DadMode: Parenting, Gaming, Streaming, Life
"DadMode" is a podcast where two gaming-loving dads discuss everything from live streaming to fatherhood in a humorous and relatable way. Join Josh aka Moorph and Bearded Nova as they share gaming adventures and parenting anecdotes, offering a unique blend of entertainment and insight for fellow gamers with kids.
DadMode: Parenting, Gaming, Streaming, Life
When is the right time to go FULL TIME Streaming?
Ever wondered what it takes to turn your passion for content creation into a full-time career? Join us as we navigate the labyrinth of financial instability and the often sky-high expectations faced by aspiring creators. We share the journeys of friends and renowned creators like Pastor Games and Caliente, shedding light on the multiple side hustles often required to keep the dream alive. We also muse about the importance of financial security before taking the plunge, and entertain ideas of alternative ventures—ever thought about opening a retro game shop?
Balancing professional workspaces with streaming setups? We've been there. Reflecting on how our day jobs funded our high-end streaming gear, we discuss how these tools now serve our professional needs. From emails to podcast recordings, our equipment has found a new purpose. As we shifted our podcast focus from exclusive content creation topics to broader subjects, many of our streaming peers have transitioned or moved on. This episode also explores the transient nature of relationships within the streaming community, and we wrap up with a heartfelt discussion on parenting, online friendships, and having "the talk" with the next generation. Tune in for personal anecdotes, contrasting cultural perspectives, and the evolution of relationships both online and offline.
Josh aka Bearded_Nova
I'm from Australia and am what you would call a father who games. I have 5 kids so not as much time to game as I used to. But I still game and stream when I can. So come join me on Twitch in chat as we chill out.
Business Inquiries: Bearded-n0va@aussiebb.com.au
Josh aka Moorph
I'm a US-based husband and father of two boys. I work full-time and have been a content creator since 2000. I'm a YouTube partner, Twitch and LiveSpace streamer who founded a content creation coaching company called Elev8d Media Group (elev8d.media). I'm a blogger, streamer, podcaster, and video-er(?).
Business Inquiries: josh@elev8d.media
turning off normal human male mode. Switching to dad mode. Welcome in to dad mode with your hosts bearded nova and morph and then it seemed like nothing else happened with it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and they still have. No, they do have competition, like road. Road made some more affordable products, that's true. I obviously I don't check out that stuff much anymore but because I would want to buy it and I have no reason to buy it right now very true.
Speaker 3:Yeah, road has been hot yeah, is that your faux bikini shirt? I see there. Yeah, very nice. Yeah, I'm worn in ages. I gotta make sure I look at it. I gotta make sure I look. Look at your eyes, not, I was just looking at that. That strong shot you took of the person complaining on twitter. Yeah, they don't have the money for groceries, like you said. Maybe you shouldn't have made the decision to go full-time making fucking content exactly like I read this comic.
Speaker 2:I'm switching to pay out twice a month because I can't afford to get groceries when I'm full-time. I'm thinking what the fuck made you think it was a good time to go full-time yeah, like our friend, mutual friend, pastor games, has an amazing youtube channel.
Speaker 3:He does. He's kicking ass, like he's almost at a hundred thousand people, almost ready to get his first plaque. Amazing, and I saw a post written on twitter a couple weeks ago finally was able to pay one of our mortgage payments. It's like and I'm not I'm not disparaging him, but like he's doing, he's doing amazing and he's able to pay one of his mortgage payments, not the other bills. So like, yeah, content creation is not designed for all, but like a thousand people worldwide to make a living no, no, it's not, it's.
Speaker 2:I mean, we all have different budgets, I guess, and you know what our means is to survive off of the income. Everyone has a different means of of income and what, what, what's needed to live. But you've got to tick those basic boxes. Can I cover all the bills? Yes. Can I afford to eat? Yes, basically, can you stay alive and keep a roof over your head? The two most important things you need to worry about before choosing to go full-time. I mean, pass again, it's different. He's got a wife, she works, he's staying home, dad, like it's a. It's a different situation, but particularly those younger people, people who single or whatever, like that's that's. Your first goal is just can you look after yourself? And then the next one is well, can this work? Yeah. If not, do I have someone to support me while I build this up or while I work towards that journey?
