2025.08.14: Metrics Addiction

Perhaps the rot is the memories, the wear and tear of the voyages, the wood touched by Theseus himself.

Hey!

Germanic!

I'm recording the plots here!

Marvel!

Gunner!

Eggin!

How about it to you?

Wherever you are, because it is!

For August 14th, 2025, my name is Bertie Bird, sitting right over there.

She is not going fishing today.

It's too hot for her.

Too hot.

I'm going fishing today.

I'm going fishing later today.

It's a very hot day in Scotland.

I'll be in the shade judging quietly.

Are you going to come down to the fishing beat and watch us fish?

Only if I can also judge.

Oh, you're judging us all part of it.

Yeah, we judge each other very harshly all the time when we're down there.

Teddy and his friends are in town, so we're going to go do some fishing today.

He doesn't have the full crew.

The biggest crew he ever had here was eight people.

And he's got four here total this time.

So it's good, though, because we have.

Still respectable numbers, but easier to fit in a a pub.

Easier to fit in a pub.

That is true.

It's easier to get a booking last minute at the pub.

Teddy has finished his training to be an electrician, his certifications, and then he goes into apprenticeship from here.

But as soon as he landed in Scotland from traveling, what?

29 hours, I immediately put him to work rewiring a light.

Like, here's a lamp.

This needs to be rewired.

I'm going to need you to install a light bar over here on this because this is.

Right, on my Polaris.

Yeah, we have like a atv that we use to go around the place and uh it had a had a light bar on the front and a couple it has like what like 60 leds in it or something like that and uh three of the leds went out like in the first month and i was like hey what's up with this what's up so they sent me a replacement and i thought well that just seemed like a free light bar to me so now we put one on the back and uh had teddy wire it up so wire it up i hate hate automotive uh electrical systems and it's so great to like go you do You do this.

You're the trained professional.

That's what all this education was all about.

You know what I've been trying to?

He blazed through

Project Hail Mary.

It was amazing.

I saw, he was reading, he was reading it over breakfast the other morning.

And I said, oh, you're reading Project Hail Mary?

That's really great.

And he goes, yeah, I'm going to try and read 100 pages per day.

And I said, you're going to love it.

It's going to be so great.

And he read the whole book.

Yep.

He's like, he is, for out of his 100 page per day goal, he got like 350 pages, whatever it was.

He just like, he didn't stop until he finished the book.

He's now lent it to one of his friends and keeps going, have you started

Liam?

Oh, Liam's reading it.

That'll be great.

That'll be great.

And I had to point out that we have multiple copies.

So if he wants,

he can spread the word to everyone.

Liam's got a big day.

Liam is the only one so far who has landed a full-on salmon.

He banked a salmon.

It was pretty dope.

Right.

So a lot of pressure, going to be a lot of judging.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it'll be fun.

I've been also been, because we've been doing airport runs with Teddy, both to pick him up and then to go back a few days later to get all the guys,

we've been listening.

I've been trying to get him into Dungeon Crawler Carl

in the car.

We're listening to the audiobook.

We're listening to book one again, which I love too, because I'm going back and listening to book one of the series.

It's one of those series that after having binged the whole series now multiple times, I'm always trying to put it on where someone might listen to it and then go, what's this?

This is really great.

And they'll be like, oh, you have you prove our Lord and Savior, Dungeon Crawler, Carl.

And like try to just like get more people into it,

whether it's their genre or not.

Like I put it on my dad's in the car and he's like, what is this shit?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think the fantasy is a tough sell.

And I'm going to say it, even though I'm not a big believer in like pigeonholing stuff.

The genre lit RPG, every time there's a discussion about that or we talk about it, it just reminds me, like the hairs on the back of my neck stand up because it reminds me so much of how much we talked about fucking machinima at the beginning of Red vs.

Blue.

And it's like, it doesn't, it's like, it doesn't matter that much.

You know what I mean?

It's, it's like, you don't constantly say that something is animated over and over and over and over and over again.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Well, and for something like Dungeon Crawler Carl as well, I feel like it's also shifted genres.

