I'm Tanner McCoolman. I've been working here for, I think, about nine months. I am a writer which also involves, you know, producing and directing.
My favorite part about working at LMG has to be getting to play with all sorts of just ridiculous technology.
Being the older tech guy, not the older guy who does tech, but rather the guy who deals with older tech,
I get to access all of these just weird, dusty, old machines that have a strange, tangy smell to them sometimes,
and manuals and languages I don't understand, and there's always just something, something weird going on with them.
It's never just, I never have to really work with a lot of, you know, 40, 90s and 1300Ks because while those are great and all,
I've got no interest in them. I want to see something from a bygone era. I want to see something where I can look at the circuit board
and get sort of a history of what's happened with that product and maybe try and track down where somebody who worked on this is at now.
So low-key stalking, that's my favorite part. So you deal with the more expensive stuff?
I deal with the rarer stuff. I wouldn't call it more expensive by any stretch.
Oh, so I ended up at LMG when I answered an open casting call on a Facebook group for stand-up comedians.
I was asked to send in a short video and my height because I believe that was the video where somebody ended up in Colton's trunk.
So I sent in a video, except unlike everybody else who sent in videos of them doing stand-up,
I sent in a video of me doing a Game Boy Repair with a top-down camera and my opening theme song was the LMG theme song,
or the LTT theme song, except instead of it being the LTT theme song, it was literally just me going,
Yeah, I had a short-lived YouTube channel. I had seven videos on it, I think.
After I sent that to James, he said, you should apply here.
So then I did, and then I got hired.
Oh, so something really weird did happen, but I am not legally allowed to say.
For no reason to do with the company, I will tell you this, I've got a lot of history of a certain company that is not us
that may or may not have been recovered from a hard drive somewhere.
That's as much as I can say on that. My least favorite part, it's tough.
I'd say fat. I've gained 30 pounds since I started here, and yet I'm somehow always tired.
Maybe that's because I've gained 30 pounds, but I feel physically exhausted like a lot.
At the end of the day, I'm physically emotionally and mentally exhausted,
so I don't really have a lot of energy to do things, and the fatter I get, the harder it gets to do things,
and the more tired I become.
I think a large portion of that has to do with having a vehicle, because prior to working here, I had never had to own a car.
I enjoy public transportation.
I'm part of public transportation fan groups.
There are people I have voted for based entirely on their public transportation platform.
I collect transit merchandise.
I enjoy public transit, but this area, I did not get a SkyTrain keychain because it was at work when they sold out.
Yeah, which is all well and good.
All well and good. I tend to not collect a lot of the things that TransLink actually sells,
but rather I may find some things in my possession as they are about to be removed from the buses.
Do you have a transit chair in your house? Do you want me to chair a couple of pots or something?
No, no. I do have every sign they put up on the seats during COVID, though. Every version of it.
And the whole set. Yeah, and I also have a don't slip on the deck sign from the ferry, pretty much.
Like, anytime somebody asks me what it's like to work with Linus, I tell them, if you've seen the WAN Show, you pretty much know what Linus is like in person.
Linus is the only boss I've ever had who hides in the bathroom to avoid doing work, and that makes him very relatable to me.
Oh, the worst part about working with Linus is never knowing what your schedule is.
Like, right now I'm supposed to be on set, but things kind of got shifted around and he's in such high demand that you've kind of just got to take the time that you can get.
And because he famously doesn't work Mondays, he follows Garfield rules.
I assume he eats a lot of lasagna. That's never been confirmed or denied to me.
I've never really asked, and frankly, I don't want to know because I like having this head cannon.
But he doesn't work Mondays, and he's often out of office for various business-related reasons, I would assume.
So in a given month, it is lucky for us to have him in office for maybe 15 days.
And we have to get an entire month's worth of video shot in those 15 days, and he has to script review every single one of the scripts.
And, you know, as much as I can make dialogue in the style of Linus, I know because I've played around a lot with those AI voice generators, I'm starting to get real good.
I can't quite always get it in the style that he is for sure going to like on that given day.
So script review ends up taking longer than it needs to sometimes, simply because we're all trying to make the best video,
but that means that it has to be rewritten sometimes.
So yeah, I never really know how to plan my schedule properly.
I would probably, if I could change anything about LMG, I would probably try and hire like five more writers and just allow us more time to work on a video.
Because once you take into account the writer's meeting that happens once a week, then the guidance for editing that goes into a video and then posting the video,
which is a lot more involved than one might think, we have to do all of the research and writing for a video in realistically like three and a half days.
And if you're somebody who's been doing YouTube for a long time, that probably doesn't sound like a whole lot and it probably isn't to a lot of people,
but there's a lot of projects where I just wish I could spend a lot more time digging into it.
I know there's more things to find, especially because I'm working with older technology and there's just, there's so much backstory that's come out,
especially as people have left their jobs, you know, six, seven years ago for something that's 20 years old.
Maybe there's people I can call that are finally out of their NDA.
There's so much more. I'm only at the tip of the iceberg and that's all I'm ever going to get because if that video doesn't perform extremely well,
which it might not because I haven't done enough research because I haven't had enough time to, we might never get the answers to that.
And I really want to get some answers to some of the projects I've worked on and some of the projects I'm working on.
What's something that people misunderstand about Linus Media Group?
I mean, go on the subreddit and read the comments.
95% of them are completely incorrect and 4% of them are mostly incorrect,
leaving 1% that has any modicum of correctness to it.
Yeah, the subreddit infuriates me.
Not because they're super mean about anything, not because they're so incredibly wrong,
but just they're confidently incorrect, which I know we get flack for a lot of the time.
AI gets credit for a lot of the time.
They're as bad as AI in a lot of cases where they will just make things up, be confident,
and then you'll just see a cascade of people who completely believe whatever narrative has just been spouted.
Sometimes I'll go in with one of my many, many Reddit accounts and say,
I think it might be this way, knowing full well it's that way,
and be told over and over again, no, you are 100% incorrect and get downvoted into oblivion,
and that is hilarious to me. No, I actually don't even know what to tell, because I didn't apply here.
I didn't aim to work here.
It just kind of happened.
So if you want to work here, fill out an application.
You've seen how fast we've expanded.
Worst case scenario, you'll fill out another application.
Eventually, if you have anywhere near the correct experience, you will find your way in,
and then you just hold on tight, I guess.
Sweet. I'm the worst person to ask about that.
Don't worry. That's everything. That's everything.
Anything that we haven't covered? Oh.
Oh, yeah.
Please stop crediting Labs for my work, and please stop crediting me for lab's work.
There's been a couple of videos where people have praised Labs so hard,
and I have never once worked with Labs.
Have you read the video that Anthony posted?
I have written one or two, but in those scenarios, Anthony legitimately kind of looks at the script,
reads the intro maybe, and then just goes off on a tangent.
That is so much more correct than anything I've written.
No, I can truthfully say every video that Anthony has posted of mine,
when people say Anthony makes such good videos, that really was more of an Anthony video than it was mine,
because I was, I don't want to say I was guessing, but I was like 80% correct,
and he brought it up to at least a 95%.