Uploaded and Unfiltered: Conversations about Personal Growth, Mindsets, and Advice with BIPOC Creators for Creators

The Art of Networking [Guest: Voxx]

• Jermaine Pulliam • Season 1 • Episode 31

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In this heartwarming episode, witness the unexpected collision of two worlds during a Firewatch playthrough that sparks a lasting friendship. Join me and Voxx, a passionate gamer and wrestling enthusiast, as we reflect on the serendipitous moment that led to our enduring connection. Voxx shares the tale of how his partner nudged him into networking, making this episode a celebration of personal connections shaping our lives and the supportive ties crucial to any creator's journey. Delve into the intricate dance of juggling content creation with a full-time job, gaining inspiration from my venture into wrestling content, a gamble that paid off in community trust. This candid exploration reveals how personal growth intertwines with content creation, offering lessons that resonate beyond the screen. Join us in encouraging fellow creators to trust their unique vision, step out of their comfort zones, and find fulfillment in the pursuit of creative endeavors

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Speaker 1:

Welcome. Welcome back to another episode of uploaded and unfiltered, the podcast in which I, your host Germain, interviews another creator and we speak about their journey thus far. Tonight I have a special guest, as always, and this has been a long time coming. So, as always, I'm going to read their bio, give a little backstory on my guests and then we'll introduce them, get them on the podcast. We can have an amazing conversation. Vox is an avid wrestling fan, and first it's how gamer navigating RPGs, shooters, fighting, sim and wrestling games, whether it's virtual brawls or gripping narratives, vox creates an electrifying blend for gamers and wrestling enthusiasts alike. And with that, no further ado I keep stumbling over my words I'd like to introduce my guests for this evening. Vox, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, sir?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing good man.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:

I guess it's appropriate that I'm sitting here laughing, considering how much I laugh IRL.

Speaker 1:

so yeah, yeah that's why I have people mute, because sometimes hey listen, I'm on behind the scenes. Sometimes I bang out the intro one shot, and other times it might take me three or four or five or seven times. But whatever, it's all good movie magic.

Speaker 2:

You like that.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, vox. How are you doing, sir?

Speaker 2:

I'm doing good man, I'm just chilling, hell yeah.

Speaker 1:

That's what I like to hear. I'm going to go ahead and let the listeners know I've known Vox Vox and you know what. I can do this now. I can do this now. I already know what you're getting right. I already know you don't have to. No, I'm doing it. Fuck you. Okay, listen, all right. So I've said this to many people. I probably said it on this podcast already, but there was a specific time that I remember. I don't know if I was going to quit, but I was definitely feeling like I need to pivot or this shit ain't for me. I don't know what I'm doing Streaming wise, and I was playing Firelight Fire. What the hell was that name called?

Speaker 2:

That name was Firewatch.

Speaker 1:

Firewatch. I was playing Firewatch Streaming like one person, maybe two, and I was just doing what I usually do I was just talking and playing the game and trying to keep conversation up with myself. So it was crazy. I got to the scary part in the game, like if you played Firewatch the game's not scary, but this part was fucked up because this black shadow came out of nowhere, popped up and disappeared and I was like what the fuck? And then somebody in chat was like I don't even remember what you said, but basically you were like what the hell was that? I was like right, and so from that there was a lot more than I actually found a VOD and what just?

Speaker 2:

happened. Yeah yeah, I'm gonna cut that thing up.

Speaker 1:

But Vox sat there and interacted with me and talked back, and then I don't even know if it was that long. Then I went and checked out his channel and he was playing Yakuza 6 and I will never play that game because I watched him beat the whole thing in a fucking suit and ever since then I was like yo, this is my guy. Like we've been vibing since then. I appreciate this man and every aspect of a human being you can like appreciate because, like, if I need him, he's there for me, and vice versa. So I'm just giving you flowers live on the podcast, vox. I appreciate you and thank you for being a friend man.

