ERMIN HAMIDOVIC: Escaping Client Work, Building a Product Business, and Knowing When to Pivot

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. And now your host, AAL Levy. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we're now on our fifth year, but it's true, and it's only because of you, the listeners. And if you'd like to see us stick around for another five years, there are a few simple things that you can do that would really, really help us out, and I would be endlessly appreciative. Number one, share our episodes with your friends. If you get something out of these episodes, I'm sure they will too. So please share us with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me and our guests too. My Instagram is at al Levy urm audio. And let me just let you know that we love seeing ourselves tagged in these posts.

(00:00:55):

Who knows, we might even respond. And number three, leave us reviews and five stars please anywhere you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, I want to thank you all for the years and years of loyalty. I just want you to know that we will never, ever charge you for this podcast, and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way possible. All I ask in return is a share post and a tag. Now let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. My guest today is someone who I've had on multiple times, always a great time having him on Mr. Irman mvi. He needs no introduction because you all know exactly who he is. So let's get to it. Irman Vic, welcome back to the URM podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:01:45):

It's my absolute pleasure. I love being here, and I think this is the fourth time we're doing this now, so we can't get enough of each other it seems.

Speaker 1 (00:01:51):

I know. I miss you so much.

Speaker 2 (00:01:54):

Likewise, man.

Speaker 1 (00:01:55):

Likewise.

Speaker 2 (00:01:55):

I feel like you have some motivational journey to share with me in the crowd. I really, really want to hear more about that.

Speaker 1 (00:02:02):

What do you mean?

Speaker 2 (00:02:02):

Well, the fitness thing, man, I'm not really that regular on social media channels anymore, on account of what we spoke about last time with the block news feeds and everything. But you have a massive weight loss and muscle gain journey to talk about.

Speaker 1 (00:02:15):

Let's put it this way, 2020 has been weird for everybody, and I knew it was going to be weird because of my H one N one PTSD. I just kind of called it super early and just made a decision that I'm going to come out of this awesome because it's going to last a long time, so why not take this time to do something nuts? I'd already been losing weight for a while, but slowly and surely, I guess the healthy way to do it, which is super slow, gradual, reasonable, insane. And as soon as lockdown started, I just decided to do it the insane way, which is all in and pretty fucking fast. And people say it's not sustainable, but I just think they don't want it bad enough because it fucking sucks. But it's probably the best decision I've ever made because along with that, I've found a renewed focus for everything else that I do too.

(00:03:19):

So the main thing though was I didn't want to come out of lockdown worse. I had this theory, and I still have this theory that people who take advantage of it are going to be the ones who hit the ground running when it's all over. Just because the world kind of seems to pause. It doesn't actually pause, and nothing's actually paused. Our lifestyles may have paused, but the competition for winning at life never pauses. And I think that regardless of what got fucked up for you, shit got fucked up for lots of people. The universe doesn't give a fuck. At some point, this lockdown is going to end, and the people who took the time to do something great with themselves are going to come out ahead and that's for better or for worse.

Speaker 2 (00:04:07):

That's absolutely right, man. The glass can always be half full depending on how you see it. And we obviously know a lot of people in this industry that got the short end of the stick. The guys that

Speaker 1 (00:04:16):

Sucks,

Speaker 2 (00:04:17):

The guys that are oriented around the live scene, I mean, their entire livelihood just died overnight completely. So you have to find some way to re-pivot some, do something meaningful with that time. And I think the crafty guys, the ones that always make it work, they found ways to pivot. They always find ways to hit the ground running.

Speaker 1 (00:04:33):

Yeah, that's the thing. It sucks. I am not trying to say it doesn't suck, and I empathize. Of course, it affects all of us, and it sucks to see friends lose their livelihoods. However, I've seen quite a few friends who relied on the live thing figure it out. So I've seen quite a few crew members figure it out too. They tend to be super proactive people. They were proactive before lockdown. See, that's the thing. It's the people who were always getting it, I guess getting after it and making shit happen. Those are the people who just kept on reinforcing that side of their personality. Once lockdown started, the people I know who just floated in the breeze might've had some good fortune with their careers, got good gigs, did a good job, but maybe didn't show as much intent in their career are the ones, sorry if you're listening and I'm offending you, but that's kind of what I've noticed because it's hard to grow that in a time of crisis. You should probably try to grow that side of your personality in the good times so that when crisis hits, you just keep doing what you normally do. So yeah, I know a lot of people who their main primary source of income got wiped and now they're doing actually even better than before.

Speaker 2 (00:05:57):

Absolutely. It's all about how you convert that opportunity. So I mean, I copped a bit of a double-edged sword, if you will, my personal life and things in that respect because all the gyms, all of the activities here in Melbourne, we got one of the most draconian lockdowns in the world when it hit. So there was basically immediately overnight, no training. So for about, I think six to eight months now, I've not been able to go to a gym. So I knew I would get the net effects of that, which are probably the resurgence of a kind of lifelong depression. I was going to get the physical kind of withdrawals of it, the fact that I would drop weight, the fact that I would feel weaker, I would feel worse day by day, and it became about creating a sort of management psychology for myself.

(00:06:41):

I knew I would be stuck inside. I knew I'd be stuck in a less than ideal living situation at the time, and it's all about converting things in a way that's meaningful. That's why I was dotting on so much about stoicism the last time we spoke, because stoicism is one of the most potent psychologies for somebody that's going through hard times. It gives you a very, very strong coping mechanism, gives you a very strong ideal set to get through those times and just focus on the bare essentials and the things that you can control and let go of the things that you can't control. But on the other hand, the businesses were doing fantastically right, because we deal with products and everybody was suddenly locked down. Everybody was making music, everybody was producing demos, and they're all like, well, we need some virtual base to help us out.

(00:07:25):

Everyone else is like, well, I can finally release the music I've been working on for so long. So the mastering business just went completely through the roof. So I was juggling just this insane dichotomy of being so miserable in my personal life with the professional side skyrocketing. So the craziest thing about that was I needed another management strategy. I needed something to fill in the role that working out and training to the limit had always filled for me. So what I found was racing, which it's so bizarre to say it's something I've been doing for years and years and years, and it was a hobby where I just thought, you know what? This has a semi physical component. You can do it indoors, you can push it to a certain limit. It really has a high skill ceiling as well you can build toward. So I literally just dumped thousands of dollars into this crazy rig, and I saw the surge.

(00:08:16):

I saw the community all going completely virtual from real motorsport into the virtual world. I'm like, maybe I can capitalize on this and build something. So I went down to the ground level. I was curious. I'm like, if I start in a completely new scene, if I start from scratch and nobody knows me as Irman, the guy who's worked on this or that, if I just start as a complete zero in that scene, what can I do with it? And in the space of I think what it's been maybe six to eight months now, we've managed to go from a hundred to about 25,000 subscribers in that scene, which I'm so absolutely stoked about. It's a tertiary career that has absolutely nothing to do with audio, and it's one of the things that helped me kind push through the more negative aspects of the lockdowns that we've had here, which as of the last few days have lessened quite a lot. So yeah, things are looking up on the whole, can't really complain.

Speaker 1 (00:09:05):

So I have a few thoughts on what you just said. So first of all, I'm not surprised, and that goes along with what I was just saying. The people who were already doing stuff with intent in their careers have figured it out. And even if you started as a zero, you already know how to get your name out there, how to build stuff. It's not like you had to develop that skillset during lockdown. You just applied it to something new that has a lot of parallels to what you already do. So I'm not surprised. I think that anybody who knows how to get their name out there should be able to do that, whether they will or won't, that's a different story I guess. I'm not surprised. I'm glad you've done it though.

Speaker 2 (00:09:49):

No, just like I'm glad to see, I mean, I can see it physically. I know the guys, dunno what I'm talking about. We're actually on a webcam feed with each other, so I can see al and he just looks healthier. He looks more vibrant. So it's amazing to see someone go through that journey. I've seen some of my friends do it in the past, and it's just amazing to see somebody come through the ringer on this side, obviously on a positive trajectory with their life.

Speaker 1 (00:10:11):

You know what you said about being miserable personally, but great with career. I've experienced that before, long before lockdown. I guess my response is I get it, but I don't think lockdown should be blamed for that. That can happen at any point. I know I've had points where my career was exploding and I was miserable in my life and the world was moving as per normal. And like you said before, you have a tendency towards depression. So I would say that could happen at any point in time regardless of the external factors. And so it's always important to keep it managed and to figure out what to do, and I think it's really, really smart that you figured out what to replace the working out with. It's interesting to me. I know quite a few people who worked out in gyms a lot before who felt that way.

(00:11:06):

I guess because I hadn't worked out in gyms, you guys, I didn't feel like anything was missing. So it was easy for me to create a pretty extreme exercise habit. I was starting not at zero. I've been lifting since last year and stuff. I've been lifting maybe almost a year. It's still not that long, but it wasn't exactly zero, but it wasn't embedded enough to where I felt like a huge chunk of my life was gone so I could just build from somewhat scratch. So I built my gym at the house and just everything I do is based on dumbbells and an elliptical and what I've got outside and that's it. So I don't feel like anything's missing.

Speaker 2 (00:11:48):

That's a great idea as well. The longer I trained, the more I began to loathe the gym as an environment. So I have a bit of a duality when it comes to the fitness industry. When I started and I hit the ground running with that when I was 19 initially you get co-opted by the lifestyle. You see all these massive jack dudes and all the hot chicks that are around them and you're like, wow, what a lifestyle that is. These guys are like Superman and it's fantastic. When you dig past all that bullshit, most of those people are fucking miserable. They're so egocentric, they're so narcissistic, and there's no filling the void that kind of a psychology creates no amount of muscle is enough, no amount of being attractive, no amount of having people desire you is enough. So you run through that gauntlet, you see that there's a very hollow victory on the other end of that, and then you realize that you kind of had it all along.

(00:12:37):

It wasn't really the end game, it wasn't the journey. It wasn't the women, it wasn't the beach body, whatever it was that you wanted. It was just the act of pushing yourself to excel every single day, pushing yourself to your physical failure points and how you can co-opt and translate that to your day-to-day life or your career to advance yourself in all aspects of life. And that's one of the most powerful things that I got from that industry. And I knew that when that was pulled away from my day-to-day life, I would have to try to recreate it in something else. So a very large void got created, which in my sense was almost a positive. There's no way I would have this new tertiary career unless that was taken out of my life. Firstly, I wouldn't have had the time much less anything else, but I certainly wouldn't have had the need. And I think you need the need and you need the hunger in order to start something again from scratch. I think that's why the people that do things to the level that you do, to the level that Joel does, to the level that Joey does, they're so few and far between because they don't really understand what it is that it takes, that sustained workload, that sustained hunger, not for weeks, not for months, not for years, but possibly decades to emerge in something.

Speaker 1 (00:13:45):

It's definitely decades.

Speaker 2 (00:13:46):

Yeah, I mean for me it was as well. I mean it took emerging in my mid thirties to understand what that journey was all about. I really didn't understand what trajectory I was on until it eventually coagulated a couple of years ago, maybe when we did proofread three or periphery four, when it all came together and I was like, okay, I think this is what it was all about. Finally, the scope of my life is starting to make sense to me, so it's a crazy thing.

Speaker 1 (00:14:11):

Well, I can tell you about time, the level of time and energy things take as far as I'm concerned, I feel like anything important you're going to do in your life is going to involve quite a bit of mental energy, especially if it's new. And so actually one thing that I decided to do this year was to not worry so much about new business pursuits, worried about the physical pursuit because too much is too much. So I have this philosophy that you can do anything you want in life, but not at the same time. That's the key. Not at the same time. There's a bunch of business things that I have planned for next year, but that I consciously put on hold so that I could spend six hours a day on the physical transformation. I had to decide basically. And so like you just said, you wouldn't have had the time before to develop this career.

