SPI 942: Stop Struggling to Create. Go Live Instead! with Doc Rock

SPI 942: Stop Struggling to Create. Go Live Instead! with Doc Rock

Liz Wilcox: Hey, friends. Liz Wilcox here, and I think Pat is somewhere around here too. Did you know that 20% of videos shown to YouTube watchers right now are AI slop, and that people abandon 40% of slow videos by 10 seconds in? Oh, and the average US citizen spends about three hours and 38 minutes per day watching digital videos.

Can you believe that?

Pat Flynn: That’s so much video, Liz. It’s so much video.

Liz Wilcox: It’s a lot, and we’re recording this at a time when I’m supposed to be on vacation, and I have been watching a lot of videos. I even thought, “Oh, gosh, I need to, like, remove Instagram for a few days,” because I’ve just been watching so much content.

So I think I’m exceeding that exceptionally right now.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, but, I mean, we kinda always knew video was gonna be king when it came to content consumption. It’s just easier. So then on the creation side of things, it’s like, how do we get to do that and do it easily? Which is what we’re gonna talk about today.

But I, I, I do wanna comment on what you said about just, like, leaving videos right away. When I think about some of my own habits, which, again, I, I am not happy to admit that I do doomscroll everyon- every once in a while. I try to control it. But I’m flipping through dozens of videos until I find, like, the one that captures my attention.

And from a creator’s perspective, it’s like, okay, well, how do we stop people from scrolling? But more than that, even, how do we get people from the short-form kind of obsession we all have to long-form? ‘Cause long-form is great, but like you said, a lot of people are just using AI to make it easy for them, but nobody wants to watch that kind of stuff.

I call it sloptimization. That’s what I call it.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. I, you, have been using that term everywhere. I’m like, “My buddy Pat- Oh, good … keeps using sloptimization.” I’m like, “Ain’t that about the truth though?” Because- Yeah … it just, yeah, it just feeds into itself, and it’s this real, like, sloppy optimization. I, I love that so much.

And I would love to know how to take people from short-form to long-form as well. We’ve started to sort of revamp the Smart Passive Income YouTube channel as well, and we posted a few lives on there. We posted a couple long-form, and they’re just not performing the same way as the short-form, so maybe we can get into that today.

We have a super special guest. I’m, like, genuinely really stoked to bring out Doc Rock from Ecamm because he- Whoo. If anybody is anti-sloptimization but can also at the same time help us with it, I think it’s Doc. So let’s welcome him onto the show.

Pat Flynn: What’s up, Doc?

Doc Rock: Aloha, everybody. Good to see you guys, as always.

Aloha.

Pat Flynn: From Hawaii.

Doc Rock: Yes. I’m not just using the, uh, aloha as a fashion statement. I live here. 40? 43 years? Uh, 44? I don’t know. Long enough that it’s older than Liz.

Liz Wilcox: That’s very true. That’s very true.

Pat Flynn: As old as me. Maybe we can quickly share our experiences with Doc to set him up, because I was on the Ecamm train back when Skype was how we recorded video podcasts, so Ecamm Call Recorder was the tool I used.

Were you with Ecamm back then too, Doc?

Doc Rock: N- uh, listen, this is the best part of the conversation. Okay, so I had knee surgery, and I got a complication, so I was stuck in the hospital, and I was bored, and I’m going through YouTube videos. And everybody on YouTube was like, “Hey, YouTube is gonna start doing lives.”

I was already doing lives on YouTube, but it was very hard. I had to go through, like, a PC machine that was doing the ingestion, and then I was doing everything on my Mac, but I was running it through two separate PCs. And this dude pops up on my feed around December maybe, and he was doing something called Smart Passive Income, and he was gonna do a whole bunch of lives.

Maybe it was January And it was right before we got stuck in the house, and it was you. And right after your video, I saw Diana Gladney, and I was like, “Oh, I think I’m gonna try this,” ’cause all, everybody was saying, Sean and, uh, Benji, everybody was saying, “Hey, you gotta do lives.” And so I went to go look for something ’cause I hated OBS.

That was the, you know, working in the PC side. It just doesn’t work for me. Even though I’m a broadcast person, a broadcast engineer, I do audio. I mean, you know how I know how to do video stuff.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Doc Rock: But it just drove me crazy ’cause none of the settings actually made sense. They were trying to crisscross normal people language and broadcast language, and those two things just don’t really work.

And I was waiting for this announcement, if they’re gonna make a Mac version of OBS that is called Streamlabs OBS, that would be better than the port that was running around. And when it came out, it was like, “Ooh, this is nasty.” So I went back looking again- … and then there’s you smiling and Diana. And then I did something what I always do, searched for a discount code, and I found Stephanie.

And all of these people are my friends now. So I literally signed up basically February or March of 2020 on the back of you streaming live. Yeah. So you probably got affiliate commission from me coming in.

Pat Flynn: Probably, and, and thank you for that. Yeah, the, the COVID kind of lockdown changed my life in so many different ways.

I mean, it slowed me down from events and those kinds of things, which was great. It got me into potentially writing a new book, but most of all, it got me behind the camera for the first time doing lives, and I went live every single day for 365 days on the Income Stream, which is what it was. And it was Ecamm, Ecamm Live is what it was known as back then, that just made it so easy to just go, to just do it.