Speaker 2:

I just want to let you and everyone else know I'm like smiling ear to ear. The thing is, thank you first of all. You had my beautiful girlfriend over here previously, callista Keynes, and I was going through a time kind of like similar to what you were thinking about. Like man, nothing is really going my way with this channel. Blah, blah, blah. Callista says, or Calli says why don't you start networking?

Speaker 1:

I'm like what do you mean networking? What does that mean? I don't.

Speaker 2:

This is like this is a super early concept of streaming, because you just knew to press live and that was it. There was no. I'm going to go consistently post on socials for people to see when I am streaming and build this community and things like that. I was like you all should just come watch me because I'm playing. And so she said that and I'm like, fine, I'll try it. And I sat there looking through cat. She was like, well, go look at games. Did you want to like? Why would I want to go look at games that I've already beaten played?

Speaker 1:

you know, like I didn't I didn't understand it at that point.

Speaker 2:

But I'm like you know what fire watch just came out. I want to go find somebody to play or watch somebody play it. And I looked through it for a while. I was just looking for let's be real, I was looking for black folks.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:

You know, it's kind of difficult to do over there on that purple site. When I found you, I'm like all right, let me just sit in here and chill. And then we came across that part. I'm like what the hell was that? And I'm like and then I don't know, was this the way that you were interacting with me? I'm like, no, this is actually really cool, because it felt like I was sitting on the couch with you as you were playing.

Speaker 2:

If that makes sense, no, totally so that was like a great thing, where it actually helped me be able to reach out to others and watch, you know and network with other people, because I thought it was going to be this very intimidating thing and it wasn't. We just sat there, talked about the game that was in front of us.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, yeah. And then now, here, here we are years.

Speaker 2:

I don't even know what that was 15 years later, oh my God, it wasn't like oh no, I almost said 2008. That would have been a lot of 2018. Yeah, it was that sounds about right yeah.

Speaker 1:

A couple years before that thing happened Six years later. That's crazy. I mean, you're still here. You're still here, so you stuck up. Well, vox for me. I already know this story, but I'm going to make you tell it for the podcast because you know, that's what we're here for. The origin story how did you start creating content?

Speaker 2:

So, ironically enough, it started when I was back in high school. You remember AMVs?

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, animated music videos from people who might be dating myself here. I used to like I love syncing videos up to music. I don't know why, but that kind of like kickstarted the urge to want to edit videos and do something with that. And then a couple years ago I don't want to say a couple years ago, it was probably about six, eight years ago a group of friends and I was like, well, why don't we try doing a podcast? And one of our friends just goes oh, we can call ourselves, I don't know, non-canon crew. I'm like you know what? That sounds ridiculous enough that I like it.

Speaker 2:

It's like a rock name band, right, which doesn't make any sense, but it's just like, yeah, it sounds cool. So it was a group of about five of us. It was one Sonner DeLantern, callista Canes and then our other two friends, and we were just doing this, just talking. We started off and I don't know if I told you this the way we started off is that we huddled around Callista's old Mac and we just talked into the Mac itself. Wow, we filmed like 50 episodes like that before we finally got a blue snowball.

Speaker 1:

That's, that's amazing.

Speaker 2:

You know. So it's like a kind of preach, the whole fact that you don't really need the best equipment to start with, because that was our first time doing it. We were just sitting there. We sat there and talked for hours. Do like those, those conversations that you have with your friends about you know, whatever, yeah, and how it just keeps going to the next thing. That's where the non-cannon part came from, because we wouldn't stay on topic for anything. We just keep going off to another tangent.

Speaker 2:

But right being with them. And then we started getting into destiny. What was the other one? Xenoverse, dragon Ball Z, xenoverse, xenoverse 2 I'm sure I'm pronouncing the name wrong or whatever, but we would just play those as a group. And then we decided to start streaming to YouTube. That's actually where we started. None of us knew anything about Twitch. And then we had friends and family was like oh, maybe you should do Twitter. We tried it there too, and then that's kind of how it went, like people Wanted to create their own brand, which was cool.