Speaker 3:yep, okay, cool it's not the time right, right, exactly. I remember, I mean, you know, when we were both really active in content creation, we saw people saying I can't wait to quit my job and they're doing all this stuff. Or, you know, and like I would try to remind them and I get yelled at for being, I don't know, reasonable. I'm like, well, what are you going to do when you take time off? How are you going to pay? You don't get any money income during that time. What if you're hurt? You have no health insurance.
Speaker 3:What are you going to do if you have a bad month, like every streamer probably has a whale that gives them a majority of their money. What happens when they go away or go to another channel and stop? You know giving you all that income? They? You have to be able to have emergency funds or something. What if twitch just closes overnight or kick closes overnight? What are you going to do, like if people just don't think it through or they don't like caliente, who had like seven side hustles in addition to twitch in order to she was making good money, but seven side hustles in addition to Twitch in order to she was making good money, but seven side hustles in addition to Twitch, just to do what she's doing like it's not all those side hustles were making way more money, though all of those side hustles were making way more money than what Twitch was.
Speaker 3:Twitch was like yeah, exactly, I was in it for long enough. I like it. It was a lot of fun. It's a lot of work but it's a lot of fun. But it you know, it didn't take me very long to realize, oh, this isn't a career. Like even me, when I was trying to make something out of it, streaming wasn't like going to be where I was going to make money.
Speaker 2:It was from a side hustle. I was right. Elevated media, that was what's going to make income. Streaming never was going to make income. No, no, I. I mean, I still still think about streaming like full-time, what time top? Definitely every every other week when I buy my lottery ticket, I'm like you know, we win some, we win some lottery. I'm going full-time but that's but.
Speaker 2:But at that point, you know, I don't care if I, if I, won the lottery I'm not doing it for an income, I'm doing it purely to fill in a void of time that would be my nine to five job, because really I would go insane if I didn't have a a job. That's honestly. I need something to do. You need something to do your brain. So, yeah, I had a chat with wife ages ago about lottery.
Speaker 2:We're talking about something like I'd either have to open like a retro game shop like she goes oh yeah, if you won the lottery you can just stream full time. I'm like, oh yeah, or I'd open a retro game shop and I just hang out at a game shop type of thing. I don't even care if it makes, I don't even think it's a great business model half the time. I really don't, and I don't. I don't see any in my area, in my state, actually surviving long term. Yeah, but in my head that's a great idea, like that's fun. It's just fun that's.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd probably do the same thing. I've always wanted to open, run a movie theater which they don't make a ton of money individual chains, you know but I just love to run a movie theater which they don't make a ton of money individual chains, but I just love it. Movie theater with comics in it, like a geeky kind of shop yeah, a barcade, but I don't care, I could run a barcade.
Speaker 2:I don't know, there's lots of different. I think barcade would be a profitable business. It's funny, though, because you get the opportunity to go. You know you want to stream full-time. You got an endless amount of money, you stream full-time, but you want to do it. Oh, no, no, no, I'm going to actually start a business. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Everybody goes. Yeah, yeah, but I'm really good at this game. I'm going to be an esports professional, alright, you know that they don't make any money either, right? Yeah, they get sponsors, and the sponsors only give you money because you they hope you're going to go to tournaments and they're going to see their name everywhere and it's going to get a lot of business to them if your team sucks. That's not happening. And plus, all these kids that are on esports teams, they want to get paid because they have to pay the work. You know practice, yeah, no side jobs. But unless the owners of the esports team can get advertisers, they can't pay you.
Speaker 2:So it's like look at overwatch league. Overwatch league isn't around anymore. It was a great idea like pay esports teams full-time, treat them like a shooting, like any professional sports team? Yeah, but it just didn't bring in enough money to keep it sustainable for a very long time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah it is. It is crazy. Like I, I applaud people who are going into content creation. I think it's a great way to learn some skills you know regularly, like electronics and graphic design and public speaking and stuff like that. You know editing, event management, yeah. But just take those skills and apply them to another job, another field, really that's, that's, that's how you're going to make money off of it. You know, people used to yell at me when I would say shit like that. I'm like, yeah, all these skills will go, do all the jobs that these skills do.
