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