Damn the man. Hello. It's great to finally have you on a meet the team. I'm very excited. Thank you. How are you doing?
I'm doing well today. How about yourself? I'm doing pretty good. Good. Good. How's your eye been?
Eyes are good. I don't have glasses anymore. Recovering well. I can almost see your face. This is great.
So some people might know you here as the logistics person, but that's recently changed, right?
That's right. Yeah. So I'm now no longer in logistics. I'm now a department of just me,
and I got a new title. What am I? Infrastructure and technical specialist,
which is a very strange kind of made up term for the stuff I do. I don't know.
So you're your own boss then? Sort of. Yeah. I don't have anybody to really report to. I mean,
I'm still technically working under Colton as well while he's still working at the company.
So what do you do here? What comes along with that title?
No, it's kind of complicated. There's a lot of weird things. So I guess one of the major things is I
run tech for the WAN Show and sort of all of our live streams. That's what I used to do a lot. So
live streaming is kind of my bag from the tech side of things. Infrastructure is also assisting Jake
with a lot of things, Jake Tyvey. So you're networking your systems administration. I'm doing
the whole sort of build out for Labs from the networking and server kind of side of things.
Also helping with the massive amounts of data storage that we have here and keeping all of that
running. I'm also in charge of the SolidWorks PDM administration, working with the hypervisors and
the kind of like virtual machines that a lot of different departments use here. I do repairs.
So repairing all the things that Linus drops or other things that go wrong.
Somebody took apart a laptop the other day and just sort of gave me a bucket of parts. And so I
had to put that back together. What else? I don't know. Jeez. I shoot short circuits. I do all sorts
of other little things. Basically, if you need a hand with something, then I'll come and help you
with that too. Oh, he was doing some custom design stuff. So Andy wanted some custom cables for the
cameras. So design a model 3D printed those and I'm putting those together for him as well.
Lots of lots of different stuff. Oh, that's right. Also tech support. Yeah, for the whole company.
Pretty much just just me, maybe some Kalinan in there, but he hates it. So yeah, it's a lot of
stuff. I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. How did you learn how to do all of this? Like, I don't know.
A lot of experience. Most of the jobs that I've had have always been on really, really tiny teams.
So a lot of the things I've had to learn myself, I've also just had an interest in tech for a long
time. So when I was in high school, I did sort of night courses at a local university to learn
drafting and CAD and that sort of thing. You know, I've worked like the last seven years as the
technical director of like a very large recording studio. And recording studios are super small
teams. I think it was just like two of us and the owner and eventually some other people.
Our studio was sort of set up for recording orchestra. So it was this massive main room.
And then on the weekends, we would have concerts in there. So you kind of have the main stage
where the band is and then about 100 people. And we sort of took that from just live concerts in
there to doing full seven camera live switched live streams, which we then record and do everything
like that. So I was also the systems administrator for the studio and dealt with all their networking
and their video editor and like director and lighting tech and so yeah, kind of large mixed bag of
stuff. Jack of all trades kind of guy. Wow. I mean, it sounds like you used to have like a pretty
nice gig. Why did you end up leaving that and join us here at LMG? I don't know. You kind of
the music industry in that kind of world is very difficult. It's not a whole lot of money in it.
There's not a whole lot of I guess the ceiling for the career is kind of difficult. There's not
really very many studios and there's not a lot of positions, right? The guy I was training under
the head engineer there. He's the engineer for 5440 and Backman Turner Overdrive and kind of those
types of larger bands, right? So that's kind of the education that I got and working with artists
myself. But like where do you go? You go to a different studio where you have people who have
been doing this for 40, 50 years who get to do an album, right? And then with the proliferation of
home recording devices that like you can do it just as well at your home as you could in our studio.
Like, yeah, you don't get a two to five million dollar treated room. But I mean, that's the problem,
right? Where do you go? Where do you see yourself? And I kind of wanted to make the shift here because
I don't know, larger team. I thought my skills were applicable. I applied to be an editor.
I never got a response. And then, you know, the logistics manager position opened up. And so I
took that. And now it's kind of turned into something weird. So you know how to edit videos,
too? Yeah. When I started here, I did a couple of weeks editing short circuits. I did the
dark plates one for the PS5, which was kind of fun. It's weird. They've got a mark on here
that seems to kind of help you put it in the right spot. But I don't see a corresponding mark
on the inside of the dark plate. My broadcast experience actually really worked for that because
short circuits like a three cam, three camera multicam style thing, which is really off the cuff.