And as we’re talking about creators, and a lot of people listening are creators or, or soon-to-be creators, removing the friction as much as possible is gonna be extremely important to just kind of making it happen. And then I, eventually after a week, I just could sit down, press a couple buttons, and, and there I was, and there I was live.

And I think that trained me for a lot of the virtual presentations that I did later on once, you know, events started to happen, and we were like, “Okay. Well, we’re not gonna get in person, so we’re gonna do virtual events now.” I started to be asked to do those, but then I would use all the skills I learned with Ecamm and, and literally use Ecamm and its, you know, virtual camera to show up on these events.

And I’d switch camera angles, include sound effects and things on the screen. People were so blown away. And then fast-forward to today, I use Ecamm every single week for my Pokemon channel to go live in front of about 8,000 to 10,000 people. And I’m opening Pokemon cards, and I’m integrating the chat and doing all these things.

Again, it’s just second nature to me now. So I’m, I’m excited to dive into that for the beginner today for sure and show them how easy Ecamm is to use. And Liz, I know that you obviously use Ecamm as well, and you got to the point- If I remember correctly, like, wasn’t Doc, like, at your house at some point?

Liz Wilcox: Yes. Y’all, I am super lazy. I don’t like to do anything I don’t like to do. And Ecamm ran a contest. By the way, I’ve been using Ecamm since before either one of these guys, since 2017, so almost 10 years now. And they were running this contest where they said, “Oh, you know, we’ll help you set up your show. You know, you just gotta pitch your show idea.” And I was like, “Oh, sweet. Bet.” And so I pitched my show idea. I looked at … They had a rubric, so I just followed the rubric. I won the contest and I said, “Hey, you know, I really wanted, I really wanted to win this because, you know, I really want Doc to just come to my house and build out my studio. Would Doc be willing to do that?” And Doc said, “Yeah, sure.” You know, and this poor man lives in Hawaii, came to Florida. I live in Florida. There was a snowstorm, the first snowstorm in- … about a bajillion years, and so he was stuck with me. There was another Ecamm fam that came too, and they were supposed to be staying.

I live right next to an island. They ended up having to stay at my house because the bridges were shut down, and Doc braved the storm every day, ’cause we don’t have snowplows, we don’t have salt on the roads.

Doc Rock: It was fun to me.

Liz Wilcox: But it was so fun building out the studio in that snowstorm, you know, with my daughters and everything else.

But yeah, I’ve been using Ecamm and live streaming since, you know, day one. I saw … I remember I saw a commercial on cable TV for Facebook Live, and it was right about the time that I started my business, maybe about a year in or something. And I was like, “Oh, well, I could do that. I, I love to talk.” Like, I know if people see my face, they’re either sold or they’re, you know, ready to move on.

And so I did that, and I remember I, I posted, ’cause I wanted to do a digital summit before digital summits, like, was a phrase. And I posted on Facebook, “Hey, I want-” A software that can do ABC, you know, cut to people, have two people on the screen, put a layout. And somebody said, “Oh, you need something called Ecamm.”

And y’all, I had a PC, I was a PC girlie, you know, since 1991, right? And so I ended up going out to the store that day and I bought a Mac just so I could use Ecamm, because I knew it had the features that I absolutely needed to get the attention that I had to have to build my business. And now I, I’m wearing an Apple Watch, y’all.

Doc Rock: You know, hey, my… Sorry, I just have to be the ultra guy. The, one of the things that I would say that’s very important, and I want everyone here to listen to this very closely. Two things that sold me on wanting to use this when I saw what both Pat and our friend Diana Gladney was doing. They were showing up just as themselves.

Again, I came from the broadcast world. The lives that I was doing prior, I was setting up elaborate setups, okay? I had five or six lights. It was in a larger sort of living room kinda setup. I had a green screen. I was bringing in this Sony microphone that you all know what it is. YouTubers don’t talk about it because it’s a $20,000 mic, but it’s called a C800.

It’s basically what Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, everybody record on. Again, a huge audio nerd, so I have one of those. And I was setting that up. It takes, like, 20 minutes to warm up because, you know, just the type of technology that it uses, and I was driving myself crazy. And I was like, this little handsome dude over here just sitting down in a room full of his stuff, and I’m a, I’m a Pop collector.

Back in the day, my whole office was full of Pops. I’m like, he has the same stuff I have in my background that I am not showing anybody. I’m putting up the green screen to make it look- Mm … you know, all fantabulous or whatever. And I was like, that’s the reason why I don’t like doing the lives is not that I don’t like doing them, it’s that it takes me 30 minutes to set up and an hour to take it back down, and, you know, going through all the rigmarole.

And so you were just saying, “Oh, I just pop this on and hit this button,” and you had made a video sort of, like, how, you know, Ecamm flow works for you. And two things I got out of that. One, you’re just going as is, so people, don’t be afraid to just show up. And when I tell you what Liz was doing I was like blown away.

It became my hook for the entire year after I left her house. I’m like, “This lady made dang near half a million dollars with a old machine and a crusty desk that was wobbly.” Like, it was a little teeny desk that looked like it was gonna die, but it was cranking. And here the rest of us with these elaborate studios going, “Hey, I need to get this mortgage cleared away.