(00:15:06):

I think that the time factor is hugely important and one thing that people early on in their careers get wrong and it takes maturity to figure it out, is trying to do too much and spreading themselves too thin and call it the entrepreneur's curse. But I find it with musicians and producers too, where either they try to learn too many different styles or try to do too many different things. I have to be great at recording, great at mixing, great at mastering, great at this, great at that, great at everything rather than actually being great at something. One thing. And then moving on from there, it's very, very similar with entrepreneurship or really anything. So I've become very, very aware recently of the amount of energy things take, and so I try to do less things overall, but the things that I'm doing try to do them way crazier, way more extreme. That tends to be working.

Speaker 2 (00:16:02):

We tend to wax lyrical about multitasking and getting all these things done at the same time. But the reality is that the human mind isn't wired that way. We are all serial taskers. We are like a CPU. You need to prioritize whatever tasks are being sent to us. So I completely understand when you take on a new pursuit and it's a big pursuit and it's all encompassing and you have to devote a lot of yourself to it, there's no way you can maintain the same level of output in your other ventures. And I experienced the same thing this year. I had to pull back a lot from submission after release of Gym Base. I decided like, all right, cool. I can probably coast a little bit and develop on other things while my business partner worked behind the scenes on the nuts and bolts and the coding and all of that sort of stuff.

(00:16:43):

Which actually brings us to a really cool and positive segue. I really didn't want to spend an entire interview dotting on the whole negatives of 2020 thing. I'm sure that's been done to death by pretty much everybody else and everybody has their own sub story, but one very, very cool thing has emerged out of this for us. So in a couple of days on Black Friday, you guys are going to see us launch our very first standalone plugin. It's going to be called Flatline. It's a mastering grade mastering clipping tool that I've developed very closely with my chief business partner and all the other guys that we have working with the company at this point in time. And we are so proud. It's come out so much better than we ever expected. It's first standalone plugins. You don't need anything from native instruments, no contact, nothing like that. And yeah, very small footprint, very effective plugin. And you've actually heard it on a lot of my masters already from artists like intervals, plenty and a bunch of others that I think are yet to release. So super stoked, man. Super stoked about that.

Speaker 1 (00:17:42):

Is it basically a tool that you kind of created for yourself that now has been developed to the point of being able to have it in use by other people too?

Speaker 2 (00:17:51):

It was primarily a proof of concept for us. That's how it began. So my business partner went, look, how far can we get if we stretch our legs out on our own, if we leave behind the contact platform and start to actually delve into the c plus plus and really get into the nuts and bolts of things, what can we actually do? And within a ridiculously short span of time, just because he's one of those gifted savant types, he had basically cobbled together a tool that was, I was in disbelief, I was running shootouts by myself against all my favorite limiting tools, all my favorite clipping methods. I had the same thing done by some of my colleagues like Thomas Johansson, Henry, good fucking Mick Gordon as well. We're launching with Mick Gordon presets as well. Mick is in love with the plugin.

Speaker 1 (00:18:36):

I've heard of those guys

Speaker 2 (00:18:38):

Occasionally in passing, but I couldn't believe the level of feedback that we got from those guys and they helped validate what we were doing. That charlatan curse you have, you're like, well, I built this. Obviously I'm biased. And I think it's far greater than it is. And after our first round of beta tests, we're getting back feedback going, this just obliterated my favorite limiter. It lives on all my mixes, it lives on my master bus. I use it all the time.

Speaker 1 (00:19:03):

I get what you're saying, but you should feel that way about your stuff. I feel that way about URM. I understand feeling like a charlatan. That's my bad side. But in reality, when it comes down to it, I know that URM kills everyone in this space and I've worked my ass off for that and I'm proud of it. You should feel that way about it.

Speaker 2 (00:19:26):

I think progressively as we go on, we are having the proof of concepts, having the people come back and reinforce your perceptions you have while you're developing something help so much. But I'm one of those people that's always immensely self-critical and so is my chief business partner. We're always self-evaluating and error correcting. We're always like, what could we have done better? Of course, maybe this sucked more than it should have. This could have come out differently. But having launched with such a airtight thing is absolutely unbelievable. And there are a few things in particular that really get me excited. So a lot of people that have followed what I've done in the past with the mixing guide and everything, you would know that I'm a sucker for workflow. I love simplicity, I love simple tools. You can just pull up and get up and going.

(00:20:10):

So flatline is a tool that has essentially three or four main controls, I would say probably three that you even have to think about while you're mastering. So within the space of about 20 to 30 seconds, you can basically get a finished master going if your mix is balanced. And what I love about it more than anything is that Andrew put in all of this work getting the technicals locked in behind the scenes. So the thing that actually happens on this plugin that I've yet to see with any other, it syncs up to your monitor's refresh rate. So it's able to output at 144 FPS, 300 FPS, so it locks into whatever hertz cycle you're doing, and each frame is matched exactly to each herz cycle on the monitor. So you're not going to get any stuttering, you're not going to get any lag. It's literally as something happens as you hear it, the visual corresponds with it. It is the smoothest UI you've ever used. And it makes the process of using the plugin so joyful every single time a master, a new plugin. I know to some of you that might sound insane. It has nothing to do with the audio aspect of it, but that audio visual interplay, that tactile feedback is such a huge part of the mastering process to me.

Speaker 1 (00:21:15):

So two things. First of all, you should be also super critical of your own work. Lemme just clarify. I don't think you should blindly think that your work's the shit. You should be super critical so that you earn the right to feel good about your stuff. I just wanted to clarify that because there's nothing worse than people that were super delusional about their own work. Second of all, that's super modern. I think that old school guys are going to make jokes about what you just said about like, oh, you're playing a video game. But actually I think that anyone who's been mixing since 2005 and on or 2000 and on, especially people who are maybe 45 years and younger, have just grown up with visual being a part of how they mix. And so to take that seriously and to respect it, I think is super important and super modern.

Speaker 2 (00:22:06):

I think the first company I saw really respecting it at that level was fab filter and no,

Speaker 1 (00:22:12):

I was about to say,

Speaker 2 (00:22:12):

Yeah, it's no small accident that ProQ ended up becoming my go-to eq because it isn't just about the sound, it's

Speaker 1 (00:22:18):

Like It's like a visual spa.

Speaker 2 (00:22:20):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it just soothes you. Working with it is so helpful. And the fact that you occasionally, we all have lapses. We can't be a hundred percent attention all the time and ProQ with that constant realtime spectrum analyzer. If your ear misses something, if you get a little bit lazy, you look at that one little spike and you're like, maybe there is a peak of 2K, maybe that's why it sounds whistling in the guitars. Maybe that's why my vocal isn't coming through. And then you pull it down and then suddenly it's there. I mean, you wouldn't have had that on a 4K. It doesn't matter that you spent a quarter of a million dollars on that damn desk. You're not going to catch that peak when your ears go to sleep. So that's one of the massive advantages we have in modern day record production. Also, the video gamer thing, man, I'm tired of that being a disparaging term with people. I'm not saying that you are doing that or anything, but it's just

Speaker 1 (00:23:07):

I'm not, I'm telling you what an asshole would say.

Speaker 2 (00:23:10):

Oh, exactly. Dude, I'm with you an absolute asshole. It would take to say something like that because gaming is where

Speaker 1 (00:23:16):

I've heard it before. I'm quoting an asshole.

Speaker 2 (00:23:20):

Wonderful. Well, I started off in the tournament shooter realm in the nineties, so quake one, quake two, quake three when we got 60 FPS locked. And I saw how fluid and smooth, how low the input lag with my mouse, how quickly I could frag my friends, man. I was all about that stuff. And as I've grown up and things have moved on, we've gotten 144 hertz monitors. I've learned that my eye could perceive way more frames than I ever realized. We were always lied to. We were told that your eye could only ever see 30 frames per second, and anything more than that was just unnecessary. We know now that it's closer to a hundred frames per second, and that's what we're aiming at with our plugins. So literally using flatline is playing a tournament shooter from the two thousands or playing freaking doo eternal or something that was, because we're all gamers, we're all nerds. We want that lock-in sensation. We want it to be fun. We want it to feel like music is something engaging and isn't just a chore to work on. So to me, that kind of thing is a massive, massive elements record production.

Speaker 1 (00:24:18):

Well, when you have lag, it takes you out of the moment. It totally takes you out of the moment. Even down to when I'm doing a nail the mix and there's lag between me, the person talking and their mouse moving on the screen. Even that makes it harder for me to talk to them and keep up. I actually think that if there's anything extra, we have to think about compensation for lag or whatever, anything extra that makes our brain have to process things, takes away from our ability to focus and give our all to what it is that we're doing at that point in time.

Speaker 2 (00:24:59):

These are all very 21st century problems as well. They because so much more frequently.

Speaker 1 (00:25:04):

Well, I mean that's where we live.

Speaker 2 (00:25:06):

Yeah, well, exactly. Well, so much more of our interaction is happening through laggy means. I mean obviously in prior times, there's no way you and I could have had this near real time conversation across the ocean basically on completely opposite sides of the planet, but it's becoming so much more so the norm and everything we can do to reduce that lag, to increase the fidelity between what we see to actually replicate that sensation of us talking to one another face to face. It helps facilitate that conversation. I think it helps also convey meaning because so much of meaning is nonverbal, and it's one of the hardest things to convey in these podcasts is sometimes nuance gets misinterpreted. You don't get to see a certain tick or a facial expression that someone makes. I think the same thing relates to plugins as well. For so long I've been using these software rendered 10 FPS things where you can see the interpolation of the knob position.

(00:26:00):

It's just like moving a centimeter at a time. And I'm like, come on guys, surely we can do better than this. I've seen interactive tools on web browsers that have better UIs than this. So for us to actually make the jump do it all vector-based, completely offloaded onto the GPU mind you. So the CPU footprint is next to nothing in the plugin. It's all literally running off the graphics card, graphics cards being insanely powerful, as I'm sure some of the geeky AC crew know now with the NVIDIA 30 series and stuff coming out. So it was the perfect playground for us to unite so many of our passions and things that we wanted to see in a plugin and actually put it out as a product. So you know what, the more I talk about this, the more I feel like I'm just talking up something that it can never live up to.

(00:26:41):

So I sincerely hope that you guys enjoy it as much as I have, but at the very least you can actually hear it in a lot of my latest work. I don't know if the new plenty is going to be out by then. The new intervals most certainly will be. I hope Josh's silos stuff will be as well, but it's already been tried and tested and man, so god damn proud of what the team has done and so proud to be a part of such a very, very hungry and talented and motivated team that can pick up the slack. When I decide to go off and become like a quasi YouTube streamer,

Speaker 1 (00:27:10):

That's the mark of a good team. Things not falling apart when one member has to do other things. One thing that I've been playing around with at URM this year is to see what happens when I pull back in certain ways. Does it slow down? Does it start to go off the rails? And I can safely say now that it's not, the team's so good that I can be hands off with certain things, I'm not hands off on other things. So let's put it this way. Now I'm able to focus on exactly what I should be focusing on that only I can do. Whereas before I had to focus on things that other people could do, but I just knew how to do better or I was the only person who knew how, but I could have been replaced by somebody else doing it. And then there's certain things that only I can do, like the people I book on there, that's my contacts and stuff.

(00:28:06):

So that's the kind of stuff I should be doing. I shouldn't be installing courses, for instance. Now we've got it to a point where I can withdraw contact for a little bit and just focus on how I'm going to do big things for the company and not get involved in a lot of stuff I used to have to do. And it still keeps running without a slowdown. And so that's the mark of a good team. So I think the fact that you could start your racing career and submission didn't fall off the rails and the product still kept on being developed, that's a really good sign.