I feel like it started very much in the hard lit RPG genre, which involves a gateway.

Yes, which, involves like laying out like the stats and the leveling up and the game mechanics.

And then it says, okay, you understand all this, you've got it, and can kind of hand wave a lot of the technical stuff after that and then focus on the expanding story and conflict and narrative.

And a lot of the game is now just framework, right?

For the story that's taking place within.

And I love that about it.

I love that every

new book that comes out in the series,

it grows and becomes something even bigger.

I dated a girl one time.

Everything that she didn't like was a cartoon.

She liked the Matrix was a cartoon.

Got to a point where I learned what classified as being a cartoon to her.

And I would think she would describe Dungeon Crawler Carl as a cardinal as a cartoon, probably.

They have like spells and stuff.

That's a cartoon.

That's the way she would describe it.

But it's been great to listen to it.

Crazy

stat I just read

about the series is that every book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, every audiobook, is now charting in the audible top 50.

And well deserved.

Honestly, first of all, that's amazing that there are seven audiobooks out currently.

So for all seven of them to be in the top 50, they're taking up a pretty high percentage of those numbers.

Let me check my math on that.

Seven out of seven.

That is 100%, actually.

No, no i mean they're a good percentage of the 50

but they are they the frequency of dcc on the top 50 is high yeah no it is well deserved as well because they those are hands down the best produced audiobooks i've ever heard yeah soundbooth theater does those and it's the the narrator is the head of the company as well jeff hayes who does

I mean, just go ahead and call it every voice in the series.

It's what, like 99.5% of all the voices.

A cameo here and there, but no, he's he's on all the voices.

And a lot of people, I feel like when you just listen to it casually, don't realize that because that's a point of discovery, for sure.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

So all the women, too, yeah.

So well deserved.

The ghosts and the bugs and everything is one dude.

Yeah, it's really impressive.

Really impressive.

And

our old friend,

Maude Garrett, did you see she recently moderated a panel at Comic-Con?

I did, yeah.

So she did a panel with, I want to say it was Diniman and Hayes at Comic-Con.

And she also, I think, talked to Andy Weird.

He was on the same panel.

Yeah.

So

that was really cool.

I love to see that.

And she's so enthusiastic about all that with her book club that she runs and everything that it was like the perfect fit.

If you like

just the general category of nerdy kind of stuff, role-playing games,

sci-fi books, fantasy books.

If you're on that nerd shit, check it out.

Yeah, Maude Garrett would definitely be a person to follow.

Absolutely.

It's funny because let me look this up.

Actually, this ties in well to something I saw yesterday on the subreddit.

So we were talking about

comedy yesterday and how we years ago, we did improv classes with the employees at Rooster Teeth.

That was years ago.

That was like 2010 that we did that.

But

they were very nervous about doing stand-up comedy.

And somebody wrote, CJ Irving on the subreddit wrote, I've been doing stand-up for almost four years.

And the first thing anyone ever tells me is, is, quote, oh, I could never do that.

And tell me how terrifying it is.

So I believe the backlash that Bernie had after trying to force people to do it.

How dare you force?

Help people grow.

I thought it was interesting them talking about how impressive crowd work in particular is when I feel like the vibe I get from other comics is that crowdwork is seen as quote easy or cheap laughs to get versus other forms of comedy.

And I got to say, I would never tell anybody that their art is easy or cheap.

And also, something can be easy or cheap to one person and it can still be entertaining, right?

Sure.

And I love a lot of the crowd work stuff.

But I got to say, I get where that sentiment comes from because we were just talking about a panel at Comic-Con.

We did

dozens, if not hundreds, of panels over the life of Rooster Teeth.

And sometimes we'd be doing it for 5,000 people.

And that's a huge commitment to entertain a giant room like that.

And to me, crowd work is basically when people are afraid of that.

I watched all the people that we work with do that every single time we had a panel because the QA portion of a panel is basically crowdwork.

You're taking prompts from the audience and then making something entertaining out of it.

And in fact, I get the sentiment of it being cheap because there would be times I would show up from the booth.

I'd be running to the panel and I'd be like, what are we showing at the panel?

