG channel. But they have shifted. Like, they have moved over time. An average day is basically just waking up. And then it depends where I am in the process. Like, every day is different if I'm.
I can either be researching or literally just hanging out in hobby communities to see what's going on or just like, talking with friends to see what's happening with them. It can be either working on one of my existing scripts because I have. I kind of have two tiers of videos. I have videos that are like. I released a video today that was me just going through a bunch of, like, Dungeons and Dragons merchandise. That's a video that I can just.
I have an idea for it. I'm like, okay, that could be a pretty cool video. I'm gonna record it and do it and just see what happens. And it works out or it doesn't work out. I've got lots of videos like that. There's lots of videos that never worked out that I recorded. I spent all this time on, and then it has never went out.
And then there's kind of the video where I kind of work on the script and I know I'm going to talk about it that week and I just do that or there's like this other, like this secret tier video which is where I spend a ton of time researching. It's like a really deep dive into a topic and then it just gets released like it's any other video. But people don't know that. It took me like six months, months to work on and kind of in the background.
Whoa. Yeah, like I, right now I've got, I've got like a video right now that is almost 100,000 words. And I'm like, I don't know how that, what this is going to look. My usual videos are like 20, 20 minutes maybe at most. I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with this thing. And yeah, so like I've got a couple of videos like that that I'm always working on in the background. So maybe I'm working on that, but usually I'm working on just the next video.
I'm writing a script and then once I do that. But that can take, that can honestly take a day between like the research and the writing. And then I'll record, you know, I'll record. And recording can take anywhere from 30 minutes if I'm really like really nailing it, really hitting my stride, or to two hours if it's, if it's a little bit harder and that's the recording.
Then it goes off to my editor who has to cut the video and then he sends me back a first draft and then I kind of leave notes and go through it and kind of actually engage with it and then I send it back to him than he had. And then that can take a couple of days, honestly, between just the actual editing process. Because sometimes there'll be.
And sometimes I'll do some of the editing as well if I'm, if, you know, sometimes it's just easier to like edit it yourself than kind of have to explain your exact vision for like maybe a joke or a skit or something. Yeah. So it's, it really depends on the day, but it genuinely is a case of most of the time, like I'm working most of a day. It's not really a 9 to 5, it's more like a. Just a 12 hour kind of shift thing.
Like after this I'm, I'm, I'm having to work on a video like at 9:00pm, you know, @ night. Yeah, you know, I, I used to be in straight commission sales for my previous job for a long period of time and it was, and we've had discussions on the pod, Frank and I, about, about that life. And oftentimes when you're doing something difficult, and you've mentioned many, many times that. But running a business or doing your business in your passion, especially content creation, is just hard.
Any hard job like that, at least for me. When I was in sales, there were days I wanted to quit. There were days I was on the cusp of, I don't think I can do this anymore. What am I doing with my life? These doubts come flowing in. I'm not going to ask if that happens for you. I'm sure it happens for you at some point. But I'm curious, like, how do you handle those days and what do you do to keep going? And, you know, why. So I will say I've had a. I've worked in a lot of jobs. A lot of jobs.
I've worked in seals. I've worked in seals myself. I've worked in bars. I've worked in call centers. I've worked in kind of corporate offices. I've worked in legal offices. I've worked government. I. I've worked in a lot of. A lot of different places. I will say, without a doubt, this is my favorite job of all time.
And one of the reasons for that is not just because I get to, like, talk about, like, miniature war games and role playing games, which is awesome because they're both my huge, you know, passions, but also because in this job, the amount of effort that I put in is proportional with what I get at. There's a lot of salary positions where you put in all this effort, but it doesn't matter. You're on a salary. With this job,
I know everything's on me. I. That if I put in more effort, I can get better videos, which will be better. Right? That they will get more views. They will. And they will therefore, you know, get me a larger platform and ultimately make me more money, but also get seen by more people, which is really honestly the more important metric for me. And that's. That's what I love about this. There's. You're not alienated from your labor.
You're. All of your effort that you put into it is brought back to you. As opposed to a traditional job where you're employed by somebody, you're putting in all this effort and the reward for that is more work, you know, like, it's not like it's ever done. You're. You're always just. And YouTube. YouTube is a grind. Like, it is a. It is a grind. You know, there's nothing. I think the days where I feel Most like that are kind of funnily the days when I release a video.