Speaker 2:

So I'm like well, this thing is already kind of built up. Let me just ride with it for a little bit. What happens? And here we are exactly that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

So I usually I've been asking over the last couple episodes, people the origin story of their username. But I have a different question for you, so we can cut it if need be. But uh, you kind of told us the origin story of your name. Is it was. Is you can find you as non-cannon crew. But I remember your first stream back Was it this year or last year, the first year back after the hiatus 2023?

Speaker 2:

you mentioned.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's right. You mentioned possibly changing in the name up. Is that still a plan?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that is definitely still a plan. So I was kind of questioning. I was like yeah, should we still do the podcast? I said you know, you know what? No, because we've been planning this for so long. But yeah, it's still, it's still being planned Hell.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, all right, dope. Well, when it happens, I can have you back on, because this is my show, I can do it.

Speaker 2:

I mean it'd finally be nice to have box in the name you know yeah, yeah, I would love that, because that's that's what I call you.

Speaker 1:

I used to. I remember I was. I used to call you cannon. I'm like that don't seem right.

Speaker 2:

Hey, you know what that's. That's why we got a changer right, so not getting being all five of us, but I was always boxing on a cannon crew in and out, so it didn't matter. But it's always weird what someone calls me now, because it always correlates to my five friends or the five of us together. I'm like, but I'm fox, like it's just.

Speaker 1:

That's hilarious. All right, we're gonna flash forward to the present. It's fun to visit the past, but I like living in the present, especially nowadays, with current mindset in regards to your content that you're making now, the YouTube videos you're begging out on a weekly basis. What is your current mindset when it comes to your content?

Speaker 2:

What I like learned over those two years is that this content is for me. You know, I got into like I talked about earlier. I got into making like a and B's because that's what I wanted to do, that's what at that time was cool to me, right, right, and creating these videos. That was something where I always talked about with friends when we were younger playing Call of Duty, model warfare 2 back home, playstation 3. Oh, if we had a camera and a way to record all this.

Speaker 2:

People think this is great, you know. You know that kind of sat in my head until I realized like, hey, this is a reality, so it's always gonna come back to. I'm making this for me because I, I know I can make myself laugh and I'd love being able to watch stuff back and have that feeling like, alright, yeah, I'm, I really, I really did something with that, especially here. And other folks like come up to me and repeat stuff. Yes, that I've said in this. Yeah, I still have people coming up to me saying burn it down, burn it down for it. Yeah, it's always gonna be, yeah, it's it's. You got to put me first, right? So, yeah, I just find what I do entertaining. I know that sounds vain, but I mean.

Speaker 1:

I mean.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I just want to see how far I can go with what I got.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love it and I will, from the outside looking in. I know we talk on a fairly regular basis, but when you took that break and you like buckled down and you bang, I was the first you got a war. Just like knowing what you put into that God of War series, the way is coming out like I'm impressed, like I've never been able to. I never, I want to say never. At times I couldn't figure out how to make content off of a like single player playthrough. But watching your Kirby and Like the Luigi Mansion, like you make it work and it's entertaining and it feels like like your stream zoo for me, like those shits are funny. You're interacting but you're reacting to the game and I think that is a rare talent in today's streamer.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate it, because that's the one thing I would say was the hardest. Kind of like, what you were talking about with Firewatch is like continuously having a conversation with nobody's there. Yes, like that is difficult. You kind of just got to let your inner thoughts fly.

Speaker 1:

Like oh yeah, yep.

Speaker 2:

There ain't no like. You can't think about it, you just got to. I remember reading some article I don't remember what it was, but it had to do some of like. I had to be researching on how to be like a better Twitch streamer or something.

Speaker 1:

This is like super early in the game.

Speaker 2:

And there's just like yeah, just keep talking. If you are looking for something, say that you're looking for something. If you can't find it, say that you can't find it. Like if you're working to puzzle out in your brain, say exactly what is going on.

Speaker 2:

And I'm like you know what that helps, because you you got to pass that like video test where you can click anywhere in your video and it's something happening Like are you, are you talking or are you going to click on a certain area, and you just quiet, right, or if you click another place, now you think nothing really happened and, like you know what I mean, like you, you got to make people want to watch.