What are we doing at the panel?

And somebody would say, we're just going to do a Q ⁇ A for an hour.

And I would say, no, we're not doing a Q ⁇ A for an hour.

That's like expecting the audience to carry everything for us.

So to me, it felt cheap whenever anyone wanted to do just a Q ⁇ A.

I always hated that.

Yeah, that's fair enough.

I mean, for me, it almost feels like not an entirely different discipline, but a little bit, right?

There's a difference between putting together a really tight set where you've, you've probably worked a lot of these jokes.

You've probably done them and seen, you know, what the crowd crowd responds to and massaged them, fixed things up, changed where things go to make sure that you have like the best possible flow.

Like there's a lot of like engineering that goes into a comedy set, right?

Whereas if you're doing crowd work,

it's saying that I'm going to just ask this person, what do they do for a living?

And I'm going to assume that I can make something funny out of that.

And so I feel like those are, they're almost like two, they're related.

They're both involve like quick thinking and and wit and you know holding a lens up to the world in an amusing way uh but one is like having the confidence that i can do this on the fly right and for for me that's one of those things that if they can make it look easy it's not yeah and i always think of stavros as being

the most well-known modern example of crowd work but probably jimmy carr like globally is probably better known and he's really good at like i I don't know that I've ever seen the stand-up portion of either of their acts.

I've only ever seen the crowd.

Crowdwork portion of it.

Yeah.

I don't even know if it's 100% crowded.

They just show up with nothing and go, all right, what do we got?

Let's do this.

They go, we're doing a Q ⁇ A.

Let's do it.

But a big part of it is, and this is easier, it's easier for British audiences where you can take the piss, or you're in a small comedy club with people who are out at night.

having a lot of drinks.

Sitting in the front row, waiting to get roasted.

Yeah, like a shit talking audience, you know, whatever.

i've watched i've seen stab take it too far and i'm thinking man back off of this dude

it's one of those things even like afterwards you're like why'd you post this video dude it's like you're being you watched this back and decided yeah upload it talking a lot about your relationship with your dad in this it really does but uh it's uh

it's not the same audience at a convention it's not and so i would have to make a disclaimer a lot of times like when we were at packs literally like 5 000 6 000 people in that main theater And I would say, look,

there's 5,000 people in this room.

We have an obligation to entertain everybody here, not just whoever just happens to get up to the mic first.

If you go up to the mic, you are part of the show at that point.

Just, I have to make that disclaimer right now because I didn't want anyone to ever feel bad or sad or whatever.

We got to make something funny about it.

And there's nothing worse.

We can all relate to this.

If you've ever seen a panel, There's nothing that takes the wind out of your sails faster than just they let someone go too long.

Like someone tells, gets to the mic and doesn't have a question.

They just like tell like a five-minute story about nothing or whatever.

And everyone is just sitting there.

You can see the energy just draining out of the room.

Not going to happen in the comedy club.

No, no, no, but it's like, I have a lot of sympathy with

people who get up to the mic.

And it's probably a lot like anyone who's seen, say, they've been watching a panel and you're talking and it's all very comfortable and everyone is having a great time.

And you go, I can talk too.

Or, you know, you see like the

crowd work people and it just seems like it's going to be easy.

And then you get up there and then the mic is waiting for you and 5,000 pairs of eyes turn to pay attention

and your brain shuts off.

And it just, it abandons you.

Everything like you may have had something planned, you had like you had something you want to say and then it's gone.

Everything is gone.

You've been abandoned and you're just a hollow husk of a person standing there with a mic.

That's hard.

You're triggering so many memories for you here.

Like somebody would get up there and it would either be the first person, which it's usually a line of like 30 people, two mics on either side, big long line.

You see people like dying to say something,

you know, and the person gets up there and they say, okay, QA, let's start the Q ⁇ A.

Everybody line up.

And then we do a couple more things up on stage.

And they say, okay, ready for the Q ⁇ A?

Let's go.

First person over here.

What do you got?

And then they go, um,

uh,

what was I going to ask?

And it's like, dude, I need you to stop right there.

I know, right?

Exactly.