Because when I release a video, there's this momentary of like, like, ha, there is that done. That video is out now it is done. And then the very next second is, what next? What next? And that is scary because there's no, there's no reals here. You know, it's not like, well, on Tuesday I know I'll be going into the office and I'll be working on the thing and then at 5 o'clock I'll be going home. There's like a separation between
work and life there with this. There's nobody, there's nobody here as a guide, right? Nobody knows what's going to do well. Nobody knows what's not going to do well. So you just have to take risks, you just have to go for it. And that, that's really scary. And it's definitely a huge grind where you're just going back to it. It's like, okay, now I gotta work on another video. Now it's kind of never ending. How do you manage that kind of. I mean, for your own mental health?
It's, it's really hard. It's really hard. And there's definitely times where I feel like, oh my God, this is, this is really relentless.
There'll be times where maybe especially where the hardest part, I think at this stage is the conceptualization of a video stage actually coming up with a strong idea because my standard for what I'll actually do a video on has kind of raised now this is kind of the danger of whenever you've got a channel or whenever you've got anything and it starts to do well, your baseline for what is success raises. Right? There's videos now that I'll maybe do and I'll get a number of views on them.
And maybe I'm unsatisfied with that. I'm like, that's not, that's not great. That's kind of not as good as my last couple of videos. But that compared to like six months ago or a year ago is incredibly. Well, like a year ago I would have been like, this is amazing. Oh my God, you know? And yet for now it's unsatisfying because the context has kind of changed and my barometer for what is successful and what isn't has changed.
And that is hard, like to get your kind of mind around and to keep perspective on those things, you know? And I mean, three years ago I would have been really happy if more than a couple hundred People were watching a video, you know, and so it, it's just trying to, trying to keep that, that perspective can be really tough. Could we, could I ask, because you mentioned a few things there, but one is the metrics and what you look at.
One is obviously views and how many people are looking at this, but what are the other metrics in your business that really are the determiner of success for you? And where do you, you know, what do you. What brings you the clues as to where to go next? Honestly, it mostly is views. Like views is the really big one, Views and then likes to dislikes ratio.
So if I get like a lot of views, but people didn't like it, like, I read a lot of my comments and if people are like, oh, I don't like this, I will respond to that. So whenever I release a video, I'm actually very responsive to what's happening with the video. Like, it doesn't end there. Whenever I release a video, I will watch it and if it's like not actually watch the video, like I'm going to watch its performance.
If people aren't enjoying it or they aren't clicking on it, then I'm going to change the title and the thumbnail. I'm going to manage it and see if comments are like, oh, I don't like this and people are really upset about it, then I might, might change the title to be a little bit more explanatory about what I mean. Even though that's really hard with a title, you got like six words. Like, there's not a lot of room for nuance in that. So that can be really tough.
What's also really tough is knowing what feedback to ignore, knowing there are just certain realities to the platform that if you don't work on the platform, you don't get. Right. Like sometimes, like people, people are always accused. I've been accused of clickbait since the very beginning. And the problem with that is that everything is clickbait. It like anything interesting is clickbait. Yeah, it's all kind of the game, isn't it? Yeah, like it's. The entire enterprise
of having a title is a clickbait. Right. And. And so it's trying to navigate this space of what is too much and what isn't right. Because there's been times where I've overstepped the bounds and I've had to change things. So it's trying to know when, when to change things. That's. That could be really tough. So views are super important, but how that people are responding to the video is really important
and there's no real metric for that. I mean, like you can look at likes and dislikes, but I won't tell you the whole story. You have to read comments and you have to kind of understand your brand in the wider kind of community as well. That can be really tough. Apart from that though, average view duration is a really big one that I don't see. People talk about that a lot. So I actually look at my videos and I see in YouTube it will show you when people click off.
So I will watch my videos and I will see what videos have the highest average view duration. Like the average user spent, you know, six minutes in this video, whereas in the other one they spent like three minutes. And I'll, I want to look to see, like what is different about these videos? Like what is it that makes one video more interesting to watch? And that's something that I've, you know, that, that has really helped inform how I write the videos.
I try to emulate what worked in the past, what people liked hearing about. And obviously a lot of this is tough. It's not a science, it's not like maths. Because one video might have been about a really interesting topic that people were just really interested in and that's why it has a higher average view duration. Other videos might just be about something that maybe people just weren't as interested in. You can have the best script in the world, but no one cares. So good luck to you. So it's,
there's a lot of. And that's where, you know, doing this long enough kind of comes in. That's something you just pick up over time, kind of naturally. Hey everyone. Chris coming at you. Just thought I'd remind you we have a Patreon where you can go and get tons of bonus content, including more with discourse. We spent another 20 minutes, maybe 30, talking through a whole whack load of other cool parts of her business, including how to build up your YouTube channel from scratch.