What’s, what’s going on?” And so just don’t overthink that part. Like, understand you probably have everything you need right now, even if it’s just your phone. And I hate using the word just, but I think in this ca- it highlights the fact that you can take a phone, plug it in, and it works. And when I do Pat’s gigantic event stream, you know what I’m using for two of the main cameras?

Two iPhones. Yeah. That’s what the Pokemon cards are shown on, because it’s the easiest for the creators so that they don’t freak out. I tried to bring in a fancy camera and they’re like, “Doc, this is in my way.”

Pat Flynn: Even when you think about what’s working today, we talk about, like, the sloptimization of things and AI being used to make everything look perfect.

I mean, people are sick of it. They don’t want the fine-tuned, optimized show. They want real-life stuff, right? That’s what’s popping off right now on Twitch. That’s what people are connecting with on YouTube. That’s what people are connecting with even on short-form videos. It’s not the crazy fancy edits.

It’s just sitting down and talking. You know, a lot of those stories, they call them yap videos, and yap videos are taking off right now because people are just… They just wanna hear what you have to say, and if you learn how to tell a great story, which I’ve, I’ve said, you know, for years now, just get good at telling story, whether it’s a 60-second story or a 60-minute story, or you’re live and you just happen to be talking about something, you can capture attention.

You could build superfans, and you can bring them into your ecosystem from there. You don’t have to overcomplicate this, and you can get started today. So I’m, I’m gonna offer the, Liz, if it’s okay, the first plug for Ecamm, to go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/ecamm because there’s some goodies there if you wanna get started with that.

We’ll mention that a few times, but I just, I cannot sing the praises of Ecamm enough because I wouldn’t be here doing what I’m doing today if it wasn’t for them.

Doc Rock: Yeah, oddly enough, me neither.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, use it, please. It is the b- it is the best software to go live. There’s a lot of other ones.

Streamlabs I tried. It was just way too complicated. There’s, like, StreamYard, which a lot of people use. OBS was just a foreign language to me. Ecamm just makes it so simple. And, and I remember creating a tutorial on Ecamm, my first one, that saw, I think, over a million views in three months because people were so excited about just how simple this was to use.

So I’m just gonna keep shouting from the rooftops to get it. So SmartPassiveIncome.com/ecamm.

Liz Wilcox: Okay, so let’s take it back a little bit though. Like, let’s say I’m listening, I’m a member of the SPI community, but I’m not wholly sold on video, right? Like, I know Pat does it. Liz is desperate to do it more, right?

But I don’t really know. Like, I’m scared to get on video. I don’t have the right mic. You know, why do I need video right here, right now? What do you think, Doc?

Doc Rock: Okay, I used to let people… This is gonna sound crazy, but I used to let people sort of slowly work their way into video, slowly back their way into video.

It’s kind of the way that, you know, you train someone on spicy. I us- I’m a heat eater, right? I’m half Puerto Rican. I was adopted by Koreans. My food is hot. When I started dating my other half 25 years ago, yo, her ketchup was spicy. And I, I’m like, “I’m not cooking two separate foods.” I’m like Pat. I love to cook, but cooking two separate foods is very pain in the butt.

So I’m like, “I’m gonna slowly creep her into heat.” We get a diluted Tabasco, then we work our way to sriracha, and now I can get her into a whole scoop of gochugaru, which is the Korean, you know, pepper flakes, and you have to work your way in. Well, now video is at the point where if you don’t do it , you’re really gonna get left behind.

It is the best way to connect with people. If you think about who you’re watching when you’re supposed to be doing your work, and then you’re scoping out your friends on the internet, as we call them, you have this set of, like, 10-ish people that you watch pseudo-religiously because you, even as a creator, we have parasocial relationships with other creators, you know?

One of my parasocial relationships with another creator happened to be Benji. Like, I’ve always watched his stuff, always thought he was really cool. I was like, I knew we would get along. He has a little bit of Japanophile in him. I happened to be doing a show with Pat, and I saw him walking across a thing, and I was like, “Hey, Benji, come over here.”

And then he was like, “Who’s this weird dude?” And then we got to talking, and we’re best of friends now. We talk, like, five, six times a week, right? So you do build these kind of relationships with people, and this is how you grow your audience. This is how you build your team. This is how you have your community.

Your community finds you because you’re showing up as you on the internet, because you’re showing up to give them a reflection of the type of people that they enjoy to hang out with. And now that we have, quote-unquote, a loneliness epidemic where people- Mm-hmm … just feel like they don’t have a space, this is the thing that takes down the walls that like basically old Star Wars fans get together and talk game where nobody’s gonna talk bad about us.

Like, where I used to have to run from people in school because I had my, you know, lunchbox, I don’t have to do that now. All the Star Wars fans unite. Now it turns out the cool kids are trying to get into Star Wars, and we’re looking at them like, “Hey, we’ve been here before the Baby Yoda.” His name is Grogu, by the way.

He’s not Baby Yoda. Yeah. You know? Like, things like that, right? Or the, the people who love Back to the Future, people who love NSYNC. Like, these people all exist on the internet. You can find your folks. So you really have to do video at this point. And yes, it’s all scary in the beginning. If you take any of our videos, go all the way back on YouTube, sort by oldest, and look at what we started at, and you’ll be like, “Dang. Dang, Cuz had to glow up.” That was, that was terrible back then, you know?

Liz Wilcox: That’s so funny.