Speaker 2:Pay way more, way more than you'll ever make in content creation I actually saw a job advertised when I was going to send it to you the other day for tiktok on. It was actually on a because, because every so often I like to peruse the job market just to see if there's something slightly different around my pay scale that I couldn't use my skills at, etc. Etc. And there wasn't job for a TikTok agency, really, yeah. Well, the pay was not what I'm on now, definitely definitely not what I'm on now, but it wasn't horrible either. Like it would be a step back for me.
Speaker 2:And the job was basically headhunting creators oh really, yeah, yeah, and then organizing them with streaming and getting them into live space and just like, yeah, like a marketing manager, I guess. For, yeah, yeah, that actually sounds like a really cool job.
Speaker 3:Like, if I wasn't successful at what I do, yeah, I would probably have jumped on that when I was in the before I started elevated media, when I was in the midst of just doing streaming and I was getting kind of burnt out, I realized that I like the process of setting up the stream and organizing it a lot more than I did doing it, because it was exhausting sometimes, you know, and I was like thinking maybe I should be like, if it's such a thing, like a stream producer, you know, like helping people. And I'm watching this YouTuber yesterday I won't mention his name, but he's he's a great call of duty content creator and he has hundreds of thousands of subscribers in his channel but his, his videos aren't great. His, the camera, the lighting, everything was bad about it. He was popular because he was good, you know, and I'm like I could help him be better. You know what I mean. I'm like you know what, even that that's not going to pay me what I make, no, and I have a lifestyle built around my current salary.
Speaker 2:Exactly, we're both sitting in these. There's a lot of streamers that don't have little rooms like we have, which is just a dedicated part of stupid expensive equipment in it. Yeah, our jobs paid for this. You know what I mean expensive equipment in it. Yeah, our jobs paid for this. You know I mean our jobs paid for not streaming content creation. It was our jobs that paid, yeah, for to have this. And yeah, this is a glorified room that I come in and I'll print something on a 3d printer again, that was my job. Where I'm like I want to get in 3d printing, boom, I'm doing that. But realistically, I come in here I have this massive desk with monitors, studio lights and cameras and motion tracking cameras and, and you know, stream decks out the arsehole. And what do I do? I work, I type emails, I do quotes, I'll record a podcast and then maybe once a week I might play star citizen for like two hours yeah, yeah that's realistically what this room is for.
Speaker 3:Yes, that sounds like. Yeah, that sounds like my situation. Absolutely I I don't. If I use streaming income to buy stuff that I have here, I would really have a set of floodlights back there.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, my, my came out. Lights are probably the only thing I'd have left, but I wouldn't change anything. It's just. This is what makes me happy. It's what makes you happy. This is my position.
Speaker 3:I think for both of us. Even though we're not actively streaming, we're still podcasting, so we still need some of the same stuff. I don't regret anything, I know, but for anyone that I remember when I first started and people like you're brand new, how do you have all that stuff? I'm like, because I'm a working adult man, like what do you want me to say? I'm stupid with my money.
Speaker 2:At times I don't ask my wife for permission. Sometimes I just show up and get surprised, look what I have and just hope that she just bought out what I brought.
Speaker 3:Yep Listen to this podcast, so I'm not going to echo those sentiments. My wife will see this clip.
Speaker 2:Trust me, I hope this will find this part purposely make it the top clip to send up here, Yep. But you know, as I said, I wouldn't change a thing because this is my happy space and at any point in time that we want to stream or we want to do anything, we've got it here.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:As it is.
Speaker 3:It's funny. So Nova and I met doing streaming and when we got into this we were utilizing our streaming personas, I guess, to help sell it. Like our, our streaming personas, I guess to like help sell it. And you know we knew a lot of people in the streaming industry you know that were parents, because we want to do something more, you know, parent focused. And it's funny, like we've been doing it for so long, like I've been out of the streaming world for a little for a while, that I don't know that I know as many people I think people that I used to know really well have quit since. So I think the podcast is starting to evolve a little bit as well. We talk way less about content creation and streaming than we used to. It used to be one of our favorite topics and now it's just slipped away from that.
