Podcast video topics and time stamps:

4:52 - n0thing on why casting comes easy to him

7:53 - What it would take for him to return to play

13:38 - The underlying problems of today's rosters

14:56 - Cloud9's intra-team issues

18:25 - Why it "almost was a relief" to get benched on C9

26:11 - The first time he met swag

33:06 - Can swag still compete at the highest levels?

40:39 - The importance of sponsorships and winning

43:07 - Why "travelling sucks"

55:06 - The "guilt" of content creation

1:13:30 - Movember and the best beards in CS:GO

While Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert was removed from Cloud9's starting roster in August, the veteran NA player hasn't wasted a moment since. In addition to working as a desk analyst and caster at ECS and ESL, n0thing has stepped up his streaming and YouTube game, raising his profile without stepping back into the world of professional competitive CS just yet.

Find theScore esports Podcast on iTunes.

Click or tap here to listen in on SoundCloud.

The 26-year-old told theScore esports Podcast after years of non-stop travel, he was ready to enjoy his first birthday at home in two years.

"It's fun to just be like 'Oh, I'm going to go golfing down the street tomorrow or something," he said.

However, that isn't to say that he's retired. According to n0thing, while he doesn't intend to compete this season, he's watching this year's crop of teams carefully for when he's released from his contract with Cloud9 and able to put himself back on the market

"Making a new team, you have to take into consideration where everyone's at and it's like, some people ask you to simply go ring for them, but I guess mentally I didn't want to just jump into a situation just to play," he said. "I've had my ego satiated years long enough to just be ... I don't want to go out there just because I want to hold onto something, I want to go out there because I'm really going to bring something to the team."

He also said he's looking forward to the opportunity to building a roster without some of the cohesion issues that marred his time with C9.

"After playing for so long, I almost feel more clear than ever in terms of like being able to just sit down with him for a couple of minutes convo, depending on how well I know that person, knowing how they're going to communicate as a teammate and whatnot and one thing I want to do that I wasn't able to do on my last roster is make sure... I don't know, I guess just make sure that the dynamic is strong before we start."

According to n0thing, while he and his former Cloud9 teammates got along well on a personal level, the lack of a dedicated leader led to confusion over strats and shotcalling, which in turn led to bigger problems.

"Eventually other things came in between. There was just tension in different areas, things with practice and different stuff. shroud obviously wanted to sit out, that was one thing that was probably going to happen regardless if I got benched or not," he said.

While the team had several "interventions," including receiving counselling from a sports psychologist, n0thing said some players were more receptive to it than others. Attitude problems were also a concern, with some preferring to stay cool during matches while others felt frustration could get them further.

"There was a point where I think we were just frustrated too because between some people's lack of assistance with the strats or the team, they had more of the showing up mentality vs. the super-competitive people and then not having necessarily a leader and then how people react to winning was affecting it," he said.

Ultimately, the situation got to the point where he said the news that he was benched was, at least in some ways, welcome.

"It almost was a relief because we were in this limbo for a while as a team where we needed something to change, so I remember I kind of celebrated. I think I went that same day I went and bought a $2,000 set TaylorMade golf clubs."

n0thing also spoke at length about his friend and former teammate, Braxton "swag' Pierce who was recently un-banned from several tournament organizers after his involvement in the iBUYPOWER match-fixing scandal in 2014.

When he first met swag at the end of the 1.6 era, the young superstar still needed his family to accompany him to events.

"I go in an elevator and there's an older woman, younger woman, a boy and then a younger boy, and it was Brax's whole family basically," n0thing recalled of their first meeting in Dallas.

"They drove down with him, they drove like 14 hours with him from North Carolina to support him and it was his mom, his aunt and his older brother and they'd all came there. And I was like, 'you're swag right?' And I shook his hand and I shook everyone's hand in the thing and I was like 'Hey, dude, I look forward to playing against you' and he was literally tiny at this point."

Despite swag's age, n0thing said he already had a healthy respect for the young competitor after watching him in online matches.

"I definitely had respect for him because I had watched him online and normally when you watch the up-and-coming kids, they're very hyper-aggressive and their aim and dexterity is just so amazing right? But it wasn't only that, the kid was super patient."

According to n0thing, the thing that really differentiated swag from his peers was a strong tactical sense in-game and maturity out of it.

"You kill the kind of inexperienced kids with good aim because at a higher level, we all kind of know what each other are watching, it's hard for them to really juke me and they have to come out of one of the corridors you're watching regardless of how sick their strat is and just kind of end them," he said.

"But swag was a little different. He would mess with me, jiggle me, peak me, wait, bait, do these little things you need to his teammates. We'd call him a little baiter, but he would always seal the deal for his team. And I remember watching him and just being like 'oh.' And not only that, the kid's actually a good kid. He's communicating well, he doesn't really bitch to his teammates when he dies, he's just kind of like having fun. I was like 'wow, this is awesome.'"

The two would go on to play together on several rosters between 2012 and 2014 until swag joined the ill-fated iBUYPOWER team in 2015.

When asked whether swag could succeed on a tier one team today, n0thing said that while some organizations might be trepidatious about him still being banned from Valve events, he's still a very strong player when he's allowed to play his own game.

"I think he has the ability to kind of come back into it and be a little bit better than you would expect him to be because of his intuitive skill and maybe he doesn't see every type of exec or anything, but he's really good at dancing through chaos," n0thing said.

"I think if anything what he would struggle with the most nowadays is the SK type style. The styles where people aren't really using a lot of overwhelming smoke walls and things like that, because when they do, Brax loves those situations because he knows you're coming at him and he can kind of play around his objects and do what he wants."

Colin McNeil, Josh Bury, Dennis Gonzales and Sasha Erfanian are editors for theScore esports. You can follow them on Twitter.