Hello and welcome to Let's Chat. Let's Chat is a live podcast where I talk with creators about live streaming and the way that streamers and their communities shape culture yesterday, today, and in the future. I'm Dan Clancy. I'm the CEO of Twitch and I am currently in Austin, Texas live in person with the one and only SVN TV. SVAN, welcome.
Hello. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to get to chat. I always love getting to chat.
All right. He's a chatter. I'm a chatter. And we got a nice setup here. Nice space. We're trying this. We're one of the first times where we're trying out doing this remote and so far so good. And we'll see how it goes. All right. SN, let's start out. Okay. With um I'm going to start out back when you started.
Okay. SN. and talk to me just about like what was the first time when you started streaming?
So um from the very beginning
so funny story about how I started streaming is that I didn't start streaming on Twitch. I started streaming in 2017 that's whenever I consider myself like started streaming. Uh I had a Twitch account.
Mhm. But like I was a computer science student and I just heard about live streaming and I was like I just I was into tech stuff so I was going to try something. So I had that from before but I didn't watch anybody or like it just it's something that I did one Christmas break. So after that I kind of put it down for 5 years. Wasn't really thinking about it whatever. And I was in between jobs because I used to work in college football.
So I was a I worked in like recruiting video.
So you played football at SMU. Yes.
Right. And then when you graduated, you were working college football basically after you graduated.
So the specifics are kind of convoluted.
You don't have to go through all this.
So I won't go through all of them cuz that might take up the whole podcast.
But basically I walked on the football team. I got injured and then I didn't do anything for the next season and new coaching staff comes in. Some people get retained on staff. Oh, and then yeah, so I didn't do anything the next season. New coaching staff comes in and some of the coaches that get retained, they call me up or one of them calls me up. Somebody on staff actually calls me up and he's like, 'Hey, you know, we know you love football. We know you love SMU. We know you're super smart.' And this new coach that came in, he wants to do some more tech stuff than what they did in the past. Like the old coach was June Jones who is a very old school NFL pen and paper type of coach. New coach coming in was Chad Morris who was like a new age, he was at Clemson and high octane all this stuff. So he wanted to do more tech stuff. So they said are you interested at all in coming to help out? And then I did. Next thing you know I was in charge of digital recruiting, I was doing social media graphics everything.
Right. So, and this is the short version, by the way. So I'll get through it. But yeah, so that's what I did. That's kind of how I learned all the stuff about streaming that I know is because I was doing all that, all the video stuff, production stuff. I worked in the weight room at one point, all that. And I wanted to be a coach. I end up changing my major to sport management and I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go the sports route with things like sports, business, whatever. And I end up getting a business degree. I'm supposed to have a job whenever I graduate. They were paying me as like a student through financial aid stuff, whatever. They were getting me paid pretty good for a student, but I was doing like a six-figure job.
Mhm.
So, I end up not having that position when I graduate because admin looks at it and they're like, why did you guys what is this new position you guys are hiring for now? And like, well, this is for SFAND. You know, he's been doing this. They said, 'Well, you got a student to do it before. Why can't you get another student?'
So, basically two weeks before graduation, they pull the rug out from underneath me. And I'm like, 'Okay, that sucks.'
And now getting to the streaming.
Now is when there is whenever we get to the streaming stuff.
So I'm like, 'Okay, I need to make videos. I need to make videos.' And I started playing World of Warcraft private servers. So, I knew a lot about Retribution Paladins and vanilla World of Warcraft.
I mean, who doesn't want to learn more about Retribution Paladins?
Absolutely. So, this is like I knew a lot about this one specific thing that mattered from like 2004 to 2006, 7 actually really it was like 2008 is my area of expertise, right? This 4-year period of time. And this is my knowledge. It's kind of like law. It's like hieroglyphics. Okay.
I regret asking this, but
yeah. So, I'm not going to go into that, but it's just like not a lot of people know this thing. And I end up going and making some videos just to stay in practice while I'm in between jobs. I'm like, I'm going to look for another job at another school or go coach high school, something like that. And I don't have enough hard drive space to record my raids. Raids are about a 4-hour raid night. So I'm like well if I live stream on YouTube it'll just save it there. So I thought it was the craziest thing in the world. I was like wait I can record straight to the internet. So I
Yeah. So I went live on YouTube and that's kind of how I started streaming and I just stream my raids two nights a week instead of recording it for four hours and just posting it.
And then that led to me getting banned. I got a three month ban on YouTube.
All right. Congrats. Thanks.
Congrats.
Yeah, but that ban is kind of how I got known because it was like, oh, he's the vanilla wow classic wow private server guy.
And then classic wow got announced and then it kind of I got
all your claim to fame streaming all came through WoW
All right. Yeah. And so now for some folks like oh please don't bore us with this. But I'm sure some folks have heard a ton of World of Warcraft. Okay. But what is it that for you? Why is it that World of Warcraft was so magical to you? And there's of course lots of magic in there.
Yeah. Oh, a lot of magic. A lot of magic, a lot of weapons. So the thing with WoW to me it was nowadays when you talk about the attention economy, there's so many things that can pull you away from anything. You have social media, which wasn't really a thing back then. It was, but not like it is now. YouTube, Twitch, Tik Tok, Discord communities to just talk to your friends online for the games, everything. WoW took all those things and it was a one-stop shop for everything.
I remember logging in and some people still do this. They log in and you'll sit in a capital city and I'm just talking in what was called trade chat, which people would use at the time for general chatting. Not even they wouldn't use it for trade and selling things. They would just use it as a general chat to hang out. It was kind of like what Discord is today where a Discord channel to hang out with your friends. And people just be talking in text chat and there was memes on the server and people got to know certain people. I was one of those people in original. I was pretty well known in the Burning Crusade expansion. But then I became that way in private servers too. Started streaming whatever. And then that's actually how I came to Twitch was off of a YouTube ban.
And I was like I'm going to be a good boy now and I won't do private servers and I'll wait until classic.
Usually it's the opposite that happens. Game Recept.
Actually, it was around the same, it was 2017. It was the end of 2017, beginning of 2018.
So, I started streaming in April of 2017 on YouTube and then January 2018 on Twitch.
Right. So, let's get you started with WoW, but now let's chat about IRL streaming. Something you love to do and of course it's changed like tons of changes. So talk about when you started to IRL stream and what were you thinking when you first started?
So I consider myself like a second generation IRL streamer.
Cuz the first generation was Pokémon Go era like 2016 2017 and that was like
Wow. It's been that long since.
Yeah. So, it was kind of that era that was like the first era with Summit and those guys, Reckful, all these guys doing IRL back then. I came to Twitch and realizing I can't stream Vanilla Wild private servers anymore because I got the three-month from Blizzard, Blizzard Action, my YouTube account.
Which is funny cuz I work super close with them now. But I went from being on that list to then being a good boy. But it was because I had to spend time not streaming vanilla out private servers, right?
So I had to find other things to do. That was whenever I started. This was summer of 2018 I would say and that's when I came down to Austin and visited because I grew up in Dallas. It just so happened that a lot of the WoW streamers who were the biggest streamers on Twitch at the time, who were also heavily into the IRL theater, they all live down here. They got to know me because of the private server stuff. Like Sans's the guy for Classic Wow.
Who were the ones that were into IRL streaming that were living down here then?
Like Soda was in IRL streaming back then.
I don't think of Soda and IRL streaming.