Speaker 2 (00:28:47):

A hundred percent. I think the more an enterprise grows, the more you find that people become intrinsically more role-based if you want it to actually function well, it becomes

(00:28:56):

Like any partnership, like any tribe, it has to be role-based in order to function efficiently. And eventually everybody sinks into their place and anybody that doesn't have a place very quickly falls out and begins to understand that maybe they need to start pulling their slack more or leave the enterprise and start something else. Luckily for us, all the people that are part of this enterprise have very astutely found their role and much like yourself. I think over time I've come to realize that my role in IT is more to create opportunity to create contacts, to facilitate the logistics of what we're doing rather than the technicals. As much as I am, I guess mostly a consultant on the technical aspects, I'm not the guy that codes it himself, but I can give them very visceral feedback. It's almost like the way that a race car driver would interact with the race engineer.

(00:29:43):

You do a couple of laps on the test session, you come back to the pits and you're like, Hey, look, the car was too on, steer on corner entry, had a weird arrow balance mid corner. And then it's kind of the way that you speak to your programmer, and then if you have a really good relationship, you have really good communication with one another, you come out with something pretty amazing. It's no surprise to me that we're probably going to see eye to eye on these issues and how a successful enterprise functions. And on a personal level, I'm excited for 2021 in the sense to see submission flourish beyond just the small time, if you will, roots of virtual instruments on a third party library to see it come into its own own as a fully fledged software development company.

Speaker 1 (00:30:24):

You got to start somewhere.

Speaker 2 (00:30:25):

Absolutely, man. Well, I mean, I think back to Steven Slate when he was flogging us SSD 1.5 back on these Andy Sneak forum. I mean, he went around shopping his drum sample CDs to guys like Mike Shipley. He would just ambush them on the street and be like, Hey, Mike, use my snares Snap Man. It's sick, right? And you've got to start hustling. You've got to start at some point. And now the dude has, what would you even call it? Some kind of audio mega corporation, right? Everybody knows what Slate Digital is, hardware interfaces, software, virtual, he's everywhere. But I still remember the early days and always the funny thing I guess about coming into your thirties is that it always feels like yesterday you think upon the very first days, the early days, and to you it's like, that wasn't that long ago. And you really think about it and you're like, no, that was 15 years ago. A lot of the people who listen to the stuff that I make were just being born around then. So that gets pretty crazy when you put it in those terms.

Speaker 1 (00:31:20):

Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that should be happening right now. If it wasn't happening, I'd be worried with how long you've been around, you should be taking these kinds of steps in the life of a plugin company or a virtual instrument making company. You would expect at some point if things are going well that they would move off of platform, like contact and do their own thing. I think it's awesome. That means things are going well. I feel like if you were to stay there forever, that would be concerning.

Speaker 2 (00:31:52):

Well, this is actually, you're touching on something really important here. Something very visceral to me, and a lot of the younger guys that will be listening is I was trapped psychologically for so many years, and I did it entirely to myself. I took on that old adage, which is those who can't do teach, that always stuck through in my head, always, always stuck through in my head, and it was always like

Speaker 1 (00:32:13):

I got over that one.

Speaker 2 (00:32:14):

Oh, totally. And much to your success, dude. Absolutely. I mean, it certainly didn't do me any good for many years. So yeah, going back to that, I had this idea in my head that I had to be a practicing mixing engineer. I had to be creating records of a certain caliber of a certain quality by certain points. I had all of these break points set for myself. So I had the goal setting thing that everyone always spoke about, but I had this very regressive mindset of not chasing every opportunity or every new venture as it presented itself. And I think back on one of our very first conversations, actually, I remember after we did our first podcast, Joel kept me on the line and he spoke about all the things that we could do together. And I was very hesitant to pivot into that space.

(00:32:55):

I was so stuck in my mind about I have to be doing this, I have to be doing that. I can't really afford that partnership or this partnership. But when I think back on those conversations and the kind of opportunities I destroyed for myself, I'm just like, what did you really gain from that? What did you gain from maintaining this course that you had set when you were 19 and being completely inm malleable? You've seen so many studio owners go bust because they weren't willing to be malleable. They weren't willing to sell the two inch tape machine. They weren't willing to downsize the studio. They weren't willing to downsize their running costs or ditch the assistant and start doing some of the boring work themselves. So once the mastering thing finally came along, once Nolie and Misha pulled me into that space, almost inadvertently, and for the first time in my life, I actually said yes to something meaningful.

(00:33:43):

And it worked out. It worked out in a way that was almost unbelievably good. I pivoted into what could be considered probably the easiest service job in all of audio engineering, which I could then use the spare time of to supplement by building a software development company by doing the whatever else, the working out the sim racing stuff, all kinds of other ventures. And then the more and more I got away from the purism of having to practice a craft, the more I got into that entrepreneurial mindset where you're like just creating opportunity. You're looking at patterns around you and looking for ways to manipulate and work those to the advantage of those dear to you and yourself to create something together as a group. And that has been so much more meaningful to me than anything I ever did as a mixed engineer or anything like that.

(00:34:28):

And I always think back on the release of the mixing guide, it was by far the most successful thing I'd ever done to that point in my life. And I just didn't listen. I didn't listen to the outcome. I mean, I saw the sales, I saw the wildfire it created throughout the industry. I saw that nobody else had filled that space at the time, but I didn't continue along that journey. I just went right back to doing the mixing thing and grinding away. It was one of the most regressive moves I ever made in my life. And I think being able to look back on that and identify it as what it was has helped me a lot coming into my thirties and coming full circle.

Speaker 1 (00:35:02):

Well, I can tell you this, there's a lot of resistance against doing anything educational in this space. So I completely understand where that frame of mind came from. At the beginning of URM, I had to fight that voice in my head pretty hard. It took me a while to even come to terms with doing something educational back when I was doing Creative Live. And then for a while I was struggling internally with the, well, if you're not mixing, how can you do this and not be a fraud? But then I came to the conclusion that how can I do this while mixing? It's impossible to actually take this to the level I want to take it to while also trying to maintain a mixing career. You can't do both. Not the level that I have wanted to take URM to. So I had to find a way to get that voice to shut the fuck up.

(00:36:00):

That's what detractors will say. They will say, that person isn't mixing X many records per year or whatever. What's the last thing they did? They don't have the right to have an educational venture, which is complete fucking bullshit. Because knowing how to run a business and seeing a hole in the market is a completely different skillset and a completely different type of value that you provide for the world than mixing records. It's not the same thing, but because we're in this small scene and we come from that artistic world and we kind of have those values inside us too, it's hard to separate from that. But separating from that is probably the best thing you could possibly do. In my opinion.

Speaker 2 (00:36:45):

Every niche community develops its own little tenets, and most of the time those tenets, so hyper echo, chambery, so regressive, so personally limiting, when I think back on every forum I've been a part of, or every group, whether it be a car group or an audio group or lifting group or whatever, they develop these strange parameters by which they have to live by because they judge themselves by those, but they don't take a step back to see that nobody in the wider world gives a shit. Nobody cares that you mixed blah blah, blah. Death metal bands record like two years after you've done it. Mixed engineering is one of those things where you continually have to keep proving yourself day after day after day, week after week after week, year after year. And even then in our community, if you've mixed a massive metal record, you're still kind of no one in the wider world.

(00:37:31):

Nobody gives a shit about what we do. So if you put that in context for yourself and realize that it's not about some kind of purist idea of who you are as a craftsman, but just about the level of personal fulfillment that you have, the amount of change you're able to affect on the scene and the world around you and how that all interacts, that means so much more. And one thing I realized was that I was making so much more of a positive impact as an author educational figure, software developer, consultant, whatever, than I ever did as a mix engineer. So that made it such a very natural pivot because everybody else was getting way more from my time that I'd invested, and I was getting way more out of the time that I invested. So those kind of, I dunno if you call 'em puritanical or purest thoughts, really just got me absolutely nowhere initially.

(00:38:17):

And actually an interesting way kind of segues into something that's been happening over the last year. Once again, touching on the fact that 2020 has been such a challenging year for so many people. There have been so many developments in the last six months. I wouldn't even be able to touch on all of them. But one of the more important ones that I guess is relevant to the scene is that I found my interactions with clientele were beginning to become very strained towards the beginning of the lockdowns. And I couldn't account for what was happening. I don't understand why the projects were getting more difficult to finish. I couldn't understand why they were wanting more revisions, why the processes were taking longer. And when I found myself getting kind of dour and starting to snap at clients, I'm just like, all right, I can't do this anymore.

(00:39:01):

I can't be the face and the interacting entity and also be the creative force as well. So I need to hire someone in the middle. So I hired and manage it to manage all of my interactions, manage my schedule, and hopefully make life a lot easier. That ended up taking a lot of the load off and ended up helping me kind of focus on the creative and technical elements of the craft rather than worrying about the money and the scheduling and all that sort of stuff. But I don't know whether it's because of what the lockdowns did to people's psychologically, what they've done to the music scene, but the interactions just kept declining in the sense that I would continue to get requests for multiple versions like half a year after a record was done. It felt like no matter what I did, no matter how thoroughly I worked, a record was never truly finished because guys would keep coming back to revise something.

(00:39:50):

Maybe it's the lack of deadlines, the lack of label influence, that emergent new mentality of working on music. But I found that it was so personally limiting and so personally regressive, I couldn't focus on anything else. I couldn't focus on building the YouTube channel. I couldn't focus on submission because every day I would wake up, I'd wake up to a massive essay from my manager going, Hey man, these guys from three months ago need this, this, and this. Oh, these guys forgot this one song. Oh, these guys didn't like the snare sound and track force. You've got to reprint the whole record and resequence it. So by the time I'd worked through all the revisions and all the backpedaling on any given day, I'd only had three or four days left to engage in any new ventures. So as we got closer and closer to this kind of a pivot point that we're at now, towards the end of the year, I found myself needing to move house.

(00:40:35):

And that's something I did about two to three months ago now, and the time has gone by so fast. I literally dunno the exact amount of time I've been here. I've just been go, go, go, go, go the whole time. But it just didn't end. The moment we resumed, it just became more of the same, except I also had to deal with the landlords and the maintenance of the new place and setting up the new studio and all the things around everything else to a point where we said, Hey look, we're going to cut all uptake of new mastering work completely until early next year and we'll see how that goes. And we did this about a month ago now, so we've stopped taking new work entirely with the exception of very, very few select projects for my friends like Pliny and stuff like that. But no new day-to-day stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:41:16):

A periphery comes knocking. You'll do that.

Speaker 2 (00:41:18):

I already have, mate. We just did a live record.

Speaker 1 (00:41:21):

Okay, there you go.

Speaker 2 (00:41:22):

They actually just came through with a

Speaker 1 (00:41:23):

Case in

Speaker 2 (00:41:24):

Point. Yeah, well, they just came through with one of the aforementioned revision requests, well after the record was done for a month. So this actually ties in very viscerally. So all of it. So what I meant to say is that even though we cut all uptake of new work, I'm still here revising to this day. I spent the first half of today when I should have been writing the manual for flatline, getting all the assets to our videographer, getting all of that tied in with our influencer partners and stuff. I'm here issuing revisions for a band I should have been finished with six months ago. And this isn't periphery by the way, it's just somebody else. But this has been an ongoing thing and I realized that this is never going to end if I continue operating the way that I operate. They're continually going to keep eating into my time like this, and they probably don't mean to, they probably don't have ill intentions, but I'm always at the brunt of their lack of preparedness. I'm always,

Speaker 1 (00:42:14):

Dude, it's not just them. It's you not being willing to put up with that anymore. I don't think that this is unique to 2020. I was feeling this in 2013, 12, that feeling started to build and then by 2014, I was starting to lose my patience with clients for being unprepared and I didn't have it in me anymore to put up with the normal stuff that all my producer friends put up with. So I think honestly, it means that you're ready to do other things because you just don't have it in you anymore to put up with that shit because that shit's not going to change. And it also hasn't changed. It's been that way forever. I think probably you've gotten involved in other things that actually move more efficiently and coming back to how dealing with bands is probably, it doesn't sit right with you and the more successful your other ventures get, the more bullshit it seems to deal with this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (00:43:17):

I think it becomes very difficult to account for that time that you spend after a while,

Speaker 1 (00:43:23):

Especially when you have things going that are very respectful of your time and profitable.