Speaker 1:

Right, exactly, that's dope, and we're going to segue perfectly into this next section, lessons learned. Like you said, you've been doing this for a while. You probably learned a few different things, whether it's technical or relationship wise, whatever it may be. What lesson have you learned? Because you started creating content that you could, or do use in your everyday life?

Speaker 2:

It's always going to be a work life balance. It's going to be the number one thing.

Speaker 2:

Because, what people and what I've done is that I work a full time job. Probably decision don't mean I don't think I've had a part time, so there wasn't really that much time to work on content, so you had to figure out how to make it work. But the reason why I had to take a break is that I couldn't figure out how to make it work. I couldn't figure out how to do my full time job Do this, which was like almost almost a part time job.

Speaker 2:

You know, doing content creation, yeah. But then it also enjoyed myself because now what happens? You play video games for not a hobby, but for like monetization, and now every game that you look at, oh man, I could possibly stream this. Yeah, but the reaction to this would be great on stream. When I was on my break, the first game that I played was Last of Us, 2. And I sat there because I sat there for a couple of days, not like five days or like two days, because I'm like I want to play this.

Speaker 2:

I keep thinking about it, but this is really good in stream. I don't like going back to that. Like I'm supposed to be, you know, resetting and rebuilding, and I'm. It was just one day where I'm like, screw it, I'm just going to play it. And I started playing it was the I don't know.

Speaker 2:

It was like the best experience that I had in a long time. There was, it was work, and I came back home to play Last of Us 2. I was by myself on the couch because Cali did not want to be near for that, but I'm sitting on the couch, I'm immersed in we're talking like five hour gameplay sessions, at least you know, and slowly I started playing more and more games for me and soon, soon, it became to no that's.

Speaker 2:

I'm not going to stream that one, I'm going to keep that one for myself. And it was more games that I wanted to play off on than it was that I wanted to play for everybody else to see, and I think that helped greatly, because it's just like turn it off, turn it off.

Speaker 2:

You don't need to be on at all times. You got to have that time for yourself to be able to breathe, for you to be able to just see what's around you and be able to grow from that as well and enjoy yourself. Because if you're going to constantly keep doing this, the content Christian, I know they say, dude, it's the grind, it's the grind, it's the grind. But yeah, you're going to grind yourself to a halt. You got to like relax.

Speaker 2:

You know what I'm saying, so it's just like like take it easy. Like, take care of yourself first. You got people that ain't like eating or drinking proper water when they're streaming. They got to have like like just start binging afterwards or whatever. Like, take care of yourself and stop, you know, and don't miss out on those things that you did once. Enjoy, cause I know a couple of people probably listening have that issue where they can't really enjoy the things they used to like with video games because they do it all the time.

Speaker 1:

Right, exactly.

Speaker 2:

Take, take it back for yourself.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's okay, trust us, that's amazing. I love like hearing everybody's story Like the backside of yes, this creator is doing amazing things. You might see him streaming and making people laugh and he'll he got another video out but there's definitely a structure to the back end that you, I think not, I don't, I won't say you need to follow, but if you want to be healthy and you want to stay sane, a structure is going to help you a lot.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, whatever. So you can't really like move forward without it.

Speaker 1:

Mm, hmm, all right, hey, where's the advice? Vox, I'm somebody who is interested in content creation, or I've been doing it for a while. What would be your number one piece of advice to give someone who wants to start creating content?

Speaker 2:

Number one piece would be take it slow. You don't need to rush to get that expensive equipment right. You don't need to rush to make sure that your entire weekend or the days that you have off from your job are completely filled to the brim with just content creation, because you're still working. So take it slow. Learn what your limits are, what you can offer to people and what you can keep for yourself, and know the difference between those two. And I think the thing with that is like it won't necessarily help you grow your channel, but it'll help you grow to be able to handle that as you do. You know as you do build your community.