And so editing those, I managed to get it down to like an eight hour day after a couple of weeks
to do one of those, which is good. What's the biggest difference you would say between
here and any other job you had? So I used to wear like 13 different hats at my last job.
And the issue is when fires would happen, I would have to leave that fire and go fight a
different fire. And then when I came back, that fire was still burning. And it was just like
12 hour days, seven days a week, all the time, never stopped. Here, if there's a fire, I can go
fight a different one and somebody else can come and put that there. So there's a lot more support.
And each individual person is like not as critical. You know, I'm here to support Jake
Tyvee and Jake Bellavance. I basically just work with all the jakes. It's weird.
And so if Jake's having a bad day or something happens to him, I can step in and cover and,
you know, vice versa. And so having that like support network and the diversification of skills
is like so nice. It's so much more stressful. I mean, it's still really hard. Like we don't stop.
But there's just that support, which is great. What's one thing you wish you could do more of here?
Oh, man. Okay. So I was talking to Colton and a couple other people about this and it ended up
not being something we needed. But at the studio, you know, we were charged like $160 an hour plus
room fee plus fees for engineers and all that sort of thing. And so if you go and try and find
like a cable or something and it takes you five minutes, you've just cost your customer a load
of money, right? You can't have any kind of failures or downtime or have any inefficiencies,
right? And everybody here like our video video production schedule is so intense that there's
not really a lot of time to like sit back and look at procedures or anything like that. And for the
longest time, I basically just wanted to like make everybody's job easier here. The problem is that
I don't know, it's not really something that can be fixed or needs to be looked at too intensely.
And I think they're working on some other steps to fix that. I basically just want to make everybody's
job easier and their life easier because our schedule is so nuts. What do we do? We make 18
videos a week or something like that. And so any tiny little issue or failure or complexity that
doesn't need to be there really, really screws everything up, makes everybody stressed.
I mean, you already do a lot to help everybody. I try my best, you know, if you have a problem
with your computer, we want to get it fixed as soon as possible because especially with the editors,
like, oh man, I couldn't imagine the pressure there. And I can't, I did that. Yeah, it sucks.
Yeah, working here is hard, but we do good. You do a lot of stuff here at LMG, but you also do a
lot of stuff outside. Is that correct? Yeah, I do. I mean, there's a lot of design stuff and other
things like that. I do a lot of OST work and sound effect work for indie games and other projects
like that. I'm a musician myself. I used to be a touring musician, did a tour of Canada, all that
sort of stuff before I ended up in the music industry. I've not really done a whole bunch of
the video stuff. I take product on white for a couple companies. I developed this cute little
pumpkin pincushion suction cup thing that we've launched on Amazon, which is pretty excited.
It's like a little jack-o'-lantern. What else? What else? Design games myself, do some programming,
that sort of thing. Never really been a big artist, so I've always been looking at like,
what is a concept that I can execute that has really shitty art? And that's always been hard.
So trying to learn Blender and add some extra skills that I don't have. Yeah, design things,
working on a modular audio controller system, which has been a hellish project, mostly just
because the interconnects are like beyond my skill level of electrical engineering.
So that's been a nightmare. Yeah, otherwise I think that's about it.
That's all? I do cross-stitch. I'm working on one that says crippling anxiety, and it's got some
nice like flowers around it. That's fun. I always forget stuff. I mean, just a new flavor of the
week, every single week, and it's hard to remember. Time isn't a thing, I don't know.
So if you wanted to, let's say, build a game from scratch, you could basically do everything.
If the art was garbage, yeah. I mean, because I know how to program, and I know how to
like game and audio. The only real issue is art, and so my current concept is kind of art light,
or at least style heavy, and doesn't really focus on like complicated character models or anything
like that. I mean, doing games as a solo developer anyway is really complicated. My first project
was a team of three, and it took us five years to make like a 30 to 40 minute experience.
It takes a hell of a long time, so if you're doing solo development stuff,
keep it simple, and don't make an RPG ever. Don't do that. What's your favorite memory from the music
industry? You mentioned that you toured a bunch, as well as making soundtracks and stuff. I actually,
I still have a signed vinyl for this, so we were working with one artist who came to do a
concert, and she brought on a guest singer who ended up being the singer for the My Little Pony
theme song. Our audience is like rather older, so they're like 80 to 85, and they come see this
folk singer, and you know, that's kind of every single week. This is the audience that we have,
but there's this one guy who came, and he's like my age, and he's wearing a My Little Pony shirt,
and comes up and talks to this woman and gets her autograph, and I just thought that was just
the most beautiful bespoke cringe I've ever been a part of. So I bought their vinyl and had all of
them sign it, too, so I always keep that close to my heart. It was like, it was magical.