Speaker 2 (00:43:29):

If it's your everything, I mean, if you are just a tracking engineer, a live engineer, a mixed engineer, mastering engineer, and that's what you do like 12 hours a day, it makes perfect sense. You're going to spend two hours a day answering emails, corresponding with your clients, forming strong relationships. You can be doing two hours of revisions a day, and then you start your new projects and issue out however many records you work on in a day. But when you are managing four different ventures at the same time, and all you can think about is these motherfuckers are fucking third revision and they're like, I've got three business partners waiting for me to supply this document. They need to launch a new product. You feel beholden to other people. It isn't just your time that's being wasted. It's like a categorical domino effect where they basically start to topple every other venture that you're doing.

(00:44:15):

I may get resentful of it, but the clients don't mean ill. They're always going to be at a particular point of preparedness. They're at a particular place psychologically or at a particular point of professionalism. It doesn't necessarily mean that they mean you bad, it's just that they aren't there, they're not ready and they dunno what they need to supply, and they perhaps haven't gone through the process enough times to understand how to have a smooth working relationship with the audio professionals that they outsource work to. You can't really hold that against them. But when you get to that point as the operator, that is historically when I've recalled major pivots in my life happening. So I guess this is a way for me to say that I think I may be soft quitting day-to-day mastering much as I did with mixing whatever it was two years ago now, that was one of the best things I ever did.

(00:45:04):

By the way my income tripled within the space of six months, I think. Congrats. My stress levels went down to a third at the same time. And now I'm seeing mastering being a similar kind of impediment where it's like I can't justify the amount of time being spent on this, and I think it will be far better spent on other things. That's not to say that I'll never master a record again, but I'll probably, my manager will be a lot more stringent in what he lets through what we accept, what we're willing to work on, and what we're willing to spend time on. I want to make sure that it's something I'm behind creatively, that I can connect with the artist and that we can do each other justice. I know they're going to respect my time as much as I respect their time and their craft. I think that just ends up being a better relationship for everybody involved.

Speaker 1 (00:45:48):

Yeah, though it's interesting. I know people obviously who only want to do mastering or only want to do mixing or production or whatever, and they're cool to do 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week. They're cool with all the revisions. I mean, they might get frustrated sometimes, but they don't get to that resentful point, what they want to be doing. And so the fact that they're doing that makes them happy and they just view those tweaks and all that as part of the job, maybe a part of the job that they don't like as much, but it's just part of the gig. But it sounds to me like you can't justify that anymore. That's how I was getting,

Speaker 2 (00:46:33):

It has to do with how you're wired as a person, I think, and for me,

(00:46:37):

I have to make a process more efficient over time. If I find myself doing the same thing again and again and again, and nothing is improving, I just start to go mad. And the problem for me is that in spite of the fact that I'm growing as a person, my workflow is developing. I feel like my methodology is improving over time. The age of the average band that works with us is always the same, and we're always working through the same ground level issues with them again and again and again about file provision, about the way they track and record and edit things. And that is in no way a knock to them. There's always going to be guys at all levels doing that stuff. But at a given point, I don't think I can justify it anymore. And it was actually going back eight years now.

(00:47:16):

One of the reasons that I wrote the Systematic Mixing Guide, it was because I was tired of answering the same mixing related questions again and again and again. I'm like, if I have it in a book, I can just link the guide to the book and then everyone can have those answers. And that was my way of streamlining that process for myself. Now, unfortunately, when it comes to mixing and mastering, there is no way to really streamline that process. You can get as many assistants as you want worked in. You can have as many managers and middlemen and guys feeding stuff to you unless you're at that point where CLA is at. He just boots up the console, mixes the track in two hours and says, alright, motherfuckers, you get one phone call. I don't care if it's like 3:00 AM in Australia, you get five minutes for revisions and that's it.

(00:47:58):

Your record is done. So unless you get to that point, you can't really get the level of streamlining that I think I would want in the end game. And for me, I think it was about accepting that that role in the industry either no longer exists or is so far out of my reach that it's basically pointless to aim for anymore. So I think there's a certain serenity in that acceptance to understand what you can affect and what you can't affect. Again, looping back to the stoicism, which help me accept and make so much peace with so many aspects of my life. This included of course, the idea that going into the future, I mean, I'm not just going to wake up to revisions. I'm not just going to be dealing with clients and answering emails. I'm going to be looking for opportunity. I'm going to be networking with new people, hiring new people, working out ways to feature our products, promote them new angles, new ways to reach more people. I think what we've managed to do with submission in this short time has affected the industry so much more than the whole breadth of my work to this point. It's unbelievable. I mean, there's that ongoing gen meme where it's like if you're a gen producer, you need a check to C seven, get good drums. Neural DSP and submission audio basis, we're already part of that meme. So to me, that's basically the metal industry end game of what you can be doing as a software developer

Speaker 1 (00:49:14):

Becoming a meme.

Speaker 2 (00:49:14):

Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that what we all really want at the end of the day, become a meme for all of five minutes?

Speaker 1 (00:49:20):

That's the true gauge.

Speaker 2 (00:49:21):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:49:22):

It's a true gauge of impact

Speaker 2 (00:49:23):

When guys like Elon Musk are all about the meme life. It's powerful shit.

Speaker 1 (00:49:29):

Well, actually, I actually do think that if you make it into a meme, it is a measure of how much you've impacted other people, because memes are by their nature, viral and impact lots of people. But one thing that I definitely think about that definitely I did think about too when I started doing the educational stuff was I realized very quickly that my creative live classes were doing more, were basically creating a greater impact than anything had done before that. More than my band more than the productions I had worked on, whether I was producing or assisting. It was just bigger and there's nothing I could do about that. And all I ever wanted to do was something that made an impact. So when I realized that that's what was doing it and not what I had originally thought would do it, I was sold basically. But it took a second to realize that the original stuff that I had set out to do just wasn't it. But it's a good thing that I figured it out in my opinion, as it's a good thing with you too.

Speaker 2 (00:50:39):

Well, I'm glad in your case you figured it out about 10 years before I did. It certainly would've saved you a lot of time in terms of getting the gears spooled up for the business growth.

Speaker 1 (00:50:48):

I'm also older than you.

Speaker 2 (00:50:50):

Ah, I'm sure not by that much. I'm getting used to being the old guy in the scene these days. It's been an interesting shift. I always felt like I was always, you spend a decade being called the young guy. You're like, wow, you're only 25 and you wrote a book and you did all this and that, and then in what feels like five very short years, it's like, oh, he's 30, right? He's been around for a while. So it feels like the peak is such a short span of time in the modern world. It's like you have this little span in your twenties where everyone's like, man, you're doing so well. You're doing all these things in your twenties, and then the moment it ticks over and there's a three in front of the age bracket, you're just like, ah, that guy. Yeah, cool. There's somehow less reverence to what you've managed to do in your time when they account for the age.

Speaker 1 (00:51:32):

However, when you add the four and the five, that's when you really peak and can make the biggest impact, in my opinion,

Speaker 2 (00:51:41):

In this industry, especially

Speaker 1 (00:51:43):

In the world. People with a four and five in front of their age basically are the people that make the biggest difference.

Speaker 2 (00:51:50):

They're the powerhouses.

Speaker 1 (00:51:52):

And in music too, a lot of the talent and stars get famous young, but I think that a lot of the true movers and shakers tend to be a little bit older just because they're more mature. I think also that's one of those perception things, kind of like those who can't teach. It's something that we think about. We like superimpose other people's opinions onto our view of ourselves when in reality, I don't think anybody really gives a fuck how old you are as long as what you do resonates with them or makes a difference to them.

(00:52:31):

We get a lot of URM students who are like, they consider themselves to be too old for starting out, and they think that it's a mark against them. I'm talking about dudes in their mid thirties and stuff, or early to mid thirties. And the thing is, I've seen a few of them actually do stuff, develop real careers in the industry within a pretty short period of time. And the reason that I think that they could do it was because actually say that you're a successful producer and you have the option of getting a super driven 30 5-year-old or a super driven 18-year-old. The 30 5-year-old has the maturity of a 30 5-year-old and already has a bunch of skills and no attitude problem, and the 18 year old's just a kid. I think that a more mature producer is going to go with a 30 5-year-old, and that's what I've seen happen. They don't want to deal with a kid, maybe the 35 year old's a little old to be an intern, but I've noticed that those dudes tend to graduate from an intern very, very fast, and then they end up helping out on lots of things that an 18-year-old could never help out on business development, for instance. So I don't know, man. I think the age thing is kind of bullshit, honestly.

Speaker 2 (00:53:52):

I guess it depends on the scene, depends on what perspective you're looking from, obviously in the,

Speaker 1 (00:53:57):

Well, if you want to be in a band, it matters.

Speaker 2 (00:54:00):

Yeah, that's exactly where I was going to go. I mean, if you want to be the next pop star, then you're pretty much screwed if there's a three, at least in front of your name, in front of your age bracket. But that's just one of those industries that youth obsessed much as the movie industry is these days.

Speaker 1 (00:54:13):

But if you want to be a pop star, you're pretty much screwed anyway. Yeah, period. Because your chances of success are basically zero. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:54:20):

It's one of those things you see generationally, we've developed a bizarre youth focus over the decades. If you go back to old movies, especially if you look at, let's say the old Star Trek TV show or movies, I mean the average age of the guys on there are mid forties at least, right? And now the cast all consists of early to mid 20 year olds. It's very, very bizarre the way that it's shifted, and I think we've lost a certain maturity because of it. We're trying to express all of these storylines which are so angsty and driven by the modern day politics of it all that we've lost that timeless factor, those age old realizations and nuggets of wisdom that come about from a person that only surmounts the gauntlet of life and comes back around to reflect on it. We're starting to see that in our media as much as everywhere else.

(00:55:09):

And talking about the age thing, I mean, I can give a good story if one of you guys have just started with URM, you're in your early to mid thirties, I mean even older or whatever, and you think you're too old for this business. I mean, for me, I'm ancient by it by these standards, but back in February when I first started the YouTube thing and I'm just like, Hey, this game I really liked just came out. Why don't I make a video about it? Right? I had a hundred subs. I was making these shitty little racing videos for just my friends, and they would watch and encourage me, and it was nice and it was fun, but I never saw it going anywhere. I never got more than a few hundred views at best. Then I decided to make a video where there was a build guide for a game called Walson Lords of Mayhem.

(00:55:49):

So it was a game where I had a leg up. I had been playing it through early access for five years. I knew how the builds worked, I knew how to break the game. I knew how to crash it basically. So when the game came out, the developers really fucked up. They didn't account for the massive surge in play account. They didn't expect 160,000 people try to connect to their master server all at once. So that immediately crashed their entire server architecture. Nobody could play the game for about a week. And I'm like, alright, so I've got about a week. What can I do with this? Maybe I can make a little build video when people can finally get into the game again, I can give them something to play it with. So me with a hundred subs average view count in videos of 150 to 200, my first build video goes to a quarter million views, and I'm just like, what in the fuck just happen?

(00:56:37):

What is this? And then I learned about the power of news cycles and the way the algorithm prioritizes content during particular news cycles. Eventually that Walson wave died off. My view count went from quarter million to 150 to a hundred, then below a hundred K generally until I was just making videos to 20 K people at a time. And I knew that there was no end game. This couldn't sustain into anything else so much in the audio business where I came to the natural end of something, I'm like, well, I need to use this momentum to pivot into something else. So I'm like, well, I mean I love sim racing. That's what the channel first started off as. Why don't I try with sim racing, everybody's locked down for COVID. Maybe everybody's getting into this business now. I can see that the scene is really bursting, the keywords are really trending.