And you like, you're feeling that cork, like the drain coming out of the tub.

You're watching the energy drain out of the room.

And I'm like, this wasn't mandatory.

Like,

you weren't required to come up to the mic.

That wasn't necessary, you know?

No, I know, but that's the thing is the intention is never to be the guy draining the energy out of the room.

The intention is to like ask something witty and it's going to be fun and I'm going to interact.

And then you're betrayed by yourself.

Yeah, or they try a bit or something like that.

Some of the most famous

things that the audience like berating the other members of the audience are like bits they tried and the Q ⁇ A

just fell flat.

But ultimately, that's great over time.

Ultimately, that's great.

Right.

That's the kind of comedy that's, it's not funny then, but it's funny later.

Yeah, exactly.

Like me falling off the Tony Hawk skateboard.

It's like, ah, that was really embarrassing and stupid.

And yeah, we went and posted it anyway.

Like six million views later, it's like, I don't know, man.

Talking a lot about your relationship with your dad.

No, my dad never taught me how to use a skateboard.

That's really nice.

Your dad sounds like a great guy.

But yeah, so let me just ask you this.

And wrapping up about the QA thing, like being cheap or not, or crowd work being cheap.

Let me say, you've done a lot of panels, right?

Yes.

Did you ever get to the QA portion and thought, oh, fuck, this is going to be super hard?

No.

No, because then you're like, okay, we're going to answer questions.

No, okay.

All right.

Point mine.

Point mine.

Yeah, you get to that point and it's like, oh, man, like if you had a choice of, I got to do five minutes by myself up there presenting a video and talking about a specific topic, or I got to do questions from the audience.

Questions from the audience is always way easier, way easier.

I guess that's true.

I mean, it depends on like what my five minutes is on.

Is it on Dungeon Crawler Carl?

Because I can do that.

Go ahead.

Have you made your way back through the series yet?

Oh, yeah, I've, I've read and then listened to it now several times.

And it's fun because I keep picking up on

things that when they initially enter the narrative, they aren't super important or super developed.

They're almost throwaways.

But now that I know what some of those things grow into, it's really fun to then watch them and chart their progress much more carefully than I did the first time around.

I always had advice for writers, which was if you don't have to say a number, don't say a number because numbers are hard.

Like they're like, I mean, they're hard facts.

And numbers, for whatever reason, stick in people's heads.

So if you say like, man, I haven't seen you in two weeks.

You just set up a window of time and you cannot change that ever.

You can tell a story within that period, that hole that's greater than two weeks or whatever.

And I was, it's funny because I was just listening back to the first book, and Mordecai is talking about his trip.

This is not a spoiler in any way, I don't think.

His trip through the dungeon when he did it.

And he says, I was up to 30 million viewers or 30 minutes, 30 million followers.

And I go, that's not a number that makes sense for what I know later about that character.

But it is, it is for what you know later about that character because of when he did his crawl.

That's

probably true.

Probably.

That's it.

No, that's a good rationalization.

Yeah.

Also, I mean, in reality, is you're writing something

at that point in time, you have no idea exactly where it's going to go.

That's what makes numbers hard.

That's what I'm saying.

That's all I'm saying.

Once you say a number, you're locked in, right?

Right.

And then it's like, what are you going to do about it?

But one of the things that I like about that series is that it moves away from the numbers over time.

It goes, you get it.

His strength is high.

Yeah.

Right?

It's, it's good.

You punch things, they go squish.

They go squish.

I mean, even in the first book, it says, he makes the comment, you're now as strong as almost any human that's ever lived.

That's like in the first 20 minutes of the audio book.

So you can imagine where it goes from there.

What a great series that is, man.

It does a tremendous series.

Let's just, let's just, I don't want to, I could do a whole five minutes on Dungeon Crawler Carl, but I'll just say instead, it's in the top 50 on Audible for a reason.

reason.

Highly recommend checking it out if you have not yet.

All right, let's go to our next question over here.

Hi, is that what my voice sounds like?

Stop.

Stop.

No, it's not.

None of our voice sounds like that.