Speaker 2:I've done a little bit more work from home, so slowly getting back into the groove of main monitor work, blah, blah, blah. Side monitor. Over here Twitch is playing up in the top corner, just so I've got something. You know, some noise and background, yeah, and lurking, really Chime and chat lurking a lot. That being said, a lot of creators that we know I don't see anymore, yes, yep, and a couple that I do great, they're doing fantastic. You know Deb, she's been on here before. Deb got the Twitch bus program, yeah, yep, you know bigger revenue split for her. Congratulations, that's awesome. Yeah, a couple of other guys you know Wes. Wes has been on. He's doing a podcast now with Nug, him and Nugget. They've got their own thing happening there. The landscape, I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Eric, ps2, I don't know to be honest, I haven't asked him much of him from him anywhere lately no, no, I think dom's being very focused on the behind the scenes stuff that he normally does with, because he's got side hustles. His main focus wasn't content creation as a sense of us, it was very much helping other content creators promote their to promote, so he's been very focused into that. That being said, I'm horrible and haven't messaged him either, but PS2, he's still doing the grind. Yeah, a lot more on tiktok focus, yep, and yeah, a couple of people that I just used to see online I don't really see online. I still see. See, I'm posting content on tiktok though, yeah, um, which makes me think that they're still yeah, that's.
Speaker 3:That's. The one thing too is you know, I was mentioning how I don't see something people is. When you get a configuration, you develop a lot of friendship quickly because you're talking a lot of people you should talking a lot of people and those relationships you're creating it's like when you're dating.
Speaker 3:Sometimes they last a week, a month, a half a year and then they just disappear right, yeah and and it's not just your, your peer streamers, content creators, but also your, your community people will come into your stream or whatever, and they'll be there for four hours every the entire time. You're streaming, every single day. You're streaming for like three months and then you never hear from them again. It's it's like you. You can't invest too much into some of this stuff. You can't take too much a lot of it too seriously, because you're just gonna get disappointed, you know yeah, yeah, yeah, 100 it's.
Speaker 2:It's disappointing, I guess it's the best way to put it. It's disappointing a lot.
Speaker 3:I honestly think it's. You know, like you and I have been friends for a while, I feel like this is an exception to the rule for people that we've met.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, you know, yeah yeah, let's go, as I speak to you even all the time and do content creation.
Speaker 3:I'd speak to you a lot less than what I used to yeah, say, of the hundreds and hundreds, thousands of people that I've met either in the community or fellow streamers, there's like five that I still talk to, including you, on a even a semi-regular basis like that yeah, yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 2:That's that's where I am nowadays. There's, there's. It was funny, it was even a content creator. You never met. I've known him because we actually played competitive games for like 10 years. We live in the same, we live in the same town. We've never met, but we actually played competitive games for like 10 years. We live in the same town. We've never met, but we used to play. Yeah, but me and I'm actually the third guy there too but we used to play pretty competitive games online like four or five times a week, you know, a few hours a day. Like we spent a lot of time playing games and that was for years so obviously tell you, a decade playing games. He went into streaming, yeah, around the same time I did. We both, that's kind of like teared it off because we stopped playing those games, so we stopped playing as much. I actually haven't spoke to him or seen him in ages online. I was only thinking about that the other day.
Speaker 3:It's like been a year or something since I've actually last seen someone who I had so much to do with my wife and who knew so much about my life yeah, yeah, I think that's part of it too, because you, you do talk to people a lot, but it's usually very surface level, like, hey, what did you stream last night? Hey, did you hear this thing that that twitch did so? Like, when you don't talk to them regularly, you don't have anything to connect with them about after that. You know, yeah, um, like there are people that used to be in my community all the time who still like every single uh video I put on tiktok. Even I rarely do it now. Or if I make a comment on a video, they'll go and like the comment, you know.