And we also tackle a number of cool random roles and rapid fire questions that we don't get to include in these public episodes. So if you want to get that, go to patreon.com nerdpreneur and become part of our awesome nerdpreneur board. Now back to the show. Should we do random rolls? Yeah. So do you have a D100 handy? Yes, I've got a dice roller here. Yeah. Great. Yes. So these are usually less serious, more fun questions, depending on what you roll.
Okay. Awesome. All right, well, I'm ready to roll. Whenever you want. Do it. Okay, so I got a 86. Ooh, the anticipation. Yeah. If you could instantly learn to play another or a musical instrument moderately well, what would you choose? Oh, wow. I think if I was younger, I would have said the violin. I always wanted to learn how to play the violin. They just. I always loved the sound that they made. But these days I think probably bass. You know, I just want to be a bass player.
I just want to sit in the background just vibing, vibing along. You know, not too much pressure, but there's still a little bit of technical skill in there. Yeah, I could go for bs. Yeah. Now guitar or stand up. Yeah. Geez. Okay, guys, you're really testing the limits of my knowledge about music here. Which sound do you like more? Guitar. Basically the guitar. Yeah. Yeah. And there's the flea style, which is like that slap bass. Kind of like the Seinfeld thing. Right? Or you
can do a pluck bass, which is, I think. I mean, I'm not sure who plays pluck bass, but it's an option. Yeah, I'll go pluck. I'll go pluck. Why not? Why not? Awesome. I've heard it's easy. Easier to learn that one. Let's roll again. Okay, let's see. 85. Wow. Okay, well, it's easy for us to find. All right. What is your favorite video game of all time that you think may deserve a remake? Oh, wow. Okay. How long have you got? This is really tough for me.
So whenever I grew up, when. Whenever I. This is actually what got me into war games. So I grew up around real time strategy games. Command and Conquer Warcraft. June. Red Alert. Yeah. Yeah. So that. That was my. That's what got me into strategy games in the very first place. And I absolutely adore. So I think. I think it might be. It might be Command and Conquer Red Alert 2.
For some reason, they did like a remaster of, like the original Red Alert and Tiberian dawn, the very first game, like a couple of years back, and then they just didn't follow that up with a remaster. Like the most acclaimed video game in the series. So maybe Red Alert 2. Absolutely adore that game. Absolutely adore the music. Love it. Amazing strategy game.
And I might have been tempted to say Crash Bandicoot because that's kind of like my second favorite franchise of all time because I was a PlayStation kid in the 90s, but that got a remake. Yeah, I was just going to say it did. Command and conquer. I would love to see Command and Conquer. You know those skits, right, that were like, just atrocious in almost every way, but they were still like, wow. It was. It was kind of a new thing. They were making vid. No, exactly.
Atrocious in like a beautiful way. Kind of. Okay. But then also they did something kind of revolutionary. They made video. They like filmed video for cutscenes. And I bet you they saved a lot of money because back then, special effects were cutting edge and hard to do. It was. It was a real. It was really awesome, like, full motion video cutscenes, I think, are absolutely incredible. I would love to have them again. I. I'm gonna put. I'm gonna put this out there.
If I ever create my own war game or RPG, I am 100 putting FMV cutscenes, like links to them in QR codes scattered throughout the. Throughout the book. I want FMVs cutscenes to be in everything. There's just this heightened theater and drama of them is just absolutely fantastic. Sorry, fmv. Yeah. So full motion video. So that's what they are called. Those cutscenes are.
Are FMV cutscenes where you've got like the actor, you know, dressed up to look like a Russian general and they kind of yell at you from across the, you know, into the camera. They're like, hello, Commander, we meet again. Yeah, Tim Curry. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I love those and I'm so sad that they. That they have kind of gone the way of the. The doodoo a little. But everything's in game these days.
Yeah, I miss those board games that were interactive, like Nightmare or the Star Trek video board game. Did anyone ever play those? Those were hilariously and awesome fun. I've never played them, but I've heard a lot about them. Where you put the VHS tip and you'd watch along as you played. That sounds so incredible to me. It's such a relic of the time as well, you know, it really was. I mean, my friends and I were up at one of his cottages. My friend has a cottage out somewhere.