(00:57:23):

So I just went into a cold, my whole community we're all just RRP G nerds, and I'm like, Hey guys, look, racing Sims got a wheel, got a whole setup, all this nerdy shit that you don't care about, but through the power of, I don't know what it is, just sheer association with the algorithm. Once you're a hot topic on YouTube, they will literally spread your content out further. It doesn't matter what scene you're a part of, you're just going to get more face time with more people, more opportunity over the space of about a month. I managed to convert that into a sim racing channel where all of the RPG guys basically just went, I went from 3000 subscribers in about six months to 25,000 with a complete scene conversion at the same time. And I did all of this when I was 33.

(00:58:04):

I mean, I am a dinosaur by their standards. I mean, they hear my voice on the screen cap videos and the guys are like, oh man, whenever I do the camera feed stuff, they're like listening to your voice. I thought you were over 10 years younger. I assumed that you were a guy, and he is early twenties and all of this shit. And the first thing it does, it starts to fuck with your head like, am I too old to be doing this? Should I have done this in the first place? But then you come around and you think, well, the only reason I was able to do this is because I had already run that gauntlet in so many other industries. I've already done this before. There's no way I could have converted all of these opportunities so successfully in such a timely fashion to grow something this quickly unless I'd had the experience of having run that gauntlet. So you can actually use your maturity and your experience to supercharge your growth throughout an industry. So never sell yourself short. If you're listening to this podcast, if you're my age, you're older, it doesn't really matter. Just get into it and just do it and just cultivate all the opportunity that you can.

Speaker 1 (00:59:02):

Once you know how to do that, you know how to do that. What were the opportunities that you had to exploit basically that you understood to exploit? Could you talk about what some of them were?

Speaker 2 (00:59:12):

Absolutely. So through what we had done with submission audio and all the Facebook marketing and through the organic and viral marketing and working with different influencers, I realized that you need association and you need to either piggyback on the back of an organic news cycle or create your own news cycle. You're basically trying to create a wave that people are going to get onto so you can get as much face time with whatever venture or product or thing that you're doing that you want to get. So for me, there was a few organic ones. It was the release of the game that I knew to capitalize on, so I jumped onto that. Then I saw another surge in a different scene. I decided to jump onto that because I know that when a scene is hyper growing, it's just like when we had the Bitcoin explosion.

(00:59:58):

There were so many guys that got so hyper rich in such a short span of time. They got it on the ascent. They became the gurus for all of one month, made away with all the money, and then the currency just deflated. Everyone got screwed over, but they still ended up with the millions. So you have to be one of those guys. I remember reading a book by a guy who invested in Amazon before anybody knew what was going to happen, and he saw the trends. He saw where it was going. You need to understand systems. You need to understand human behavior and trajectories, and you need to be able to preempt events almost become like a pre cognizant entity that can kind of put it all together. It's almost like you're looking at matrix code, and once it all coagulates into an image in your mind, you can capitalize on those opportunities as they happen.

(01:00:41):

And for me, what that eventuated in and this tertiary career thing that I've started, I very recently joined a real life Motorsport team called Butler, Powell Motorsports. They're guys that race my favorite racetrack in the world, the Berg Norlife. They're also devout sim races. They're a dual team, so they do the virtual stuff as much as they do the real life stuff. And it's connected me so much more viscerally to a scene that I always felt was one step out of my reach that I wanted to be so desperately a part of because I've loved Motorsport for my entire life, but being a poor war refugee for most of my life, I just had no access to the capital that you need to even get into that, the carting, the gear, all that sort of stuff. So to be able to come around after I've built a financial foundation, if you will have a career, have some kind of clouts to start again in a whole new scene and be able to just inject myself into it, even in my thirties, has probably been one of the most personally gratifying things I've ever done. And I would love to hear more stories like that from people that are a part of this community or people that are just simply listening to this on a whim. It's always possible if you're willing to just get in there and do it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):

The reason that I think that it's harder when you're older isn't because there's anything wrong with you. In fact, I think you're more equipped for it when you're older. It's just you have more real life going on. Generally. The reason that I'm able to do things is because I don't have a wife and I don't have kids, and my job doesn't have an office, and that's by design. I used to own a house. I don't own a house anymore. That's by choice. I don't want to own a house. I don't want ties, at least for now, that allows me to do things

Speaker 2 (01:02:21):

Same.

Speaker 1 (01:02:21):

That's a decision. I could definitely own a house if I wanted to own a house. I don't want to own a house. I'm sure that I could be married right now if I wanted to be married. I don't want to be married. And I think a lot of people lock themselves into those kinds of things, for better or for worse. I'm not judging. It's just the truth. A lot of people lock themselves in. And then it gets hard

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):

Just to interject. You are exercising control there, which is an extremely important thing to have over your life. The ability to say no to things when it seems like life is invariably funneling you in that direction, you may be in an amazing relationship with an amazing person, but to still have the presence of mind to say that, Hey, no marriage is not the right thing for me at this point in time, it's likely to do more damage or tie me to things that I don't want be tied to. You're exercising a form of control, which I guess in the fitness terminology would make you an alpha al. So congrats.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):

Thank you. Is that what an alpha does, exert control over their environment?

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):

I think so. I think that's probably the benevolent way of looking at the alpha, is looking at someone that exerts control over their environment and uses power in a way to beneficially affect the people around them as basically a protector, as somebody who creates opportunity, who safeguards their tribe. I mean, if you see yourself in that role, I mean you very much are, yeah, alpha in that sense.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):

Well, interestingly enough, I have had ex-girlfriends try to get me to marry them. I thought about it, but just couldn't. No, it just wasn't right. And I basically see myself as responsible for the livelihoods of a bunch of people, and if I fuck up, I feel like their livelihoods go away. So I kind of carry that. But I like carrying that. As a matter of fact, I feel most myself in this situation. This is like I didn't feel like myself really when I was in a band, for instance, and we were second out of five on a tour or whatever, or just doing our thing, it didn't feel like me and then in the production role didn't feel like me being an assistant didn't feel like me. Nothing I had done up until this point felt like me. And right now, being in this role is the first time in my life that I actually feel like myself.

(01:04:48):

Now, what I think is important about that, where this is relevant for listeners here is whatever it is that you're going for in life, you don't have to go for the same things that other people are going for. But it is important, I think, to be honest with yourself about how you're best utilized, what you do that makes the most impact on other people, what actually brings value to them and what you feel like yourself doing. So earlier in our conversation, we're talking about not having the patience anymore for dealing with endless mixer visions or whatever of how we're wired. If you're listening to this and that's what you want to do with your life mix for a living, and you have the patience for that, that's great. You shouldn't feel like you need to start eight businesses just because we're talking about doing that need to make that clear. There's a lot of great people who mix for a living who have been on this podcast, interestingly enough, in 2014 when I was walking away from production, one of the realizations I came to was, I don't have the personality for this. I'm getting pissed off about these things. But these are the same things that have been happening for the past 15 years, but I don't have the patience for it. This is turning me into that guy. It's bringing out the worst parts of me.

Speaker 2 (01:06:08):

Yes, I

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):

Don't like who I'm becoming

Speaker 2 (01:06:10):

That that is the world speaking to you, and it's so good that you had the presence of mind to listen to that and actually make the right decisions. I think back on one very specific moment earlier this year, I remember I laughed so hard when I had this experience. It happened in such a short frame of time and it was so consequential to my life. It was the last mixed job that I did. It was a complete disaster.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):

How so?

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):

Well, so I worked with a bunch of guys who were very, very cool, very cool. Bunch of guys came down on track with me and everything. We got everything finished, and I hit a bit of a stumbling block. I think my life started going down the toilet in a personal sense, in a really bad way. I had some deaths in the family. I was doing a lot of traveling and all that sort of stuff was going on, and I couldn't find that creative headspace. And I kept mixing and remixing and mixing this record, and I really, I gave it a lot. I believe in all my clients that I work with. I want them to make sure that they feel like they got everything out of me. So I spent a lot of time working with these guys, getting the performances, getting the mix locked down, and after feeding them all of these songs, spending weeks and weeks and weeks on this record, even though I didn't really didn't get much back from them other than, yeah, this is cool, man, this is cool, this is cool.

(01:07:22):

And when I finally supplied the entire mix, I woke up to this, I woke up to this message saying, Hey man, I just spoke to the rest of the band and we're really not vibing this. The vocals sound like they're unmixed. And the way that they were presenting, it sounded like what I had done was unsalvageable, or it was so far gone that I had to start again from scratch. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, is this really where I am? After 15 years of having done this, I'm working at a discounted rate to accommodate these guys at half my regular rates. I've supplied all of this stuff gone above and beyond with the amount of time I've spent, and this is the message I've gotten back, and I'm like, God damn, this is the most bizarre thing I've ever run into.

(01:08:02):

But that isn't the story. The story is that just after I've run this, I'm just sitting there, I'm just staring at the ceiling wondering what's going on with my life. I get a phone call and I answer the phone call On the other end is Mick Gordon. Mick is like, Hey man, you want to master a the do maternal OST. And I'm just like, the gulf between these two experiences happening within the space of 10 minutes is so fucking comedic. I can't even quantify it. I can't believe that the one can actually happen. In contrast to the other. So we had this conversation. He told me all about the video gaming scene, how things work with deadlines and all that stuff. We set together a plan to get this done for those who followed that story. Unfortunately, it didn't pan out for various reasons. Much to my dismay, Mick is in some, let's call 'em negotiations with the company that he was working with.

(01:08:52):

And unfortunately, I didn't get to work on the OST in the end, but when I put that in perspective for myself, I went back to this band and I'm like, this is going to be my penance for making all the wrong decisions. I gave them back all of their money, good move, all of it, deposit everything, everything. And I'm like, guys, this is a hard cut. You take it. You're not happy with it. I'm totally at peace with that. I'm going to supply you all the files, get it mixed by whomever you want. I'm going my own way. You go your own way. And that to this day is the very last record CD of things I'd ever worked on. After that I worked with my friend Ola, but obviously I'm going to work with Ola. That's a different story. That's the different criteria of things.

(01:09:31):

But that was the last mixed job I took and probably the last mixed job I will ever take. Much as I'm feeling that same thing happening again with mastering. Every single day I wake up to these revisions, I find myself getting more and more bitter and wondering why I'm allocating my time to these things that are so not fruitful to my future. When life is screaming at you so loudly, you have to listen. And one of the biggest mistakes I made when I was younger and dumber like Al referred to the 18-year-old intern, you have to listen to when life is speaking to you, look at the patterns, understand the way that things are going, and to completely derail this, I'm going to end this train of thought very shortly. One of the things that helped me do this in a wider sense with the sim racing and the YouTube and the wider business endeavors was understanding the way that human psychology and in particular group psychology worked.

(01:10:20):

I would strongly recommend you go see the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. It's an early two thousands BBC documentary. It will teach you about why the world landscape looks the way that it does. I would urge you to read a very recent book by a fellow called James Douglas who wrote a book called The Madness of Crowds, understand Heard Behavior, and understand how you can use it to your own advantage because the herd behavior is for the most part going to hurt you and it's going to hurt the trajectory of your life. You may as well mitigate that as much as possible by understanding how people operate and how to most benevolently co-opt that in order to create opportunity for yourself, your friends, and your colleagues.

Speaker 1 (01:11:02):

Well, lemme just echo what you said about listening to the world talking to you. I actually did that same move in 2014 a couple of times in two different projects. One was a mix where the artist really didn't like it and sent me this huge email. It was substantial, and I just had a little talk with myself. Do I really want to do this? Do I really need to be doing this with my life right now? Start from scratch, make this guy happy, do I give a fuck? Nope. And I gave him his money back, and that was that. And his files, it wasn't even up for conversation and I felt great about it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):

It's funny how we both have that exact same story.