Doc Rock: My old videos are hilarious to me now.

Liz Wilcox: Oh, they’re super cringe, I’m sure. We all are. So Pat, you mentioned going live for an entire year.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Liz Wilcox: What did that do for SPI?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I wasn’t 24/7 live for an entire year, although that kind of content is also becoming popular.

IRL, in real life kind of content is, is picking up steam as well. But no, I was live every day for one hour, 9:00 AM Pacific, and it did a number of things for me personally and for SPI. For me, it just got me comfortable going through the motions of putting myself out there, and no, none of those videos were perfect.

It was sloppy. But you know what? You gotta be cringe before they binge. That’s what I like to say. You gotta be cringe before they binge. You think that like, “Oh, well, before I go live or before I create a video or record, I’m just gonna practice,” right? Practice makes perfect. But in the world of content creation, publishing makes perfect.

You gotta just put it out there and, and just get messy with it, right? The– another phrase similar is you gotta be a disaster before you become the master. So all that stuff, I was just going through the motions, and I wasn’t trying to optimize for views or likes or anything like that. I was just counting my uploads.

Count uploads, not likes, as my buddy Alex says. And that was really key because I just wanted to keep that streak going. But that’s what forced me to figure out, well, how do I make this easy? It’s what got me to understand, okay, well, which topics my audience preferred more than others. It got me better at storytelling.

It got me to learn how to communicate with a live audience and make them feel like they’re a part of the show versus just kind of like watching somebody. And I started to get advanced over time with how I can insert little movies inside that we could talk about later, or little, you know, pre-recorded things or audio.

That was the first time I included a jingle, right? That was the income stream jingle, which now I have a jingle called Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed that has been heard by billions of people. So it taught me how to get out of my own way, which then transpired into SPI building a deeper connection with the audience there.

Now, it didn’t explode my subscribership. I think that was the one thing that was very surprising because I was going live, and I was consistent. Didn’t explode my subscribership, but it got me deeper with those people who were there every day. You know, I became friends with some of them. I can still remember many of their names, Jess Samson and so many others who were– they were making the livestreams a part of their daily routine, as much as the livestream was a part of my own.

And we became very close, and a lot of those conversations and friendships, even after the stream ended, continued on and went into the DMs, and I’ve gotten to meet a lot of those people in person who are now superfans who’ve continued to become students and even become paying customers over time. More than that, they sing praises for SPI, you know, and, and fly the flag really high for us, which is really amazing.

So that’s been really neat. And yes, there, there were some videos, uh, when you go live, and by the way, Ecamm’s not just for going live. You can record your videos in Ecamm as well, and the cool thing about that is once you figure it out, and again, it’s not that hard It reduces the amount of editing you need to do later, right?

Let’s just say, p- pretend you have two cameras and, you know, in the editing process it’s like, “Oh, now I gotta switch between both cameras in the post-editing process,” which takes time, versus you can just click a hotkey or a button to switch between the two cameras during the recording session, and now it’s just there already.

It’s the most beautiful thing, ’cause then you can just kinda almost publish straight from there, for the most part. So you can do it that way, too, but again, it, it did teach me a lot. And what I learned from doing the lives is that if you can repackage those lives, meaning maybe you change the thumbnail after the live, or you can pull a part out of that live and make that a clip, or turn that into a smaller video.

That is a popular thing that people are doing. So I’m sorry I’m rambling, ’cause this is really exciting, but there was this thing recently called Streamer University. I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve caught wind of this, but this was something that a very famous Twitch streamer named Kai Cenat did, where he recruited a whole bunch of people.

They rented out a university, I don’t remember which one, but it was during a summer session, and they had streamers there kind of taking class, and there were a number of other famous streamers teaching these things. Ludwig is one of them, a very famous YouTuber and, and, and Twitch streamer. And he said that his workflow was he would go live, and in this live, he would be live for two or three hours, he would talk about multiple different topics, right?

So for the people who were watching them live, man, he’s building this deep relationship, building superfans, interacting with the chat, all these kinds of things. But there were segments that he pre-planned. He didn’t script all of them, but he knew what the topics were going to be, and he had a really well-defined hook for each of them, because he knew that he would then have his editors take out that 20-minute portion where he’s talking about topic X and then this next topic, topic Y, he was gonna pull out that portion.

Those were each going to be separate YouTube videos with its own thumbnail, its own title about that segment that was just a part of a much larger whole. And so from there, he can then pull out from those shorter segments, a 20-minute segment, he could pull out the two-minute segment that could be a vertical Short.

So now from one live stream, you could have 50 pieces of content potentially, and it’s all just done in one fell swoop. And I think that that, that kind of approach to this can make your life so much easier when it comes to, well, what are you creating? Just a little bit of planning ahead of time, and then deepening that relationship in lives.

But then finding the newer audiences from the YouTube videos that are pulled from that, you can have kind of– have it all, and the Shorts as well. So I hope that’s exciting to some of you, because that’s exciting to me and something we’re looking to explore, you know, even in the Pokémon space with, with the lives that I’m doing too.

Doc Rock: Oh my God, I just had a, a major sort of brain thought, and especially because Liz wants to go live more. Uh, this is gonna sound weird, Liz. Stick with me. Trust me. You know I have weird analogies. We’ve been friends long enough.