And of course the cottage is full of all these old board games. And there was the Star Trek video board game that my friends and I decided to play one night and we had a blast. Because it's hilarious, because it is. It's of this time and there's a time limit. You literally play the game for like an hour and you're done no matter what, because the v8 chess is going to be finished and something's going to happen. So the first time through is pretty awesome. And yeah, to see.
To see all the hilarious. Like, it's all. They always have the same formula of. It would slowly, like, whatever was happening, the guy who was. Who was the main video person would slowly change over the course of time. They would either get worse and worse or like, the ship would get blown up more and more. So we'd come in with more scars and
something happened while you were there. So. So it's a really cool experience and I'd love to see a resurgence of something like that with now the modern version of it. And you could do different YouTube videos and different versions and replays of the game. It'd be so much easier to make now versus maybe there's a Kickstarter in here. Who knows? Yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. I think there's something. I think there's something there. I think there's something there.
I am available, by the way. Anyone listening, I am available for fmv. That going Perfect. All right, let's get into the rapid fire questions. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, these are faster, quicker. Rapid fire is in the name. Right. And we'll also see if you make the right choices. We'll see. Yeah. Okay, let's go. Let's do it then. I'm ready. I'm ready. Okay, I'd like to open up with. We talked a bit about Star Trek. I want to talk about Star wars now. Not including the original three episodes.
Which of the more recent stuff would you say is your favorite? The Phantom Menace. Dom. I failed. Okay. Yeah. Episode one. Oh, wow. Jar Jar Binks and all. Unsubscribe. No. All right. Orcs or tyranids? Orcs. Correct. Best Spider man actor. Tobey Maguire. The one from the 70s, actually. I take it back. I take it. Yeah. Oh, darn. You almost had me. They. I'm the Toby fan in our group and I have been made fun of for that. So I. I almost. I was almost on my side.
All right, Changing it to the 70s Spider man that I had on VHS tape as a kid where he had to fight a bunch of students who had a nuclear bomb. All right. I don't even remember that show. I have to look for it now. What is the best munchy food? Munchies. The chocolate. The chocolate. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Wait, wait. Munchies. You gotta educate us. This is an English thing maybe, or. Yeah, there is, there is.
There is chocolate called munchies. Yeah. Because over here we have a. We have a snack food bag full of A bunch of different things called munchies. Like, has like, pretzels and Cheetos and a bunch of, like, other things. So munchies over here, a little different. Oh, no. Munchies are like these little cubes kind of chocolates that have a bit of caramel inside them and a little bit of biscuit inside that. They're an actual brand over here. I'm sold. And now, is it milk or dark chocolate?
It's milk chocolate. Okay. All right, Now I'm out. Now I'm out. I did generate a bunch of sort of Warhammer 40K rapid fire questions. Oh, geez. Okay. By and generate, I mean, I plugged it into ChatGPT. So I'm curious to see. Because I'm not super, actually. I mean, I used to play Warhammer third edition. So what I remember from that experience playing Eldar is after my first turn, no one was alive because Eldar would basically just destroy everybody. Yeah, yeah.
Glass canet or like the Swooping Hawks that were just basically like Vietnam. You just strafe the entire battlefield with frag grenades and destroy Imperial. And if you played Imperial Guard or you played it because you loved them, it was, yes, you were not gonna win. But anyway, I thought, why don't I throw a few of these together and see what happens out of it? Imperium of man or Chaos. You know, if I was younger, I would have said Imperium of Man. But these days I have to say Chaos.
I have to go with Chaos these days. Imperium of man are the. Are the real baddies? Can I. Can I say that? Can I be like Dark Eldar? Am I allowed to do that? Can I just, like, choose a third. Faction that was gonna. Well, I was gonna say Eldar or Dark El. Eldar. Dark Eldar. Then in that case, it's going to be the Drukhari every time. Because, you know, they're the good guys of the setting. They're the protagonists. So bolters or chain swords? Bolters are cool. I mean, like, they.
They say they're not. They don't shoot bullets. They shoot, like, little mini rockets that explode. And that's like the basic firearms of space Marines. But chain swords are so iconic to the setting. It would be neat to own a chain sword. So I'm gonna go chain sword. Nice. Mankind's survival or the pursuit of ultimate knowledge. Wow. Okay, well, we're getting very philosophical with this one.
I'm gonna go with the pursuit of ultimate knowledge because I assume that we don't survive because we get Turned into robots or something. That would be pretty neat. The flesh is weak and all that, so that'd be kind of cool. Psykers burning out or achieving psychic ascension. Ooh, I'll go for this. Psychic ascension for me, please. But if there's other Psykers around. Yeah, I mean, let's, you know, off to the black ships with them. Eternal war or the potential for a.