Speaker 1 (01:11:49):

Yeah, I got the email and I was just like, Nope, not doing this again. I don't care if you don't like it, just take your money. I don't want your money. I don't want anything to do with this. I'm done. It was very, very liberating. And then also right at the end of 2014, I was going to co-produce a Battle Cross record, but that's when I was leaving Florida and starting URM and it would've made me stay in Florida. About another month and a half, I had made the decision that I was going to quit making records to do URM, and then there was this record, yeah, the Battle Cross record on for Metal Blade. So it was like, do I co-produce this and get another label credit or not? And I decided to walk on the project and just let the other dude do it himself. I figured if I do this, I'll do the next thing too, and the next thing and the next thing, and I'll never get out. So I walked on a project where I was going to get paid and get an actual credit, and it felt great. Nothing against the band or anything, but it felt great to walk.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):

It is funny how that can happen as well. And you're always, there's a voice in the back of your head whenever you're turning down opportunity, especially when it feels like sizable opportunity. There's that voice saying, man,

Speaker 1 (01:13:13):

The fuck is wrong with you.

Speaker 2 (01:13:15):

What if you're not going to be able to pay the bills? What's going to happen? What are you going to do with that extra spare time? Is you going to sit around and play World of Warcraft or some shit?

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):

Well, I mean, not being able to pay the bills was a serious concern that first year. There were some months I only made like $1,300, but I was okay with that. Yeah, that's a real question, a serious concern.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):

Yeah. Sounds like you really put yourself through the ringer. And I guess I've always played it safe. I guess I had to wait until I had some kind of a nest egg that I could fall back on if I was going to take any kind of a risk in that regard. So the mixing guide helped a lot with that, and working for 10 years as a mix engineer helped a lot with that. And now mastering and all that other stuff. But it's rough at a point, you have to take a risk and see where it goes. I mean, for me, the proof was in the pudding. I told Al before, and I'm not saying this to make a point or to brag or anything like that, but when I gave away the thing that was taking up 50% of my time, if not more, which was mixed engineering, when I hard cut that, my income tripled within six months and my stress levels went down by about two thirds.

(01:14:20):

So I cannot overstate the power of that. I felt like this tremendous weight had lifted off my shoulders. I didn't feel like I was trapped between a rock and a hard place anymore. It's just the feeling of elation was hard to describe. And I think that's the moment I realized that I was never set to be a mix engineer. And the more and more I do this, the more I'm realizing that me providing a service to people for a living, for money is not where I need to be as an individual. That is not where I belong. As much as I love working with my friends on mastering their records, I love working with Pliny and intervals and periphery and M's. Solo record and everything else that comes along. There's a certain point at which when it feels like a day job, it feels like the most soul crushing day job you've ever had in your life. And I never want music to feel like that. For me.

Speaker 1 (01:15:08):

The thing is, if you're wired to be cool with doing a service job, then awesome.

(01:15:16):

Some people are. The key is to recognize that in yourself, and yeah, you will have to take a risk. I didn't have much of a nest egg at that point because basically I went from making zero for years in the band, literally zero to making a living in Florida. And I was only there for three years. So I only had three years of experience with money. And so I didn't have a nest egg, but I knew it was going to work. So there was a risk involved. But you know how you were talking about being able to see the matrix or whatever, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was going to work because I saw all the signs basically. And so there's always a risk, but I've always taken risks that other people think are crazy. But that to me made perfect sense.

(01:16:12):

They seem unrealistic to other people, but I've learned you can't listen to other people. They don't see things the way you see things. Same way that they don't hear things the way you hear things. Not everyone can see the signs. And if you see them, you might be wrong. You might be wrong. That's the risk. But you will never know unless you take the risk. So at some point, you just have to fucking rip the bandaid off. And the thing is, with timing with certain things, if I had waited any longer, I bet you somebody else would've done it. So they had to at some point, the idea is too simple, someone would've come up with it. So I felt like I had to do it then, and there was no time to wait. I actually wish I had started it a year earlier. So yeah, what was I going to do? Build a nest egg for five years and then say I had that idea five years ago, but this guy already did it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):

That's one of the things that eats the way at my mind to this day, because the very first seedlings of an idea of starting submission audio and us doing the virtual base thing began in 2014, right around the period that you are talking about. Andrew, my main business partner and I, the guy that's basically 50 15 with me and everyone else as an employee or a contractor, we used to hang out a lot at his studio. He used to have a studio down in South Melbourne near the beach, and we would just hang there all the time and definitely not smoke anything crazy and just listen to music. But one day I had my guitar there, no

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):

Crack,

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):

No, of course not. I'm not CLA level. So yeah, I had the specter there, the bass guitar, and we're just remarking on how great that thing sounded and how we wished that all of our clients would bring in instruments like that, how much easier life would be. I was working with a band then called Elm Street, my last big record where the guys spent big money. We recorded everything, nineties style man directly into the amp, no DI's, no crazy editing, just like the take is the take. The tone is the tone. The drums are the drums you commit, right? And he was like, Hey, you heard this thing called zombies? And he plays it and he's just like, yeah, it's not great, but this is what people are doing now. They're programming based. I'm like, that's ridiculous, man. Who would ever want to do that?

Speaker 1 (01:18:27):

Is that the one that had the crazy bad intonation?

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):

I think so. All I know is realizing at the time that every third note was duplicated. So they were just stretching everything and only recording every third or fourth note and just shifting all around to do less work for the actual sampling process. So I heard this and I'm like, Hmm, yeah. I mean, I don't see this taking off Andrew. And he's just like, look, just bear with me. Just plug in. Let's record super hard velocity layers of every note down to da, da, da, right down to the drop chord tunings or whatever. So he just had me play down strokes as hard as I could get all the clank and all the vibe and the buzz from the frets, and he compiled it together into this super basic contact instrument, and we played, he programmed it to one of his songs, and we both just sat there in fucking awe going, oh my fucking God, what is this?

(01:19:18):

That was the beginning of Euro base. That was where that originated. I could not believe how good this thing sounded in a mix. So obviously the humanization wasn't there. We hadn't multis sampled. We hadn't done the up and down strokes and all that sort of stuff, but you could see the embers of what was going to be something very special, at least what I thought was going to be something very special. And then we did nothing with it for about two to three years. We did absolutely nothing with that realization until Andrew realized the mixing thing wasn't working for him. He had to quit. He became an electrician, became borderline suicidal. He hated the nine to five work cycle so much that he had to run that gauntlet and come back and say, look, man, this isn't for me. This kind of a lifestyle. I can't do it.

(01:20:02):

And only after he had that experience was he really ready to go in a hundred percent on a new company. And I knew at that point that he had no other choice and we had to go after it. So I had to give him a really good proof of concept that this could work. And that was the very first Euro base thing, obviously. I mean, it's a bit of history now. I mean that did really, really well. Everybody in the scene kind of, not everybody, but a lot of people in the scene took to it. They responded really, really well. We followed it up with Euro Base two for free, which I felt really passionately about because that reflected the ethic and the workload and the quality that we actually wanted to be selling at that price point. And then everybody was super happy about that, and it became a legitimate, legitimate business from that point on. And I guess here we are a couple of years later, foraying into our very first standalone plugin come I guess a day or two from when this is going to go live Black Friday. So man, I mean, what's to say?

Speaker 1 (01:20:56):

Well, that's great, by the way. I don't think that that's such a bad thing that you guys had the idea in 2014 and it took a few years.

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):

He wasn't ready. I know that he wasn't ready mentally to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):

You got to be at the right point. Me deciding to quit and do URM, I had already been doing the audio education thing for a few years, and I had been looking for a way out of my situation in Florida for years. I got to Florida January, 2011, and by January, 2012, I was looking for a way out. I needed to get the fuck out of that place. And anyone who knows me from that time period knows that early on I was already looking for a way out long before things went awry. There. I was looking for a way out, and I found it through the Creative Live thing. But the Creative Live thing didn't start until 2013, and it took a while to develop the ideas. And so just saying you having the idea in 2014 and it taking a little bit, that's okay. That's how it normally goes. I'd be more surprised if you guys went all the way on the first go around. It takes a while for things to sink in and for people to realize that it's something they actually want to try.

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):

Yeah, I think there would've been something to have been said about doing it that early. It would've been very much like the mixing guide in the sense that there would've been no real competition in the space back then. So whatever we released would've defacto become the go-to thing. Whereas coming back to it four years later, we had to battle a lot harder to kind of get through what was already entrenched in that space. And now obviously we have far larger competitors coming into that space, and I'm so excited about our answer to those products. I mean, I can't speak about anything yet, but my God, if you guys know what's been happening behind the scenes for the last year, see, when I speak about this stuff, I get so excited. I don't get excited when I talk about new mastering clients in the same way. And that's one of the giveaways. I think that it's time. It's time for the next step. It's time to move on to what really gets you going, what makes you passionate. I don't think we were recording when we spoke about this, but to the guys that don't know, I'm doing this insane 24 hour endurance sim race

Speaker 1 (01:23:12):

That is insane.

Speaker 2 (01:23:15):

It's 12 o'clock UTC on Saturday. So the race begins at 12 noon German time and ends at 12 noon German time begins on Saturday, ends on Saturday, much as the real race. So what we're doing is the 24 hours of no Burging, which is my favorite endurance race in the whole world. I watch it every single year. I watch the onboard cams, I leave it on for an entire day, literally just the dashboard of a car as it goes around a track again and again and again and again for 24 hours. And to be even a virtual part of that is going to be so exciting. And to those who are actually even marginally interested, I'll actually be streaming this on my YouTube channel. So if you just type my name into YouTube, subscribe to Erman Vic, I will be streaming there as long as they'll allow me to stream there. And you'll basically just see the onboard footage of our car and the team chatter as we, I think there's going to be five of us, five drivers sharing stints as we make our way around the virtual burging nor lifer for 24 hours across very different time zones, though strange times.

Speaker 1 (01:24:14):

That is pretty nuts. I've heard of doing races like that in real life, like running with teams where you run for three hours and then somebody else runs for three hours

Speaker 2 (01:24:25):

Endurance marathons. Yeah, I think every insane discipline has endurance events like that. The Motorsport aspect is absolutely insane. It isn't anywhere near as popular as Formula One is. So many people don't actually realize it exists. They don't understand the world of GT racing, and to those that don't, there's basically three main endurance events in the world, three that are revered, and they're all extremely close to one another. The first one is in Spa Frankham in Belgium. It's one of the most famous race tracks on the planet. They do the 24 hours of spa. There's the 24 hours of Burging, which is two hours I think, east of Belgium. It's a place that I hung around in last year and really wanted to go back to earlier this year. But unfortunately, the COVID thing kicked in. So two racetracks within two hours of each other, host two of the most important endurance racing events in the world. And the third is the one that everybody knows the 24 hours of Lamont, which takes place in France, and that's the one that basically epitomizes what endurance racing is. There's actually a series coming out from Porsche about Michael Fastbender taking part in one of their teams in this course, because what all the rich guys inevitably do, they either become gentlemen, drivers that either support a team and just do endurance racing, or they start their own team and start hiring drivers and becoming a part of it, it seems like,

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):

Or they go Falcon,

Speaker 2 (01:25:46):

Yeah, all that. But it seems like such a, I think of them as the alpha guys, the ones that are just the speed demons, the ones that are just looking for that next thrill. They always just end up, once they become multimillionaires or billionaires, they always end up in real life. Motorsport just kind of pissing away their money on these endurance racing events, almost like the natural resting point for a middle-aged dude that's done well with the first part of his life. To give you an idea, what's his name? Either they used to call him McDreamy from Grey's Anatomy. I forget what he is.