Speaker 2:

Because, that's why people talk about like oh you know, it's going to be a while before you can get your community, because you got to learn how to manage that first. You got to learn how to manage yourself too. So you can't like have one without the other when it comes to building that community.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. Yeah, I've seen a lot of bigger communities. They grew too fast, did not have that management piece, and that's when the crazy shit happened.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it kind of like falls into itself because not that person doesn't know how to deal with all of what they have now.

Speaker 2:

As opposed to. Like you know, you're setting up your boundaries Like all right, cool, we know not to cross this and kind of build that community to where you need it to be. You're setting up boundaries for yourself as well, right, like, I don't need to. I don't need to stream six out of seven days a week, I'm cool. I'm cool with two. I'm cool with three. Like you be good with what you got. Like, right, I had two years that I was gone. Like, I built up a backlog of videos that I composed. So now, if I decide I don't want to stream, or if I want to try some new, like taking this, you know, sabbatical for a little bit and coming back, there's still content there to support. But I wouldn't have done that previously because I didn't have time to think about it. I didn't have time to think about like, oh, this is going to be good for me later on. Like, let me take care of myself now.

Speaker 1:

So exactly, I will say. Doing this podcast weekly and not missing a week has taught me not only am I able to do it, but having a backlog is amazing as a content group. Right, because you get to like, plan, like I could go on vacation and content's still coming out Like what.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. I haven't recorded anything since God of War and it's still weird. We're good Like I got some more weeks before this is up. That is Right, Even if it does finish and I'm still not ready, for whatever reason. I already have another series ready to go.

Speaker 1:

Nice.

Speaker 2:

You know what I'm saying. You run that risk of having it a little bit outdated because it's an older game of whatever you're playing, depending on what you're playing Right, but at the same time people don't care because there's a niche literally for everything.

Speaker 1:

Yes, exactly, and that right there, once I realized that, like Bloodborne, I feel like when I was like heavy in the streaming, bloodborne is one of those games that like pushed my channel up, Not only because like motherfuckers like those type of games, but it was the type of game that would get me to interact and like be more explosive and like more charismatic, because that shit's crazy and like it's an old, old ass game, but it does numbers.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and it's because, people, it's one of those games that you can only experience once. Right, you can play it again, you can get better at it, but the reactions that you get from learning the lore, fighting the bosses, leveling up your character, you can't really experience that again, right, right. So it's just people always want to see, like, oh, I reacted this way, is he going to do the same thing? Exactly? So, like, I respect that, though. That's, that's cool. Like, because I mean, like, if I had a Pokemon series that was coming after God of War, right.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

Chances are those. God of War, people probably won't stay around to watch me play Pokemon.

Speaker 1:

Mm, hmm.

Speaker 2:

But somebody will. It might take a little bit, but somebody going to find it and watch it.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, and I think to the late. I'll just last thing I'll say on it, even though I think there's no conversation. Like the idea behind the content you create for me and I think, like this for you, the personality is what I'm trying to hook people with and, like you said, not everybody's going to go from God of War Pokemon. But they see you and they're like oh, I like this dude, oh, he's playing Pokemon. I don't know shit about that, but I like Vox. So let me go check out the shit. Like that happens more often than I realized.

Speaker 2:

I want to. I want to respect the time as well, but you brought, you brought up a great point. We talking about that. That's the whole thing I deal with. And see, everybody in my community trusted me that I said, hey, I'm going to play a wrestling game. I never did this on my channel, right, I play Yakuza, I've played Pokemon, I played all these different games, legend of Zelda Like I played all these different games, I'm about to play wrestling. Do y'all trust? People showed up, stuff started moving, more people started showing up and like it was to the point where, like, I was top five, top 10 or something like that. I remember the wrestling game that I was playing and when they were the E2K 20, I think that was like the worst game they made. Yeah, yeah, I was keeping that category alive.

Speaker 1:

Exactly Talk your shit. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2:

So, but the thing is, though, we're talking about people coming to the personality, just being who you are, because you're in the community too. So y'all trust me to go from playing Yakuza to playing some of these serious games call it duty shooters and all that stuff to do wrestling, and it paid off. I just said I can do this. I can. This is what I have as an idea for content. We did it, and now everybody keeps asking me where it is. You have people who are not even interested in wrestling. It's not even a night, like not even a thing to them, but they still tune in. They tune in at the same time to watch this, exactly, exactly so, and I still have people now ask me it's only been two or four months. It's like, hey, what is it? What is it? What is it Like?