New era of peace in the 40k setting. I think it's got to be eternal war, Cotton. Otherwise, I mean, like what? Otherwise I'm not. This will not. Yeah. What am I playing then? Diplomacy. The game, you know? Yeah, a peace game. No, no, no. It's got to be eternal war. All right. Harlequins or Craft World Eldar. Interestingly so I don't have a big amount of experience with the harlequin, so I'm going to say Craftworld Eldar. Although the harlequins look really cool.
Yeah, Harlequins. I had a harlequin army back in the day. Wow. Yeah. You know what? That was the, that was the army you chose. If you really enjoyed painting, which is what I did. I was much more of a painter. I'm curious. I'm just curious for me, really detailed. Painting or get em done painting? Painting. Get them done painting. Get them done painting. I have been painting some tyranids today that are literally just.
I just painted a bit of red on them and then I. I left the top of them black and that's them done. Now I'm just gonna put some little eye things. I collect a lot of like Horde armies. And what that means is that there's a lot of miniatures in the, in those armies. So I, I say just get them done. Ultimately there's a lot of amazing painters out there who will paint models and they'll put them up on Instagram, you know, with the studio lights on and the detailing and all the.
All the paint schemes just look absolutely gorgeous and they're like layering on these different like colors. Ultimately, I. My favorite element of war games is the playing in and of itself. So I just want to get onto the table with a good looking army. And I always find that like, just getting things done is the best way to do that. Otherwise you just sit with like a load of unpainted miniatures forever. Yeah, I actually. So you can kind of see over my shoulder there's
some stuff set up over there. I don't know if you can really tell on the screen, but doing some terrain pieces because, you know, like I said, I Don't do Warhammer, but I do D and D. So for the terrain. That for me is what really takes the immersion to the next level is when you place some like, hey, here's a tree that I painted, you know, or like a boulder. You know, it's small, it's not too hard to do, doesn't require the kind of detail that a character does and.
But it is very much like quick and dirty sometimes. Oh yeah. I think, I think there's a satisfaction that you get from putting a model down on the table, regardless of how well you've kind of painted it. So long as that to you it's done. And I think that that's really satisfying. Yes. Warp storms or webway portals. Webway portals, please. I would much prefer to travel safely than through the warp where all the demons live. As you can tell. I don't even
know what some of these mean. I'm just, I'm just hoping that these are. Let's see here. Oh, purge the Xenos or embrace alien alliances. You know what I figure if I were in the 40k setting, I'd love to be a rogue trader who is a type of person that travels the stars, kind of like a pirate and basically trades with other species and different groups of people and kind of acts as a go between. Between the, the Massive Empire, the Imperium of man and alien. So I'm going to go embrace.
Embrace alien allies. Why not, you know, know, get some cool tech and sell it to your. To sell it to your comrades. Have you tried the Warhammer ttrpg? Yes, I actually. So my very first RPG was not Dungeons and Dragons like most people. It was Dark Heresy back in like 2007, the very first RPG I ever played. So I got in from Warhammer into role playing games. So I, I took a very different path, I think, than most people. I didn't play D D until like for like five years.
I've been playing RPGs for years. In fact, I, I didn't end up playing D and d until like 2017 or something because I actually played Pathfinder a lot more. It was sold to me as basically DND which, which was fair with Pathfinder 1. So yeah, like I, I started with Warhammer Warhammer role playing games and I'm currently in a Warhammer fantasy RPG at the minute. Like game at the.
So for folks that haven't played it before and since you've played D D, how approachable, like, do you think there's a large barrier to entry to learn rules For Warhammer or I mean the. The TTRPG in terms, in terms of the tabletop game, the role playing game there. It's not as big as like maybe like Warhammer in the war game and definitely worth a read. But they are kind of of their time. They are a little bit older now.
What that means is they tend to come in this and they're kind of structured the way that Warhammer the war game is. They have a big massive book and it's filled with loads and loads of rules for the DM to learn and everything. All the items and stuff. They all have what are known as universal special rules. So like, you know, your sword might be piercing, so you'll have to like look up what piercing is in the rule book. So there's a lot of like upfront kind of front loaded elements to learn.
