Bridging the gap between the job you want and where you are

[Music]

hi

my name is justin mcelroy and i am a

and uh author and

uh bonfivent i don’t know exactly what

that is but it feels

it feels right um so uh we’re talking

about bridging the gap today

and uh the gap i wanted to talk with you

about

what is a literal physical gap

uh specifically i mean the physical

distance between

who you are where you are your human

body

and the the job or work that you want

um so let me tell you a bit about myself

i live in huntington west virginia

that may be very much like where you

live

uh it may not be i don’t know because

i’m not allowed to

uh travel i was gonna come and check it

out

but uh no dice there got to the airport

and they said

no no international flying apparently so

here we are uh but i don’t know if it’s

like where you live it’s a

small town it’s 50 000 or so people

um and i am 39 years old 40 as you’re

hearing this i believe

uh so when i was growing up the internet

as we know it today was not a going

concern

so the kind of work that i wanted to do

i wanted to write about video games and

talk about video games and be

an entertainer and i thought the kind of

work that i wanted to do was

not possible for me and at that point it

probably wasn’t

uh as someone living in huntington west

virginia uh and someone growing up

away from the hubs of movies and tv even

the video game magazines

at the point were set out of i think

minneapolis and

the bay area in san francisco bay area

so

it was an option for me but as the

internet evolved and grew

i found that i was able to sneak my way

in

a little bit gradually i started

pitching around to any outlet that would

have me

offering to do the reviews of games that

no one else wanted to

to to play the games no one wanted i

ended up playing a lot of

uh hunting video games and uh some

some pretty bad spider-man license games

and some

rather long computer rpgs that no one

else wanted to sink the time into i was

willing to to take the bullet

uh uh figuratively speaking here in

huntington west virginia

i i continued with that pattern uh i

worked at a blog called joystick which

was owned by aol it was aol’s

video game blog sadly now defunct but

that’s really sort of where i got

started

uh in in working more regularly in

in video games from that point i was

very lucky to

build a career at joystick i became the

reviews editor and then the managing

editor which is like the number two

position there

uh and went on to found a video game

site called polygon in 2012

uh that is uh thankfully still still

going and still operational while

we i was doing that around about 2010

my brothers and i started podcasting uh

we started a podcast called my brother

my brother and me

i had actually started on the joystick

podcast a couple years before that

but my brother my brother me was the

first project we all did together

um that has now grown into other

spin-off shows like the adventure zone

which is a

actual play d d podcast saw bones a

medical history show i do with my wife

uh and then we have some other one-off

things like the mcelroy brothers will be

in trolls world tour

and till death do us blart which is an

annual review of paul blart moncop

ii uh that we do every thanksgiving and

we’ve turned those into other media the

adventure zone is a graphic novel series

that’s been number one new york times

bestseller a few times and uh my brother

my brother me was a

tv show we’re doing an adventure zone

animated series we did a saw bones book

and we’re working on a book about

podcasting right now i’m telling you

about myself i don’t know

i don’t have a reason for that other

than to say that

i have done all of this here

in huntington west virginia and it’s

always been hard

to be honest with you um i had to travel

a lot to video game conventions and

stuff like that which isn’t that onerous

but it gets worse as you have

kids and i’ve had to travel to

cities just to record voice over in

studios for uh we were in the movie

trolls world tour we had to go to

cincinnati

uh which is about three hour drive for

me in ohio uh

to go to go record that there are

opportunities

that i know i’ve missed out on by not

being in a specific region but

by staying here in my home where i grew

up i have been able to

uh capitalize on some strengths

for one the cost of living where i live

is much much lower than it would be in a

new york los angeles san francisco

you name it pretty much

in the united states uh you’re not going

to do much better than me which means i

can work

cheaper than a lot of other people too

i have a unique perspective being from

this

region i uh have access to to people to

characters to stories that people in

other regions may not have

it makes me a bit more of a unique uh

talent

and the reason this is on my uh talent

listen to me all right anyway the reason

this is on my mind the reason i wanted

to talk to you about this specific

gap this this idea of bridging a

physical gap

is that strangely

i believe the covid19 pandemic

has actually created

opportunities for this specific

kind of work obviously

don’t feel like it needs to be said but

holistically speaking the coven 19

pandemic is a negative

i think outweighing all these things

uh against each other definitely still a

negative

what with all the laws of human life etc

but

uh it has been interesting as someone

who has always worked remotely

it’s been interesting to watch how uh

companies who never would have permitted

uh

online work remote work before are

now finding ways to make that happen and

i believe

once these avenues have been created

it’s going to be a lot

easier for people who aren’t able or are

unwilling to travel to

the larger cities that are really hubs

of whatever kind of work they want to do

it’ll be easier than ever for them to do

that work let me give an example

uh i did some i recorded some voiceover

work uh

recently for a cartoon series now uh in

the past

this has always been pretty tricky

because they’re used to people coming

into a recording studio

and standing behind a microphone and

looking at engineers and

recording the audio there with a script

in front of them that

obviously is untenable right now

so they had this production company had

set up

a uh sort of a back end interface

uh that allowed the recording to happen

seamlessly for the engineer to uh

look at my recordings and take my

recordings on the fly

uh it allowed me to talk to the director

uh as i was doing my voiceover

i have the sound setup already here in

in my office

uh and we were able to do it just like

that uh with with no loss in quality

this was not a surprise to me by the way

because i’ve been making things like

this work for a long time but

i think because of the kovid 19 pandemic

you’re seeing these companies

uh finding ways to again working in our

team bridge that gap

uh the physical actual gap between them

and uh people who want to do this sort

of work so

to give you another example uh we

recently recorded the audiobook

for uh everybody has a podcast except

you which is our podcast about

it’s our book about podcasting sorry

it’s a little bit oral bro snake eating

it’s tail it’s a book about podcasting

and this is an audio book of a book

about podcasting so it’s kind of like a

podcast of a book about podcast

sorry but uh the the point here

is uh through tools like zoom

uh the and the engineers were able to

remotely take control of my computer

um and uh handle all the recording

locally on my machine doing all the

things that they would normally do in a

studio

but they had found the ways to make it

work remotely

this i think will create a lot of

opportunity for people that

don’t want to travel that want to stay

in their home

and that can be a really powerful thing

one

uh smaller areas need creative people

living in them

if if smaller more rural areas

are robbed of all their their creative

type people it’s harder to build a

community

for future creative workers who want to

come up through that same environment

it’s also uh you know you can uh

stay in your region with family and

friends i mean there are huge pluses

that i don’t feel like i need to

um illuminate for you um and and of

course

there are always going to be things that

you miss out on if you are

not in the region where specific work is

happening

um there’s there’s no argument about

that

but i i think that now

in this specific weird bizarre

moment you are going to have more

opportunities

to reach out to these companies who

maybe before would have insisted

that you live wherever they’re going to

live and they would have uh uh

created some ways to

um make things better now there’s always

going to be

weirdness when you’re working out of

your house

your six-year-old daughter may come and

tell you your ted talk is over

uh you know you never know but think

about it

that gap that used to be bridged by

travel now maybe could be bridged

through a whole lot of other different

ways best of luck to you

bye-bye