Speaker 2:

oh, and let me give further explanation for people who are listening, ncw is non-canon wrestling, which is like an e-fed, which is something that you can create in, like any of the W2K games, that you can create your own entire universe, and what I did is that I added people from my community in here and had them fight each other for championships, creating storylines for them. Everything was like done by me. I did the commentary that was the people's favorite, but I did all this to make my own little personal show and kept in character the entire time until, like, I switched the scene back to my camera. So it's just like you know. I created that immersiveness for everybody until the controller died.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, or the game freak out and not do the same.

Speaker 2:

And I have to hit the oh okay.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, like I'm going to put this, I'm going to say this and spell it out I hate when movies do this shit Like this is the lesson of this movie, but sometimes motherfuckers don't realize it when they're hearing it. So listen. He said that he was playing one type of game, took a risk, switched to a totally different game, or a bunch of motherfuckers was like what is this shit? We're not. I don't know anything about wrestling. It was like top five, top 10 in that category, because he believed in what he wanted to do and it worked.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that's, that's been the the whole point of what I've been saying.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Right, Take those risks learn your boundaries.

Speaker 2:

Continue to do what you want. I did what I wanted to be. Came one of the bed, like it is not one of, but it is, yes, best thing I've done on my channel, you understand, like that's the most talked about thing, like there's no other game, there's no other moment that I have created on my stream where people talk about as much as in CW Right and that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

I love that shit. Speaking of which, I'm going to make you do it. Call action box. If the people want to check out your content, where should they go? Where are we going to check out your, your wares?

Speaker 2:

I love how you said I'm going to make you do it, because you knew exactly what my answer would have been. Yeah, you can find me. You can follow me on twitchtv four slash non cannon crew, and a lot of people get confused with that because they spell it. The correct way I do not is N O N C A N O N C? R E W. Twitchtvcom. Twitchtv nine cannon crew. Four slash nine cannon crew. Youtubecom four slash nine cannon crew as well. I'm trying to see where else is appropriate. That's realistically where I'm at. Oh yeah, tic-tac. I don't even know what the web address for that is, but it's not cannon crew.

Speaker 1:

Not a used search. Look for it.

Speaker 2:

Right, I'm going to be that's going to be the next thing I'm actually going to be garing my or pouring my attention into is going to be Tic-Tac. So I still have the YouTube shorts going. Those are like doing really well too, but yeah, this is crap. It's real YouTube. Follow me on twitch.

Speaker 1:

You sound surprised, what the fuck.

Speaker 2:

Because again, like that's another thing, like I don't want me to jump into a whole other conversation, but sometimes when you look at your stuff you make it for you. Sometimes you're just like, yeah, I don't know if it's that funny Post it anyway.

Speaker 1:

Post it, post it, post that shit.

Speaker 2:

Pull my highest view count of videos on my channel. I didn't really think it was that good. One of them is just me showing off characters in the costumes for a fighting game.

Speaker 1:

That's it. That has like almost 50K.

Speaker 2:

I didn't do it. What yeah?

Speaker 1:

Hey, sometimes it's simple shit to get you covered, this motherfucker. No, it's fine, all right, as always. Y'all know what to do. If y'all know any other creators out there who could benefit from conversations like these and more, share the podcast with them, upload it and unfiltered. I'm everywhere I search like almost every week just to make sure that we're uploading, we are, we're good to go. I actually have a website uploaded and unfilteredcom. I just made that like four or five days ago. You should check it out. All the past guests are up there. I'm working on getting their bios up there and social links. It's amazing. Go check it out. Other than that, vox, thank you for doing this with me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate it, thank you. Thank you for giving me some time to talk and just chill out and hang out with my friends. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

Hell yeah, man, as always you know, protect your mental, keep creating content and I will talk to y'all in the next one. Peace.