Speaker 3:But it's like I don't have a reason to reach out to them. Like, what am I? I didn't know you that. I don't even know your real name, man, you know what I mean. Like it's, it's strange. That's another weird thing too, and this is probably just me being older, being gen x, like I, sometimes I dare to call people by their real name and they're like no, just call me by my handle, okay, yeah, yeah, I don't care.
Speaker 2:But Whatever, I'll respond to all types of names. I have a wife.
Speaker 3:Not the four-letter ones, yeah, so it's interesting how that all works. Oh, yeah, you know, changing gears here, the Olympics is going on. You know, I brought my kid out for his first driving lesson ever and when we got done we stopped at Buffalo Wild Wings to get some food and they had the Olympics on. He's 12, right, and I know you're the one who complains and says he's 12. You give him a driving lesson. Yeah, you parent your own way, okay, anyway, we're watching it. And then they have basketball. They had, I think golf was still on. They had women's volleyball yeah, that's where his eyes were glued volleyball, yeah. And so I'm like, oh, we gotta have a talk, huh, bud, you know. So that was frightening. So he drove and I realized, oh, oh, hormones, like in the same day, and it was a lot.
Speaker 2:It was a lot for me, yeah, just this. They can step from one stage to the next, and that's when you really notice the fact that they've grown up or they've matured to this next stage. Yeah, it's a lot when you hit it.
Speaker 3:It is a lot, did you? How did you do the talk? Do you have the talk?
Speaker 2:I don't know. My wife and I actually talked about this the other night because something was on TV. I'm like I don't remember having the talk. I swear my mom just said here's a video, watch it, or something. Here's a book or something. And that's right, it was TV, we're watching TV, and it was shit. My wife loves reality TV shows. You know your Desperate Housewives and Teen Mom and all that shit.
Speaker 2:And it was one of them and they were talking about support for women and girls in high schools and growing up in America and understanding this. And I was walking past the room. I said why would they do that? Like, don't you just have a class? Because, honestly, the schools here, I don't know what age it starts now. Class because, honestly, the schools here, I don't know what age it starts now. But there is classes in health in australia for growing up and, depending on the age, depends on you know the detail of it as such, but usually around that grade seven, eight mark is where the conversations start at school and it's a permission slip that goes home and the school's like, hey, we're going to talk about reproductive, and they do split the groups off into boys and girls and then they do ones together, you know, obviously, because there's different things for each one and the schools actually tackle most of that. You just tick a box, send a piece of paper back, you know, and the schools handle that over here. So you don't really need to have chat because school took care of it.
Speaker 2:You and my wife mentioned something and I said, oh, by the line she goes oh, yeah, no, we still have to have, I still have to have a chat with the girls. I'm like, well, no, school just did that. Like why do you need to do that? Yeah, apparently maybe it's smarter to still have that conversation with your children. But in my sense I was like, well, the school explained it, I don't need to be. Yeah, they got a question, I'm sure they'll ask, but I don't really want to have that conversation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's an awkward conversation. They did it in sixth grade, when I was growing up too separate the boys and girls and I remember my sixth grade teacher and his name was mr wilcox, I remember because you know after he showed us a video of what happens when you know you get an erection. He, you know kids, uh, I still masturbate and you know we, we, we simultaneously in the room, you know but it was probably a conversation you can't say to children it was.
Speaker 3:It was surreal. Nowadays he'd probably get fired and arrested instantly, instantly. But you know that's what he? Yeah, it was creepy. So that was that. Unlock your childhood trauma. Yeah, this is going to be a very different kind of podcast. Now I don't have to talk to my three-year-old Lie down on the couch, so it's I don't know. I asked my kid kind of circling back there about it.
Speaker 3:I'm like what but okay, I just wanna, I just wanna like support him because, like I know very well, and you probably remember this too like your first heartbreak, you feel like you should just jump off a bridge and I wanna make sure that I'm involved enough so he can come to me or his mom and talk about it whenever it happens, you know.
Speaker 2:I think the best thing to do is just to touch base a little bit, like hey, I've said it with my son a little bit with the daughters over the time. So it's been like either you got a girlfriend or something like that, and he might say, yeah, or now, whatever, you want to talk about things, let me know. Like I've been through, I've gone through it all, man, I'm happy to have chats if you ever want to ask questions or something. Yeah, you know, because I've watched my son do some stupid, stupid stuff and I've mentioned that on here multiple times.