Everyone who's ever watched a rushed panel is now waiting for me to eat the mic.

Most famous guy in the history of rushed panels.

No, what we do now is we move on to.

You want to have fun?

Go watch, I think it's Matt Bragg and Jeff Ramsey when they were invited to MineCon.

I think they, I don't think they have control of whether or not that video is still online.

So it's probably still online.

And watching them answer questions at MineCon, which, by the way, was the official Minecraft convention.

I think Achievement Hunter might have been a bad fit for that convention.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that.

I think the audiences were slightly different.

I get why they went.

I get why they went.

I just think they might not have been the best fit for that audience in particular.

Well, look, buddy, hindsight's 2020, okay?

That is a.

like we talked yesterday about you never see the comedians in the you know Thursday afternoon with the drunks in the small like three-person comedy club.

That go watch that video.

You'll get a full dose of it.

You'll get a fucking dose.

Yeah, play a game.

How long can you make it through that video?

How long can you make it?

I think I've watched 5% of it, 5% of it.

Ooh, yeah, no.

Yeah.

And I wanted to laugh at them.

I was going in with spite.

I couldn't sustain it.

I couldn't sustain it.

Speaking of spite, though, and this is also a classic rooster teeth topic about tech, right?

What is it that possesses computer cables to tangle on their own with no interference from another human?

Is it spite?

Are you making fun of me?

Because

I just got an uninterrupted power supply for my PC upstairs because we had some power issues.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We had some power issues last week.

But for some reason, the PC didn't go out.

Like the lights would flicker, but the PC never died.

Like it should get like a momentary nothing.

It must have had enough of a, I don't know, magical energy buffer that it could make it through a blip as long as it was very minor.

Right.

And

so I got a UPS and I went under there.

You have to go under your desk.

What would you say?

Like once every three months, unplug everything, straighten all the cables out so they're not tangled, and then plug them back in, and then they will just fucking tangle.

It's not like you've plugged in anything new.

Nothing.

You haven't been picking up the monitor and like rotating it to make sure everything gets that like good tangle.

Right.

You're not juggling your PC tower and your monitor in your hands.

Right.

Right.

Like how do they do that without any interference from a person?

Are they possessed, haunted?

It's like the cords took a knot tying course down at the marina to figure out how to make these knots that I could never make intentionally in my life.

Like I could never make somehow an extension cord or like an outlet plug into a grappling hook that latches onto everything.

Everything.

It's insane.

What is that?

What is that phenomenon?

Nothing goes on behind my desk.

Nothing.

Right.

You never go back there.

Like no one, like the cat doesn't even go back there.

It's no one is touching that area.

How are they doing this?

How?

They should

be in a straight line next to each other.

That's it.

Nothing happens.

But somehow, just by virtue of being next to each other they get completely tangled you've been having some other tech issues as well right you've been having issues with your watch specifically well it is getting close to the new apple products announcement so they might be pushing that button but that guy who walks in push that like make a battery bad button i don't know if this is true or not but it's in my head it's true there's a dude who works at apple he's in an office The only thing in his office is a dial.

It starts at 100, and every day he turns it down a little bit.

And that's all of our batteries going down as we get closer to the new one.

And then when he watches whoever the CEO is these days, Tim Cook or whatever, when he announces the new phone, he goes, okay, back to one.

Turns it up.

Yeah.

For the new phones.

Only for the new phones.

They install a new dial in the office.

He's got 800 dials.

It's just a wall.

Fuckers.

And believe it or not,

the wires for all of those tangle like you wouldn't believe.

Did you see that video I sent you?

I sent you a reel from Instagram where a kid was at a football game.

Yeah, it was weird.

He was going.

So this kid is going around interviewing all of the kids at the school who have Apple watches, and they're all

dead.

Like that guy turned all their dials to zero.

They just don't charge their watches.

He goes up to every person in the video.

He must go to what, like nine, ten people?

It's a lot of people.

I wouldn't even think that many teenagers in a high school have Apple watches.

Anyway, he goes up to everybody, goes, Hey, you got an Apple watch?

They go, Yeah, I love my Apple Watch.

He goes, What time is it?

