What's poppin' everybody? Hello and welcome to Popcorn Culture. My name is Ben Carlin and I am your host. Here with me today is my brother Jay.

Who's in every episode as the other host.

Sometimes. Usually. Sometimes I'm in every episode.

Well, so far. Always. But we don't have the fullness of time on our side yet, so maybe eventually.

You just wait till you have a sick day. I'm gonna be like it's time to record Popcorn Culture.

Oh goodness me. Yeah. The infamous long awaited Ben's sick day episode where it's one hour of Jay talking to Jay.

That's right. That's right. Which is sometimes how I feel when I'm doing streams. I like finish. I'm like, man, I've just been talking alone in a room for three hours.

And I mean, not really alone because you've got the people you're talking to in the chat or whatever, but there's no one physically speaking back to you.

Okay. And you need to basically be talking the entire time. That's the real skill. I think of like really professional streamers.

Oh my gosh. There's no there is no two ways about it. I mean, I think even going back to my early YouTube days, the absolute greatest challenge that I had with getting good at being on camera was getting away from the problem.

That is you were having a conversation with a lens. Right. And and that lens gives you nothing like you tell a funny joke and they don't laugh.

They don't say anything like you're sitting in a room like manufacturing this delivery with no feedback loop at all. Yeah, it's tricky. It's tricky because you put in all these jokes or what you think are jokes or what you think is funny.

And you put it up and you have no idea if people laughed or if they were like, oh, stupid. Oh my gosh. I know. Yeah. No, it's it's so true. It's so true. So I think that was that was my greatest challenge, though.

Getting into this. I don't know if you have this issue at all. I know it seems like you were a little bit better just talking to the camera out of the gate or maybe you just had more experience with it than I did.

But I think when I'm having a conversation with somebody and I even think why I like doing this podcast is that we're sitting in the same room. I can look at you and as I'm telling a story, I'm looking at your like little micro expressions to like figure out how you're responding to what I'm saying.

I need to hurry up or slow down or like add more details. I don't know. Have you ever watched the TV show House? Oh, absolutely. Okay. House MD. So that's what he did all the time. And I think that I realized that I was that I was doing these little things like as I was communicating with people. I'm like looking for like markers to figure out like how they're reacting to what I'm saying. Right.

And without that at all, I feel like my ability to communicate is at a complete nutter loss. Oh, so you think if we were making this podcast and we were recording like if one of us was on a trip or something is like we got to record the pop. If we were not in the same room, you don't feel like the podcast would be the same. I don't think that it would be the same. I think that there's enough inflection in your voice and the back and forth with a conversation to be able to to be able to hold a better conversation.

Then what I would be capable of doing in like a stream setting, which is where you're just talking effectively about what you're doing as you're doing it, trying to be witty while also interacting like with the chat at the same time. But whenever I've been doing it, there's always the inevitable moment where I just run out of thoughts. And like and I'll sit there. And then my mind will do like the horrible anxiety brain spiral. That's like, oh my gosh, I haven't said anything for 30 seconds. And how it's 40 seconds.

And it's getting worse. And now I'm all I'm thinking about is how I haven't said anything.

You're stuck in that like negative feedback loop. Exactly. And it just feeds into itself. Yeah, the tricky part with streaming in particular.

I think why I like that's why I think gaming has probably come as a easy way for streaming to pick up because almost at the very least, you can always just say what you're doing.

Sure. Right. And then you can always look at the chat too.

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