Speaker 2:I know through primary school, one of the girls that he had a crush on was the deputy principal's daughter. Oh, and at one stage he actually asked the deputy principal if it would be all right if he could take her Really. Like dude, you picked the and at one stage he actually asked the deputy principal if it would be all right if he could take it Really. Like dude, you picked the wrong girl at the school. You're putting a target on your back. Stay low, stay low. But like I mean, our son's the same age and I was asking my son for ages there about underarm hair.
Speaker 3:Like have you got underarm?
Speaker 2:hair yet no, no, I'm like, oh, let me have a look. No, no, like he was really shy about that, yeah, yeah. And I'm just kind of like look at this, let it go. It's like I know you're good, things are gonna happen. I'm sure you've heard about it. You're gonna get hair there hair and lots of other places you never bloody spoke about. You know it's. I think schools say enough or a lot cover a lot, and I think, as a parent, I don't think we need to have the full chat like you see in TV and movies about having the chat, but it's a great spot for us to say, hey, I know you've done this or you've learned this in school. If you want to ask questions or talk about anything anymore confused about anything, yeah, you know I'm here to have that chat. Yeah, want to ask questions or talk about anything anymore confused about anything?
Speaker 3:yeah, you know, I'm here to have that chat yeah, it is a lot different now than you know when I was growing up. A lot of it has to do with internet and the availability of content, you know, yeah, yeah, there there were. There are no mysteries nowadays. For kids, there's no mysteries. I feel like you have to talk to them, even earlier than we would probably talk to you, because any quick Google search is going to turn up something that you've got to talk about, or the fact that they have phones and they're passing pictures around. That didn't happen back then, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah that didn't happen back then, you know, yeah, so there's a lot of additional things parents who are, you know, in their mid-30s or 40s or older, whatever need to think about, because it was different when you were younger I mean, yeah, as much as the internet can answer a lot of things and and create a whole lot of questions, especially the say year or so, two years, with the more powerful rise of AI, it's actually created a whole lot of misconception as well, because you can deepfake stuff way more easily, so much more misinformation can be spread. It's not as simple as just allowing the internet to answer all those questions, because they could technically be going down a path of something. That's not true. Yeah.
Speaker 3:The deepfake is crazy.
Speaker 2:Oh, it is so bad.
Speaker 3:Although I was thinking of deepfaking myself and looking really good and young, yeah, yeah, like, oh my gosh, I can't believe someone would make that, you know, because I would like that Frame it, put it in the hallway, the family could admire it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually thinking about faking it. I spoke about this when my son was born many years ago. I actually wanted to try and age his photo like as a baby, like age him to see what he would look like at the age of like 20 or something, yeah, and then frame it like print it out, frame it and then put it in the house. So as he grew up over time he would be trying to like who's that person? Nah, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. And then when he got to that age, or very close to that age, I would hopefully hope that the picture would look very similar to him, and then he would realize that this photo that had been in the house for 20 years was actually him this whole time.
Speaker 3:And then I could tell him that he was a time traveler that's literally what I was going to say if you made it a regular story.
Speaker 2:But yes, yes, my whole plan was to display those 10 20. You were there yeah you're time traveling like. I wanted to deep fake his own time traveling history into him. Just completely Mind fucking further.
Speaker 3:And then you Photoshop yourself into it. Yeah, you have your arm around him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, by the way, for people listening, yes, it's the kind of dads we are. Pray for our children, I guess. Yeah, this has been a really wide ranging conversation it has, but yeah, it's fun you've been listening to dad mode.
Speaker 1:our passion is navigating this wild journey of parenthood and modern life, from balancing family time to managing your career and still squeezing in some gaming and content creation. And no matter what the women say, they will never be able to pry the controller out of our cold dead hands. Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, find us on Twitter, tiktok and YouTube at DadModePodcast and we can be found on every podcast site at DadModePodcast. Y'all be cool. See you next time.