Yeah, sure, sure. I don't care. What are your passion for text art?
Oh man, I think I blame my father for that, among other things. But yeah, that was, he used to run
his own VCR repair shop back in Englandland, and he actually repaired that VCR for Mark. I don't
know if you saw that video. It's like one of the last people that can do that, and he's always
sort of worked from home, and so I sort of grew up around having things in pieces and taken apart,
and like getting brought in on that. And my mother was a, she used to program bank software, right?
So computers were always there. I think I learned my ABCs on one of those crappy laptops with the
orange screens, that sort of thing. So always been around computers, and because my father and parents
kind of knew computers, I was allowed to play with them from a young age, instead of it being
like a scary box that the kids not allowed to touch. So, you know, if I broke it or installed
something and got viruses on it, it was like, oh, Dan, you better fix that. And it's kind of where
you learn, right? So a lot of tinkering growing up, a lot of, I think, just exposure to tech in
general was a big help. One of the things that really stood out to me when I met you is just
the sheer amount of different skills. I mean, obviously, as everybody's witnessed so far right
now, I mean, clearly, you've been able to learn a lot throughout your life. Do you have any advice
for anybody who might be interested in pursuing a certain hobby or skill? Like something in particular
or just like, just any, any, any skill, any hobby. Somebody might be interested in, but they haven't,
you know, put the time aside, or, you know, went full at it yet. Have undiagnosed ADHD. That's a good
start. I think the next thing would probably be just start small and learn kind of what it is
you're doing. So I find with any kind of skill, there's like an intended way. And there's always
like a workflow or a methodology. And I've been trying to apply this with learning Blender,
because I can do solid works like quite well. That's parametric modeling, and that's way different
than like artistic style modeling. The thing is that there's like different ways to approach
a problem that you're trying to do. And having an idea of what you want to do and learning how to do
that is so much more important than just like, I'm going to make the donut tutorial or something
like that, even if it's music, or if it's, I don't know, electronics, or, you know, any sort of weird
soft skill as well. It's you kind of have to have in your brain the goal, even if it's small, or even
if it's hyper complicated. And then you just start working towards that. You know, when you're doing
programming or like learning to do programming and stuff like that, a lot of people are like, oh,
you have to make a calculator. And it's like, no, that's boring and stupid. If you want to have a
program, if you want to have a piece of music that you want to make, if you want to have anything,
you need that like, thing to work towards. And then that'll teach you how to Google the problems
that you're having. You know, if you want to make a first person shooter, that's kind of like, well,
how do I make a character run around? You got to kind of break it down. So have an idea, even if
it's big or small, and then break that into smaller chunks, and then learn how to do those
smaller chunks. And you're going to, it's going to be awful. It's just going to be so bad. But
you've compartmentalized enough information where you can kind of start smooshing them together
and get a broader sense, like through the fog of what the final skill you're trying to learn
actually looks like. And then you can come back from that start with a new idea that doesn't suck,
and you'll be able to move through it even faster. Very insightful. Now for the important
questions. Oh my god. If you could be any animal, which one would you be? A lobster. Why a lobster?
I can't remember the quote. Have you ever seen the movie The Lobster? No. I don't know. Because
I lived for a long time, and everybody picks dog. Sure. I don't know. I love that movie.
Yorgos Lanthimos. Yeah, that guy's fucking nice. Where do you get your humor from?
I think it's a combination of anxiety and Englishness. Maybe. I don't know. Englishness?
What does that mean? I don't know. In England, compared to America, in America, everybody
wants to play the hero who says the right thing. And England is much more like the main character
is the idiot and the fool. So I always like spouting wrong information or saying things that
everybody looks at me like I'm a fucking dumbass. I just find that entertaining. It makes me smile
on the inside, even if it maybe ruins the perception of others of me. And it's silly.
Have you seen that meme where it's like me when I purposely spread misinformation?
There you go. That's me on my daily life. Anything else you want to say to Floatplane peeps?
I'm not sure. I'm not used to them. I hope you guys have a good day.
Well, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good one.