Liz Wilcox: I always do. Keep going.

Doc Rock: Okay. Okay. So people, I go to Japan four or five times a year.

Uh, matter of fact, I’m going in October and December. This is my spot. I, I tried to send Pat, like, “Hey, Pat, you’re going to Japan. You need the Secret Squirrel lessons? I got you.”

Pat Flynn: Oh, yeah. I’m going in November. I love it.

Doc Rock: All right. So to me, Liz, you are very much my A5 Wagyu friend. You are just good raw as is, doesn’t need a lot of craziness, no need of extra salt, no weird peppers, nothing.

You just make it, light little heat, boom, ready to go. Doesn’t require marination or hitting with hammers and all this other weird stuff. You’re just good as you are. You are trying to go live, but you also make tons of content. Fam, just go live while you batch content your Liz-ness because the you being you shows other people that it’s okay to be just normal, which is what everybody loves about you, is you let us normies feel good being normal, especially if we got a little sauce to us that, you know, all the, quote-unquote, “polished” marketing LinkedIn people think, you know, they gotta be like.

We like to show up just as us, which is why we’re friends, right? So if all you did was put your camera on and be like, “Guys, I gotta make six promo videos for SPI, and I need to make another video for my Ecamm,” I mean, my… Oh, yeah, my Ecamm thing. I’ll use that one. That’s a good one. Uh, “I need to make a video about email,” and y’all just gonna watch me make videos and just leave it there IRL.

That camera could be on the opposite side of the room just connected and running, but you have your iPad because a lot of people don’t know if you’re live on YouTube, something that I do for Pat’s creators when we’re at Card Party is I pop out the chat, I copy that link, and I paste it into an iPad so I have the chat in my hand, right?

Because it can be its own separate window in Safari on the iPad as just a chat. So you can put that on the table so you can talk to people and see what’s going on, but you just sit there and go, “Hey, Liz. Today I’m gonna tell you this,” and you give your little spew, and then they get to see you doing your mess-ups and the whole nine yards, and just see that creating content as a normal person is normal.

And the amount of weird things I say to myself when, when I’m recording a video, I have threatened to my community that I’m gonna release the edits of just the things I say in between takes And then I realized it’s not good for family consumption. But it would be a really fantastic way for you to show up in your full Lizness and get two things done at one time, because what is that task stacking is probably one of the greatest potentials available for anybody doing any type of work.

If you can task stack. So, like I do my brain dumps while I’m also walking. I’m a humble brag. Right now I lost 75 pounds this year, and a lot of it-

Pat Flynn: Wow, congrats.

Doc Rock: … had to do with walking, and I would just have my AirPods on, and I’m talking, and I’m having it go into a voice recorder, and I come back and I put the notes into Notion.

That way I don’t miss things anymore, and it’s, it’s been my s- little ADHD therapy of walking around. But again, you can, you can task stack. So I think that’s a good way for people to see this, is you can just go live doing what you were gonna do. And our buddy Benji, he has to make dinner for his family.

You know what he decided to do? Put two cameras in the kitchen while he’s making dinner for his family, and I literally sit there and watch 400 people watch this brother make katsu over and over and over. Why? ‘Cause his five girls love katsu.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. You know, I-

Doc Rock: And pizza …

Liz Wilcox: I really like that idea, and something that I’ve been doing over at LizWilcox.com for a couple years now, and I think maybe Doc gave me the idea, was to do co-working live-

Doc Rock: 100%.

Liz Wilcox: Instead of, you know, instead of mapping out this stream, whatever. It was like, “I just need to go live. I just wanna get those watch hours really.” 100%. Uh, and I wanna connect with my people, and it was very similar to what Doc is saying. I use Ecamm, and Ecamm lets me, like, project my screen onto the screen, right?

And so I say, “Hey, guys, you know, like, let’s all come together and let’s get some work done. You know, I’m gonna put on the screen what I’m working on,” and they can see me live typing, they can see me live, you know, recording the video, like Doc said. And they’ll put in the chat, “Oh, you know, I’m working on my emails, I’m working on this, I’m working on that.”

And some people are like, “Hey, I’m just cooking, but I just wanna be here because I know I’ve gotta get dinner done.” And it’s been an amazing way to connect. And while Pat and Doc were talking about video and content creation, I just wanted to give, like, a couple more ideas about video for you and your audience that isn’t just posting on social or doing live stream.

Because I know it’s easy to look at somebody like Pat, like Doc did back in 2019, and say, “Oh, I wanna be like that.” But maybe you don’t have time yet to be like that. But because we’re creating superfans, we’re trying to find a place for our audience to belong, it’s important to find those places you can create videos.

So something that I teach my audience is, you know, putting video into your emails, right? Instead of just writing out something, why don’t you just make a quick three-minute video you can record with Ecamm or something else, and you can upload it and, you know, send them the link, right? Just seeing your face makes all the difference.

I guarantee you there are people in your audience, especially if you’re growing your email list, that forgot what you look like, that aren’t exactly sure who you are, right? Like, there’s a million and one Pats and Lizzies out there, right? But showing your face over and over, just making quick little videos, and not even posting them to YouTube or thinking, “Oh, th- this is not perfect enough for a Reel yet.”