I would say that there's definitely easier games to learn, but they're, they're fun games to play if you do get the, if you do learn them. Nice. Well, I'll finish off with one last rapid fire question here. And Frank, you can have one last rapid fire here too. But fear the AI or embrace the AI. We gotta embrace
the AI but within. Within reason. Right. Like, I thought the whole point of AI was that we were gonna get it to do all the stuff we don't want to do instead of doing all the stuff that we want to do. I thought we were all gonna use it to like do all the math and that. And then we could just like paint and kind of frolic and write poetry. Instead we've all got the AI writing poetry and painting and we have to do all the labor. What the hell? What went wrong? Where did this go? So embrace it.
But can we go Back to like 10 years ago what we thought AI was going to do? I love that. That's how I feel too. It's like, let's stop taking away artists jobs. Yeah. Isn't that what we want to spend our time doing? Exactly right. I don't want to be a plumber, you know. Can we figure out an AI robot that does that? Exactly. Yeah. The last question I have is recommendations.
I would like if you could give three recommendations that are either a book or a movie or something else that has value to you or a tool. Can I recommend a war game? If someone's interested in getting into war games and maybe they look at Warhammer and they're like, wow, there's a lot, lot to Warhammer. I don't know if I could like buy that amount of miniatures and paint them. And it just feels like there's a lot.
I would recommend a game called Relic Blade for them, which is a fantasy game that uses like four or five miniatures. So you can just buy those miniatures and you'll basically be done. You'll never need to buy any more. They're really easy to put together and they're really easy to paint as well. And they're like fantasy kind of miniatures. And it's a really quick. It's a really easy game to play. It doesn't have a lot of rules.
You're basically running around collecting treasure and bashing each other with swords. It's a ton of fun. And you can play it on a coffee table. Like you don't need a very big table or anything. You could literally play it like on your kitchen worktop. It's really small scale. You don't need any terrain. You can do it just anywhere. And that might be something if you've ever been curious to see if. Whether or not you enjoy it or not, that might be a game that you'd like to try. Relic Blade.
So that would be like a war game that I'd recommend to get into. If you just want to throw some stuff out. In terms of books, ooh, I think I would recommend. I would recommend the Song of Ice and Fire series. Even if you didn't enjoy. Even if you didn't enjoy the TV show, you might enjoy the books because the books are a lot better, in my opinion. Although there is a warning, a caveat that the series isn't done and is unlikely to ever get done. But still, it's really good writing.
And I guess if you want something that actually is finished, then. I've recently read a book called Piranesi that I thought was quite good. So you might want to check that out. Out. And then lastly, I guess I gotta recommend an rpg, right? Like, if I've recommended a war game, what RPG I would recommend. I would recommend Vampire the Requiem by White Wolf. It's gonna be tough to get into. It's not like the easiest thing in the world, but it is one of my favorite RPGs.
I've been playing it for a really long time. So I'd probably recommend Vampire the Requiem over what people will. Everyone will recommend to you. If you ever ask for a vampire game, they'll say Vampire the Masquerade. I love the lore Vampire the Masquerade. Play Vampire the Requm instead. It doesn't have a lot of lore, which means that you instead can Crit. All that lore, which is the fun part of playing an rpg. The world building. If you're gonna run a game, by golly, you should get the joy
of building that world for yourself. So that's, that's what I, that's what I would recommend. That or gurps, because everything can be run in gurps. Gurps. Oh man, that's a throwback. I. I'm really glad you recommended that. So, because we have an ultimate tabletop role playing game list that we've put together and I'm going to create a little stamp that says Discourse first choice. Like Discourse approved. Like right on top of it. Yeah, we're going to continue
to update that. Hell yeah. Well, Discourse, this has been so much fun and thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. Where can people find you, watch you and support what you're doing online? Thanks so much. I've had a really fun time. It's been a joy to be here. In terms of my channel, so I've got my wargaming channel, which is. Is Discourse Minis. And you'll find that in YouTube if you just type in Discourse Minis. And I have a RPG channel called Dungeons and Discourse,
you know, because. Haha, get it, that's. That's where you can find me. That's honestly my main place on the Internet. It's my YouTube channels. But if you do want to find my Indian thoughts on things that are flung out at the speed of light, then I am on Twitter as well at. At Discourse Mini. And yeah, if you google me, you'll find me. You'll find me if you google me. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It has been awesome. And as always, everybody, keep it nerdy.
Keep it nerdy, Keep it nerdy. Keep it real. Real nerdy nerdpreneur. You know, I love my work. Work. Life's a game, so I'm going to take my turn. Nerds deserve to put their passion first. Let them rap at first so they can all be heard.