Speaker 1 (01:26:19):

I know who you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:26:20):

Yeah. Yeah. So I forget his name. But that dude is a bonafide GT three driver, has been for many years now. Michael Fastbender as well. I think there are some others that I'm probably forgetting about as well. But dudes from Hollywood and TV love that stuff. So it's this strange, somewhat prestigious yet, so out of reach of the average person's scene that only a really select click really care about it to that level. But again, this is one of the things I loved about pivoting into different businesses. They open you up with the spare time to chase errands, tangential passions like this. There's no way I could have ever done something like this had I been mastering or mixing 24 7. And it's funny, I actually have a document lifted here just in case I miss something tonight. I hate it when my mind goes off track on me.

(01:27:09):

And I literally have one that says, not having enough time to dedicate all the things you want to do at a high level. And that's literally something that you yourself touched on I think about an hour ago in the podcast. Al, I feel like we're coming full circle to that idea that you're picking and choosing what you want to do with your life, and you need to be aware of what the consequences of those choices are and what they might mean for your time. Some of you guys might be in love with the idea of mixing 24 7 that may complete you. You may literally be at the end game right there, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's so many.

Speaker 1 (01:27:43):

I know lots of people like that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:45):

Yeah, well, our scene revolves around them essentially. And there are plenty of guys that do the master, they love working on 12 records a day. They'll start mastering like six in the morning, finish at eight at night, and then go to bed and dah, dah, dah, all that sort of stuff. I mean, some people are like that, others aren't

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):

My Ian's like that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):

Yeah, I got that impression.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):

Oh yeah, that dude is a fucking mastering machine and he's got a very happy family. And Andy is an avid cyclist and stuff, and he loves it. Loves it. If that's who you are, that's who you are. And that's great. By the way, one thing I want to add about knowing the consequences of the choices you make, sometimes you just got to make a choice and then deal with the consequences, whatever they may be. I think sometimes people wait too long to make choices, and at some point you just got to, if you can't decide what to do, just pick something, pick something and go. Because you'll figure out pretty quickly if it was the right choice, and then at least you'll know something.

Speaker 2 (01:28:49):

But

Speaker 1 (01:28:49):

Yeah, it's good to understand the consequences. However, you can't ever really truly know the consequences until you can't fully know. So you just got to do things. I think the stuff that I regret in life is never stuff I did. It's always stuff I didn't do. I have very, very few regrets about anything I've actually ever done, always something I turn down or whatever. It's

Speaker 2 (01:29:15):

A bit of a cliche though, isn't it? It's pretty much everybody talks about the regrets being the things that they didn't have the courage to do because,

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):

Well, there's a reason. It's a cliche because it's universal

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):

That creates an unknown quantity in your life. You go back in your memory banks and you're like, what if I'll never know because I never did it? And it's like if you took that risk, even if you failed, at least you know that you did what you could and you got the outcome that you were always going to get. But if you never tried, then you never really tapped that potential, whatever it was, whether it was asking a girl out or applying for a job or moving country or something like that. Unless you tried it out, you would never really know. And I'm filled with experiences like that. So inherently cautious, the more I become older, the more reflective I become. Because I think you become in spite of your best efforts, you become so much more reflective on the time that you have left when you get to your mid thirties because you realize that all right, there's a very visceral ticking clock now. It isn't just like the sky is the limit. I can do whatever I want on any given day in Yolo, right? I have to be accountable

Speaker 1 (01:30:20):

For people halfway, halfway there.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):

Exactly. Whoa. Yeah, I mean, how do you really follow that up? It's so consequential that you find yourself being intrinsically reflective with everything that you do. You start to think about where is this leading? It isn't the happy go lucky choices that you once made. It isn't like, ah, let's see what happens if I do this. You start to reflect on, Hey, what can happen if I do this? And would my time be better spent if I do that instead? So there are certain things that you are more liable to do at different points in your life. And I would say it probably is true that you should be tapping as much opportunity as you possibly can in your twenties when you're more likely to be organically hungry about things. When I was 19, when I was 19 to 25, the time I spent on the sneak board back at university for audio engineering, you wouldn't recognize me from who I am now.

(01:31:16):

My web browser would load up on the ultimate metal board on the Andy Sneak board. I would immediately go to the equipment section, be like, what's just come out? What's new? What's everyone talking about? What's the new technique? How can I improve my mixes? That was the only thing that went through my mind was how I could be the best possible fucking audio engineer I possibly could. Now, over time, for me that elapsed for various reasons. I'm not saying it's going to happen to everybody that's listening to this. I'm not saying that I'm passionless either. I just have to be far more selective about where I spend my time. Because often when people approach me and say, Hey, have you heard about this new converter and have you tried this? There are a few things I would rather not talk about than that. It's just not something that's in the forefront of my mind at all.

(01:32:03):

I cannot give a shit telling someone about how a compressor works and how to dial it in or how this new compressor squeezes on a snare because it gets to a point where when you've been doing this for a given amount of time, for me, when I pull up a project and I go to master, it'll mix it. It's like breathing air or drinking water. It's second nature because I've been doing it for so many years, I don't need to talk about what a piece of gear does. I literally load it on the source. I hear what it does, and I intuitively act on that. And it's something that you can't convey to someone. I could write a dozen books that won't matter to you unless you've run the same gauntlet, unless you've worked on the same amount of records, unless you hear things the same way.

(01:32:43):

It's just the point that you arrive at after a given amount of years of doing something. And there's no, as we say in Motorsport, there's no replacement for seat time. And it quite literally is seat time in mixing and mastering and engineering, unless you've been engineering records for at least 10 years, there are certain things you simply won't understand, you won't be able to act on in the same way. So again, if you have any doubts or hesitations about what you're doing, you're best off to just get in there both feet. First, do it, embrace it, immerse yourself in it and see where you end up. If it's not for you, you'll find that out very, very quickly. You probably won't lose that much time, but if it is for you, you'll probably be enraptured by it. You'll stick with it for a decade and you'll emerge in this bizarre point where I always go back to Neo being able to see the matrix in code while he is in it and stop bullets and shit.

(01:33:31):

That's how I feel like when I load a mastering project these days, all I hear is whistle at 2K needs a high pass at this frequency needs ringing at 160. That just happens in my head automatically. I don't even have to think about it anymore. Whereas in the early days, I would panic. I would get this massive anxiety of, oh God, the possibilities are endless. Which eq, which compressor, which channel strip? I dunno anymore. But when you finally transcend that and come full circle and understand what you're doing, then pick the tool for the task based on the correct priority order. It makes so much more sense. So I feel like a lot of my discussion with the younger members of the communities trying to diffuse their anxieties and be like, just give it time, dude. Just give it time.

Speaker 1 (01:34:12):

Yeah. Well, two things. First of all, it's way easier to ask a girl out now than it was before. Way, way easier. And

Speaker 2 (01:34:20):

Why do you find that's the case?

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):

Because I'm not concerned with the outcome I used to be. I think living life and realizing that, like you said, the things that you wonder about are the things that you didn't do. So actually fully having that concept in my core of not losing anything, if you get rejected, who gives a fuck? You'll end up exactly where you were right now. So the only thing that can happen as a result is something good, but nothing at all is something good too, in my opinion, because I'm not unhappy with where I'm at

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):

And you're not losing anything you didn't already have. So you can't think of it as a lose situation. It's just a potential good. That's all it is. I think people get hung up on the embarrassment and what other people think of him in the moment, and that can be really hard. Fuck, circumvent, fuck. Well, that's the thing. I mean, the who gives a fuck attitude that that's the 30-year-old al. You can't instill that attitude in a guy that's just come out of his teens so unsure of yourself. You're so unproven. There are so many things you need to do in order to prove your utility to the world before you feel confident in who you are. And I think that's so bizarre to emerge in my thirties and be able to finally look back and say that, Hey, for the first time in my life, I feel comfortable with who I am. And in some part that may be due to the stoic philosophy and the other part, it might be due to lifting weights for a given amount of years and being comfortable with what I do and what I've achieved and what I'm capable of

Speaker 1 (01:35:48):

Or all the above,

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):

Or, I mean, they're all the sermons of a person, aren't they? But when you are 18 or 19, you've had so precious little time to actually do any of this or endeavor in any of this, and even if you did, did prove yourself, become like a megastar at that age, it's probably going to hurt you more than it helps you because you're going to suffer some serious developmental impairment if you're not faced with certain challenges along the path to wherever it is that you're going. Because the people that have it all handed to them as child stars, I mean, you can look at the trajectories of their lives. It's not always guns n roses as we say.

Speaker 1 (01:36:25):

Well, one of the things that not being 18 provides you is the experience of having things fall out from under you. Right? So it's not just asking a girl out that I'm cool with. Say There's a certain project I'm pursuing for URM, I'm not worried about if it doesn't come to fruition or something. Obviously I want everything I go for to come to fruition, but at the beginning I was way more scared of things falling through. Look, we just put out this Will Putney course that I've worked a long time to line up, but I was fully prepared the whole time for it to disappear. I'm really glad it didn't disappear. It did great. But would it have stopped us dead in our tracks if it had disappeared? No. We kept on doing what we're doing and still crushing it. So it's kind of a life wide thing, and I feel like once you start to feel like that in your life, it spreads.

(01:37:21):

So you start asking yourself what's the worst that can happen? And I think when you're 18, you don't have the life experience to answer that question properly. So you can't say, what's the worst that can happen if this falls through, if I get rejected or my band got signed and it gets dropped, you can invent all kinds of horrible scenarios by the time you're in your thirties and forties that you get rejected, you're going to meet somebody else at some point probably soon. If one project falls through, there's going to be another one. The end always. Unless you stop trying.

Speaker 2 (01:38:00):

Yeah, but I've got to say, sometimes I reminisce and I miss things feeling as dire as they used to. I miss waking up in the morning and being excited about everything. The consequence of everything, whether or not a project is going to come out sounding good, even if only 30 people are going to hear it. The consequence of ending up with my dream girl, it has to be her. Our lives can be perfect together. That sort of bullshit or anything. Waking up on a new tech announcement, like a new graphics cards coming out like, God damn, I'm going to get 300 FP fps on the new quake, or something like that. I don't feel those extremes as much as I used to. Everything is more a monotone shade of gray, and I think that that's something that just comes with the age. You get kind of battered down across.

Speaker 1 (01:38:47):

I get the swings still,

Speaker 2 (01:38:49):

Do you? Oh man, I envy that.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):

Yeah, I can just pull myself back more easily. So I still get the feeling of super excitement, super disappointed, but I can snap out of it super fast. That's the thing I learned how to do. I don't want to not get excited about things. However, by that same token, the same things don't excite me as they used to. So I'm not going to get excited by the same things I did when I was 19, but that makes sense. If you were getting excited in your thirties or forties by the same things that got you excited as a 19-year-old, you haven't grown much, what's that say, well, yeah, I mean, or you could just have a very singular focus, right? Like say you're a virtuoso guitar player and that's all you ever wanted to do, and at the age of 40 you've been playing for 30 years and you still love it just as much as you did. I know people like that who are some of the best guitar players in the world, and you can't say they haven't progressed. They're working on totally different things than they were when they were 19, but they're still just as excited by it. But you could still say that they're excited by different things, but if you're literally excited by the same exact dream as you were when you were 19, it's kind of weird, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:40:09):

Is it an exciting place to be though? I sometimes wonder if you could sustain a passion, the exact same passion for that long, what that would mean for a person to not experience any growth in the traditional sense that

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):

You'd be a guitar player like Kiko Rero or something. No, I'm serious. Had him on the Riff hard podcast. The dude is one of the most passionate motherfuckers I've ever talked to and one of the greatest guitar players alive. I think that that's what happens if you can sustain it for that long. Obviously, if you're talented,

Speaker 2 (01:40:41):

I know exactly what you're talking about. Noli and I worked on his last record. It was amazing. I loved working on it. Great, great guitar player, amazing person to deal with as well. Absolutely. Never got the sensation that I was being talked down to or something like that, especially with a person that's at that level

Speaker 1 (01:40:59):

To have that. He loves it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):

Yeah, and you can tell, but I think even if you're that kind of a persona, if you're at that level, you are still going to branch out into different things eventually. It may not be a different instrument, but it may be a different way of approaching the instrument. It might be different phrasing or different sub genres that excite you, different elements you can incorporate into your technique. I think there's always elements of subrow, so let's say, I mean, I'm not abandoning pro audio altogether. I mean, you may get the idea that I'm not excited by audio production whatsoever based on the way I've been talking about some of these projects and experiences with clients, but nothing could be further from the truth. When I get a new track sent to me by Pliny or the Intervals guys or something, and I load that up, it's just like, it feels like I'm being hit with a blast of fresh air when I open the door first thing in the morning and the sunshine just comes over me.