But it’s, it’s good enough for your audience that’s already there. Also, you know, things like the co-working. I go live on Zoom a lot, just to have people come in and ask me questions. I remember I did an Ask Me Anything April, and again, it wasn’t on social media, it wasn’t on YouTube. It was just for my community that was already there.

It was just to move them through the Superfans system to get them from casual to active, right? And they could come, they could ask me literally anything. It was themed throughout, you know, every week was, you know, content creation, podcasting, email, whatever, right? That was another one. And then the, the last one I had Well, I can’t remember, so we’ll edit that one out.

Or maybe we won’t, so you guys can see behind the scenes.

Pat Flynn: No, see, that’s real life.

Doc Rock: It doesn’t have to be perfect. Exactly. That’s the, that’s the real thing. You, you guys started off this thing talking about how, like, AI slop is, you know, really driving people crazy. The thing that I will say over and over and over again, I love AI, is I’m having a lot of fun playing with it.

I’m doing all kind of things. I’m testing out apps I’ve always wanted to build that I won’t even sell. I just want to see what it looks like if I actually made the crazy app idea that I thought I wanted to make. But you know what AI can’t do? It can’t do lives at all. It’s just impossible. It doesn’t know how to yet.

For now, it can’t do lives. So the easy way to let people know that it’s really you is when you show up more live, you know? And again, don’t be so worried about it being perfect. Nobody even cares about the perfect anymore, because many of us had people who we thought were the bee’s knees, hall of fame, and then you come to find out, like, you know, maybe they’re not good people.

Maybe they aren’t as cool as I thought they were. Where I feel like when you’re just being yourself and you’re being live and not looking for that sort of perfect thing, it helps. The other thing I think is super important to remember about perfect, if you start there, where you got to go? Like, one of the fun things about doing anything is getting progressively better.

When you first started opening packs with nephew, it was just, I, I kinda think I remember stuff from playing the game, but I don’t remember everything. I don’t know how big this space is, but the more you open, the more you find out, the more people’s like, “Hey, this is this thing and this is this type and this is a fire situation.”

I, I have no idea what I’m talking about. I just listen to Brittany and Konsu. Um, you know, and this is, this one evolved into this thing, and here’s the different versions. And now one of the biggest channels on the Pokemon thing in the planet. But it came from being willing to start As you were, and then y- become what it became in a short amount of time.

Because, again, you found something that everybody was hoping somebody would show up and allow them to live in the thing that they love, which other people might not accept. Now, outside people are looking at the Pokemon kids like, “Wait, this is a thing? I wish I had known about that. Oh, when I was a kid, I used to do that. I didn’t know I could still do that. I mean, there’s, I, something I can do with my kids. I’ve been trying to build a relationship with my kid for a long time. They always thought Dad wasn’t cool. Now these guys show up five deep at, you know, some random convention center somewhere where Pat and my- myself, my team, and his team, and the other team are doing stuff.”

It’s like you have to just let people see the real you, and I can’t say that enough. It sounds like a broken record, but it’s so, so important. Like, it just is. It’s hard to put that in words. It’s like eating your vegetables.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. I think that’s what I for- was forgetting to say. I wrote it down. I couldn’t…

Y’all, I’m writing so fast, I can’t read my handwriting. It was those types of videos create customers, but they also create retention, right? Mm-hmm. I think that’s what Doc is trying to say. Yes. You get on the video. You see, oh, this is really who that person is, and the more consistent with the video you can get, the more they’re gonna see that through line of who you are and decide, “Yep, I’m in,” or, “Nope, I’m out. I’m gonna keep scrolling,” right? And so I’ve done all sorts of little videos with my audience, and I’ve found that, you know, it’s true what Pat teaches in the Superfans book of people will come to the comments, “Oh, you’re not, you’re not in Liz’s membership? What are you doing?” You know? Like, “Here’s the li-” And they’re dropping their affiliate links and things like that, and it’s just awesome, and I know it’s great for retention as well because they’re seeing me over and over, you know, day after day, month after month, now year after year, and they’re saying, you know, “Through it all, Liz has been, you know, XYZ,” right?

“And I’m down for that.” And it’s just been this really awesome way to, you know, again, take people from casual to this active audience to eventually superfans.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I think the other thing I wanna share is what does success look like in this world of creating video? It’s very easy to see others do video and look at their numbers and believe that you’re not doing a great job even though you might be.

First of all, if you’re publishing anything, you’re doing a great job. There are loads of people who want to do that who just never will, and so again, we’re encouraging you to just get started and use a tool like Ecamm to remove that friction. But number two, that comparison game can, can just crush you.

We are all on different timelines, on different paths. You need to compare yourself to yourself yesterday, last week, last month, not So and so who is sharing that they just started, but you didn’t realize that they’ve been at it for three years trying to figure this out, and then finally something blew up, and we’re just– we’re comparing our daily life to their highlight reel.

We can get into big trouble if you do that. And the numbers, you know, those are human beings. If you have 100 views on your video, you might think that that’s a failure. But then you go into a space, and you have 100 real people in that room, it changes the perspective. You could do so much to serve those people, even if there’s just ten people watching your video, right?

And for many of us who are creating businesses that involve getting clients or customers, especially, you know, for services and things like that that are maybe higher end, it might just take ten people watching a video and one of them to really start to understand that you are their person or that you have what they need to then become a client.