They go, Oh, I don't know.

It's not charged right now.

They all say the exact same thing.

He goes, I never charge it.

They just wear it as like an accessory, and that's it.

Why would you do that?

I mean,

they're not that good looking.

i know right

i mean they i wear it because i like the stuff it does i like uh my big dilemma in keeping it charged is just deciding like when to charge it because the natural time would be while you're sleeping but i don't want to do that i want to wear while i'm sleeping because i love when it goes congratulations you got you know seven hours and 46 minutes of sleep last night here's exactly when your deep sleep was you woke up you know these uh you had like these three little wake spikes but you were immediately back to sleep good on you i love that It's so stupid.

Before we go, I have to ask a couple questions here.

Okay.

You're triggering one question, which is,

do you have the thing where

whatever the device is you have that tracks the activity, that keeps you motivated to do the activity, if the device loses its charge and you can't track like a workout or whatever, do you find like, well, this stuff, I can't do this because I won't be tracking it.

I do.

Sometimes I have to like, I'm going to go like work out on the treadmill or something, but I have to stop and wait and charge my watch.

How dumb is is that?

Because I can't go work out without my, because then I'm not getting the credit for it.

You're not getting credit, right?

And if I'm not getting the credit for it on my stupid watch, then what was even the point?

Health?

Right.

You're still getting the exercise, which is the point of the whole thing.

But when the watch doesn't work, you're like, oh man, I got to try.

I got to spend 20 minutes charging my watch.

Instead of working out because I need to track my work.

How dumb is that?

No, it's, it's like, it's so stupid.

Like these things, it should not matter that much, but it does because I love it when it goes, good job afterwards, right?

And I love like being, being able to have this cohesive tracking across everything that I'm doing.

It's dumb and it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't make anything better,

but I have to have it.

The other question I have to ask.

Okay.

You're talking about Audible earlier.

This has been in the back of my head forever.

Okay.

Audible, part of

Amazon.

Yeah.

When we lived in Austin,

Amazon, we gave it to you.

It ships stuff to you.

We're We're prime members.

I hate to reveal that about ourselves, but we support the machine.

We're prime members.

We're set.

When War of the Worlds hits, we're good.

We're going to have solutions.

First in line.

All our problems.

We get to ask at the Q ⁇ A for War of the Worlds.

We get to be first.

Amazon Prime Day,

which was an option when we shipped stuff.

Do you want it tomorrow or do you want it on Amazon Prime Day?

Or do you want it next Thursday?

Okay, you just hit on it.

Our Amazon Prime Day.

In Austin was Thursday.

We moved to Scotland.

Our Amazon Prime Day

is Thursday.

And that's a one-in-seven shot that we already had one in Austin.

So we moved here.

We had a one-in-seven shot of it being the same day.

But I got to ask, is Amazon Prime Day the same for everybody?

Is it Thursday for every person?

Why do I think it was just us?

I don't know.

I mean,

I guess I assumed that they would sort of spread the days out for people to, I don't know, even the load on the delivery drivers.

But wouldn't that just happen naturally?

I mean, I assume it's probably like peaks.

If you're getting groceries delivered, it's harder to get them delivered on like Saturday, right?

Everyone is doing their, wants their groceries on like Saturday.

Like there, I'm sure there are peak days in there.

So maybe Thursday is just a really low traffic day for

Amazon's.

They're ordering stuff on Tuesdays or something.

Yeah.

Maybe not.

Maybe they're all waiting to pull the trigger on that until Friday.

So Thursday's the low point

and just naturally.

And so they're trying to get their own day of the week, actually.

What now?

They want their own whole day.

I know.

They got their own day on the calendar.

We have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Amazon Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Look forward to that.

Thursday and Amazon MGM Day.

Don't say that.

I hate that.

You know, I hate that.

All right, Ashley, who are our Prime members supporting us today?

All right.

Big thank you to Prime members TM and Dogman.

Thank you both so much for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere.

And thank you for giving us the prompt to make our jobs easier.

We appreciate it very much to all of you today.

All right, that does it for us.

August 14th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow, fish in hand.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.