And that’s it, right? You don’t need a million views, a million subscribers. You might just need a few, and it can still be worth it to do. A lot of where we’re in right now, we’re, we’re in not just like a loneliness epidemic, but we’re in a trust recession. And so video is great because you can quickly fast-forward that trust with people when they see the real you.

Hence not perfecting and not having this style of video that is seemingly AI scripted or AI optimized. Rather, just you showing up to be you, a person’s more likely to wanna work with you, right? Your vibe attracts your tribe, so just put your vibe out there and great things will happen. It takes time, and Liz said the very important word consistency.

Very, very important because if you show up a couple times but then show up six months after that, how are you able to create trust? If, if they can’t trust you to show up consistently, how are they gonna trust you to serve them as a student or a, as a coach, I should say. So I just wanted to point that out ’cause that’s a very, very important mindset shift when it comes into diving into the world of video.

It’s compare yourself to yourself, not to others.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah, I, I wanna talk about, like, what are the bare minimum things you need for video, but first I wanna touch on the comparison. So y’all listen to me. When we are recording this, I am looking at Pat with his super perfect webcam. He has this fancy mic, you know, he is Pat freaking Flynn, right?

Then I’ve got Doc to the left of me. He’s got some fancy audio light thing in the background. Every time I speak- … I see it move, you know? Yeah. He’s got an even nicer mic than Pat.

Doc Rock: It’s the same mic. I just, I made these. This is my product.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah, I’ve got a, I’ve got a, a Doc Pop too.

Doc Rock: I just had to be cute, so I needed a different color.

Liz Wilcox: Right. He’s got, he’s got his cuteness, you know. I know he’s got his fancy, like I’m even looking at the mic, he’s got these fancy bands to keep everything together. If I was playing the p- comparison game, I never would’ve even met either one of these men, right? Because I would’ve looked at them, and now I’m getting nervous just thinking about it.

You can hear my voice shaking. Because I am you listening. I know what it’s like to look at these two men and think, “Gosh, I am so far behind. I have no shot. I might as well not even try.” Hmm. But listen It is what Pat said. It is what Doc said. It is about you, who you are showing up to be. It’s not about your webcam, y’all, because I don’t even have, i’ve got, I’m using the one that is connected to this Mac that Doc told me, “Please, Liz, when I leave your house, buy this camera,” and I still ain’t bought it. I still don’t have it. I’m still using this really ridiculous webcam. I have no external camera. I don’t even own one, and I’m not using the fancy mic either.

But here I am somehow co-hosting one of the top business podcasts in the world. That’s insane. It really is about who you are, showing up consistently, being that person, being authentic to who you are, and just, you know, not being afraid to put yourself out there and, you know, get in the room. So with that, Doc, I would love to hear what is that bare minimum equipment that my person in the SPI Community needs to get started?

Doc Rock: Okay, this is really funny because you just did the whole comparison thing, and I gotta tell you, honestly, as funny as it is, when I was there at your house and I was helping you sort of rebuild your room, I looked at the, the jank stand, I’m gonna call it that forever, and saw what you did with that, and I’m like, “I wish I never knew a single thing about broadcast engineering or having my broadcast skills,” because I went to go build what was a TV studio, and online video is nothing like the TV studio.

And I watched so many creators say to me with their actual lips, “I wanna make it like this particular TV show.” And I’m like, “The Internet is not TV. They do not have to be the same.” So my comparison was actually the opposite. I wish I had the guts to start and do it the way that you did it, because yours made you a half a million.

Mine cost me a half a million.

Liz Wilcox: And by jank stand, y’all, he’s talking about I had this, like, standing desk.

Doc Rock: IKEA rolling cart where the Mac- Yeah … was gonna fall off and hit the ground. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, it was this big.

Liz Wilcox: I still have it.

Doc Rock: I can’t even show people. Oh my God, it was not even a 24-inch square.

It was enough to put that drank that she has always in her hand and iMac, and I thought it was gonna fall on the floor, and I was like, “This is so dangerous.” Okay. Anyway, the basics that you need is one of these. I’m holding in my hand an iPhone whatever. Mine’s happens to be 17 Pro Max, but pick one. I c- I’ve actually done things with my old iPhone X.

Because Ecamm, you just plug the cable that you normally use to charge with, you plug it into the computer, and the Mac can just see your camera. One thing that’s really good to know about Ecamm, it’s a little technical, but not. We don’t actually pay attention to cameras. We don’t pay attention to microphones.

We don’t even touch it. If your Mac can see it, we can see it, so we just pull whatever the system shows us. That means you don’t have to worry about drivers, which is why I hated the PC stuff, is I was always fighting camera drivers and things of that nature. So any camera that shows up on your computer will work perfectly fine, and I will always say you definitely need a mic.

You don’t have to go crazy. There are mics out there that you can get for, like, 50, 60 bucks nowadays that are pretty good, but if you have the availability to just bite the bullet right ahead and jump on a Shure MV7+ or a Shure MV6, I would do that right away. You’ll buy it once. I buy once, cry once.

You’ll have it for life. It totally works. The version of this SM7B that my dad has is from 1972. You know what? It still works. Wow. It works exactly like it works today. I stick to Shure because they’ve been doing this for 101 years. I’ve been to their factory. They actually have a corner called Mic Drop.

They legit just drop the mic, and they have a thing called Liquid Sweat. It survives fires. It can be rolled over. So it’s just kinda worth it if you can swing it. It’s worth getting it, ’cause you’ll do it one time, and you won’t buy this and then buy something else and buy something else. But mic is important, and camera’s important, and lastly, if possible, you have the space for it, it is very helpful to get an actual light as opposed to trying to trust the window, because the weather will mess with you.

Like, I live in Hawaii. Pat lives in SoCal. Hey, the weather will go from, “Hey, this is really nice. Let’s go to the… Oh, stay in. We’re gonna watch Netflix.” ‘Cause it will just go, the weather will switch on you, and it will change your video quality. So having a light that you control, that’s it. That’s really all you need, and you can start with the one that’s built into your computer like Liz did It just works.

It really does just work. And I know you, you asked me this the other day, Liz, I would be more than happy to stand anywhere you ask me to be and show people how to use Ecamm. Like, I will do that personalized one-on-one training for anybody in SPI who says, “Okay, I need to sit there and watch this dude move buttons.”

And I’ve recently discovered a really cool design hack for my non-designers. I’m a designer, and I know a lot of people stress out about, “Well, how am I gonna make it look pretty? I don’t have a designer,” or, “I don’t have a design team.” I found a really cool design hack using Canva that will allow anybody to design anything within a matter of seconds, and you don’t have to do anything.

You just basically… If you can trace, remember that in kindergarten? If you can trace, you’re good. I can show you how to trace a beautiful-looking Ecamm layout in seconds.

Pat Flynn: It’s not that hard, guys.

Liz Wilcox: I’ll be looking for that tutorial.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, Canva’s a blessing. I mean, you can, you can create lower thirds and just kind of export that, and then literally just drag and drop on the screen on Ecamm and set it to a scene and you’re good to go.

I do that all the time, so. There are so many things to learn that can maybe feel overwhelming, but the truth is it can just be very, very simple to start. You don’t need all the fancy things right out of the gate. And every time… The, the way that I approach my videos is that every time I do a video, I just try to improve something, like one little thing each time.

But then over time, as you consistently create videos and publish them, those videos get better and better and better. And if, again, you need some encouragement, go back into my YouTube channel, the Pat Flynn YouTube channel, and go into the past and s- check out some of those early videos. They are absolutely cringe-worthy, but you gotta start somewhere.

And if you don’t start, like Doc said earlier, you’re going to get left behind. Like, it, that’s just the truth right now. But don’t overcomplicate it, and again, you don’t need to worry about what others are doing. You just need to worry about what you’re doing and how to best serve your people.

Doc Rock: And you know what?

I wanna, I, I wanna give you guys something that you guys both will understand. The day that the minors Flynn and Wilcox were born, you looked at this incredible thing and you’re like, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” That, that moment hit you like, “Oh my God, this thing is beautiful, and I can’t believe we did that, and I have no idea how to operate this. It didn’t come with an owner’s manual or anything.” But both of you have thriving teenagers who are brilliant kids. The hardest thing you will ever have to do, you’ve already done. I don’t have kids, so when I listen to parents tell me how hard Ecamm is, I’m like- Hmm … “Wait, what? I seen your kids, okay?” I look at somebody like my homie Jill, she got four.

One, two, three, four. Yeah, she does. I’m like, “Yo, I wasn’t brave enough to do one.” So you already done the hardest thing you will ever do is create a children. The hardest thing I ever did was learn how to speak Japanese, and even then I started out with [speaks Japanese] i’m like 90% fluent, but I started out with konnichiwa just like everybody else.

Pat Flynn: Hmm. Well, thank you for that.

Doc Rock: You start somewhere, right? So you have to start. So just start. Don’t be afraid. We will hold your hand. You know, I’m always on, I’m the internet hand holder all day long. I just enjoy teaching this ’cause I think when people discover their lane, I like to say like, you create little monsters, but I don’t mean like in the movie, I mean like Pokemon monsters, cool ones.

And it’s because once they find their ability, and then you get to evolve, and you just get better and better, and then you start bringing other people into the fray because they wanna help you. So every time you go live, you think about this. Every time you create a video, every time you post a video, you are helping somebody.

And I put that as the first line on my checklist. Who am I helping? Hmm. That is the first line on my checklist. So when Liz says, “Hey, can you make a video about this?” Yeah, and I will start the video like I’m talking to Liz. I will ignore the other eight billion people. I make videos for Liz, Mary Lou, Jill, Katie, my buddy Dan.

I make videos for certain people, and I just post it to the internet. The rest of y’all get to be nosy in my conversation like we’re in a cafe. That’s how I do it. That’s my secret.

Liz Wilcox: Love that so much. So we can go to what link to sign up for Ecamm, Pat?

Pat Flynn: That is SmartPassiveIncome.com/ecamm.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/ecamm. You’ll see some special goodies there. We’re always, you know, Ecamm’s always throwing in some goodies for us to make it easier for you, and those could be additional months on the Pro account, all those kinds of things. You’ll, you’ll find that there. SmartPassiveIncome.com/ecamm, E-C-A-M-M.

It’s just great to get Ecamm here on the podcast finally. It’s been a long time coming. Ecamm is an integral part of what we do, and we hope it becomes a tool that you use and, and find a lot of joy in as well.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah. Thanks so much.