(01:41:52):

I'm just immediately enveloped with this is what you'll put on this earth to do. This is what you're best at, and this is something you're absolutely going to crush. That's one of the things that's been the most elating about running through that gauntlet and feeling supremely confidence in what you do is that when you get it and it all lines up and all the check boxes are ticked and nobody's a punisher, and everybody interacts and communicates well, it goes off so amazingly without a hitch that it's a transformative process. The latest intervals record was one of the easiest things I'd ever done. I got a mix from Sam Guyana, amazing mixed engineer, I believe from Canada, and he worked with Aaron and the guys to pull a really, really good kind of pop punky element out of that sound, very, very commercial in nature and that thing, there was a ways to push it in mastering.

(01:42:39):

There were things I could do, but it was so linear and so clear. It was like a sculptor seeing the clay, and it was almost there, and you just kind of round it off a little bit and it suddenly comes alive in front of you and you're like, oh man, I think this is it. No revisions band. Fucking love it. Print the CD immediately. That's the kind of process I still live for. That's the kind of thing I wish we could get more of, and that's come 2021 I think, when me and my manager fire the business back up and dust off the cobwebs and all that stuff. That is probably what we're going to gear ourselves toward. It's going to be a question of, are we passionate about this? Do we want to do this? Can we do justice to this? And only then do we say, okay, let's go ahead on this together.

Speaker 1 (01:43:22):

Yeah, I never got the vibe that you were totally done with. It weren't into it. I think it's important to distinguish exactly what role you're cool with it playing in your life, though. It takes a while to actually figure that out, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:43:39):

Yeah. It's actually funny, this leads back to one of the fine folks we mentioned earlier. I was speaking to Mick Gordon recently. I'm always excited when I speak to that guy. To me, he's like the penultimate realization of the ideal music figure. He's just manic enough

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):

That dude's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:43:56):

Yeah, he's just manic enough to be just transcendently gifted and so focused on what he does so singular. So whenever I supply him with the new product or a new beta or something, he will come at it. His feedback will come in from left field. I will never think of things or hear them in the same way that he does. I remember the way he characterized Euro based sounding before he used it on Doom, he was talking about the way the third harmonics interact on certain arrangements and shit, and I'm just like, dude, I just played a really cool bass sound. I recorded it. So yeah, we have these amazing conversations. Maybe they're amazing one, I think I probably enjoy the conversation a lot more than he does, but one thing that was very interesting for me is him coming off of the gaming thing.

(01:44:45):

Obviously he came to be known through his work on Prey in the Doom series very recently. But what people maybe don't know is that he's been producing a lot more for other bands, bring Me The Horizon and some other ones, which I think I can't name. I don't know if it's been announced or not, but let's just say a fairly prominent, really cool industrial band that he's working with right now, and the way he spoke about his passion being reignited about music producing for bands was really informative to me. I thought he had the dream gig. I mean, he worked for these major companies working on these massive budget.

(01:45:19):

I mean, they're video games. It's like for geek like me, that's the dream. You work on a video game, you've made it, but to him, I'm guessing he was so hamstrung by the deadlines and the processes and the limitations placed upon you by someone that works as part of this gigantic juggernaut where you are just considered a minute flea hanging onto the back of it. I think that's the way he characterized it to me once on a phone call from moving to that to being the producer figure, to being the man, the guy that they come to for inspiration and guidance. It must be such an elating feeling for him, and it seems like he's gotten, he's experienced an almost similar transformation to what I've been talking about here today. So it just goes to show that this kind of thing has so many parallels in so many different situations, and you can take these lessons and these experiences that Al and I are talking about onboard and apply them to your own life. It doesn't matter if you work as a chef's apprentice or a ticket inspector or something like that. There are ways to relate this to every aspect of life. So if it applies to Irman Vic as much as it applies to the legendary Mick Gordon, I'm sure you can find a way to apply it to yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:46:28):

And the other thing about what you're talking about with Mick is just kind of what I was talking about earlier, that this is why you shouldn't be too worried about things because what's the worst that can happen if something falls through, something else comes around? And like you said, it sounds like he had the dream gig and then he didn't have the dream gig anymore, and now he has stuff that seems like is even cooler for him, and it took that not existing anymore in order to be able to create the space for what he's doing now. And again, when you're 18, you're not going to don't have enough life experience to fully feel that. If you've achieved anything by that point in time, that's awesome, but it's probably only one or one thing. If you're lucky by that point in time you haven't had the opportunity to achieve something, then have it fall apart on you, then achieve something else and have that fall apart on you and then achieve something else.

Speaker 2 (01:47:30):

Speaking of pivoting, there's actually something I wanted to ask you. I mean, you recently started doing the Riff Hard podcast. You mentioned having Kiko in there. How's that been going for you guys? How's that pivot worked out?

Speaker 1 (01:47:41):

Well, riff hard. The site is doing quite well. Are you familiar with the riff Hardd site?

Speaker 2 (01:47:46):

Vaguely. I've spoken to Josh John, sorry.

Speaker 1 (01:47:49):

So you know what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:47:51):

I know what it is generally. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (01:47:52):

Generally

(01:47:52):

Speaking. Okay. Yeah, it's doing well. So I wanted to help it more, and that's something that I could easily do. I enjoy podcasting. I just wanted to do something that was within my wheelhouse that I know that I could easily, easily handle, and I know how to make a podcast popular. So kind of like we were talking about earlier, that the experience that you've had with getting things going really paid off with your new venture. It's kind of similar with the Riff Hard podcast. So it took the Riff Hard podcast, maybe like a 10th or a 12th, the amount of time to gain traction as the URM podcast did. So it's going really, really well. And the same thing with that as this is like, I don't play guitar anymore, but I play guitar for so long that I know exactly how to talk to guitar players. I actually think it gives me a bit of a bird's eye view with production. The fact that I don't do production anymore, but did it for so long, I think serves URM. So yeah, riff Hard podcast is going great, and riff hard's doing real well, man. There's lots of guitar players out there who want to get better, and

Speaker 2 (01:49:15):

Mr. Brown is one of the most supremely easiest, the most fun people to deal with on the planet,

Speaker 1 (01:49:21):

And he's incredible at guitar.

Speaker 2 (01:49:23):

Oh, yeah. Not to mention,

Speaker 1 (01:49:25):

Yeah, key little detail. Using what we've learned from URM to get riff hard off the ground has been super, super useful. And that's kind of the idea was to see if we could do it again. It's not as big as URM, but also hasn't been around as long, but it's doing well, and it's not the last one of those we're going to do. We have a few more of those on the way.

Speaker 2 (01:49:50):

Well, it's great to hear, man. I'm always so excited when I hear about people talking about new ventures and chasing stuff, creating opportunities for people and just expanding their ideas and reach and whatever it is that they're doing, whether it be as part of sim racing pro audio or whatever, and we keep talking about pivoting and creating opportunities. And to me, the penultimate figure for this is always going to be the almighty Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean,

Speaker 1 (01:50:14):

Oh yeah, he's the king.

Speaker 2 (01:50:16):

Yeah. I mean, you look back on the guy that was like, I think a six time Mr. Olympia in his life, maybe seven time in the seventies, converted everything that he learns about being the best at something in the world to becoming a movie star in a country he'd never been to. Basically a language he barely spoke that he had to learn while he was there. He had to tap all of his contacts to get that going. Eventually became one of the most iconic film stars of all time, and then converted that into becoming a governor of, I think California, wasn't it?

Speaker 1 (01:50:45):

Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:50:46):

I mean, three distinctly different careers, all playing out at the highest level,

Speaker 1 (01:50:50):

Also a real estate mogul.

Speaker 2 (01:50:52):

Yes. And that was early on. That's what actually gave him his fortune. Him and Franco Columbo were basically into the real estate game while they were bodybuilding in the early days because bodybuilding never paid the bills. And I think he knew that. He's a very smart guy in his own words. He used to read about powerful people all the time, dictators, guys that basically took power by force, created opportunity. And even if it wasn't necessarily a benevolent story arc, there's a lot to be learned there about creating opportunity for yourself and enriching yourself or your friends or whatever it is that you're trying to do. And I think people like that always gravitate towards opportunity and making things happen and turning them around. So his isn't the only story. There's a very, very intelligent fellow in the bodybuilding slash powerlift scene. He actually trains the world's strongest men.

(01:51:40):

Half Thor Bjornsen the Mountain from Game of Thrones, and Brian Shaw, he's their diet coach, basically interacts with them, trains many NFL teams, gives him a lot of lessons. He was a guy that was a body bodybuilder for a very long time. He was the world's strongest bodybuilder. He was also a powerlifter at a given point in time, he went to himself like, look, this is costing me more money than it's making. I need to do something about this. So he pulled away from that scene and used all of the things that he learned about being one of the greatest bodybuilding to launching a business. I actually don't know what that business was for him that enriched him, but in the space of about, I think two to five years, he became a multimillionaire, was turning around millions every year, came back to the scene and then continued his passion while also having that nest egg growing behind him.

(01:52:31):

And I think the craftiest, the most insightful people always understand that it isn't necessarily your hobby or the thing that drives you that's necessarily going to pay the bills. Sometimes you have to split the difference in order to come away best in life. And sometimes you have to pivot in order to make things work. And it's no surprise to me that I think some of the guys with the biggest studios, some of the biggest complexes, those complexes were built as a hobbyist outlet. They weren't done through professional audio or they may have been done when audio was a much more profitable game. But many of the guys I know that built those complexes got enriched through running supermarket chains and stuff like that. That's far more profitable than audio has ever been. And it's the same as Motorsport. One of the adages that we have in Motorsport is The best way to become a millionaire in motorsport is to start as a billionaire. So it's one of those things that it whittles away your finances and you do it for passion. It's just never going to give you that much, no matter how many sponsorships you have, no matter how many cups you win. And you've got to understand that sometimes you've got to take one for the team. You've got to run some real estate hustle on the side. You can't just flex on a stage for seven years and expect to become a multimillionaire. It's good to acknowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:53:43):

It's good to acknowledge, and it's not a bad thing. I think that our world, the music world has some really, really weird standards about that kind of stuff. It's a weird set of rules, but tons of people break them in secret and do very well for themselves. But you're almost not supposed to do those sorts of things. Not supposed to have side hustles, not supposed to have anything else be your primary source of income. All these not supposed to dos that in some other industries nobody even thinks about. I doubt that in bodybuilding, people think about whether or not someone has another job. Maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:54:27):

It's because they all have other jobs, man. Everybody knows that it doesn't pay right's. A weird gig man's a fascinating race to the bottom. And I think after having been immersed in that scene for the better part of a decade, I feel so profoundly sorry for so many of those people because the completion that they're looking for as a person isn't to be found curling a barbell. It's not where the answer is. The answer is far deeper and far more psychological in nature. So you've got to draw those boundaries for yourself. I think a lot of people, they take on the fitness life and they think it's this transformative journey. It's going to be the answer to everything. It's the answer to a lot of things.

Speaker 1 (01:55:05):

It's definitely the answer to a lot of things, that's for sure. Oh,

Speaker 2 (01:55:08):

It is. Oh, it is. It helps your hormone balance, it helps improve your life in immeasurable ways. But the reason that you do it is so vital because so many of the younger guys do it simply for women, they simply do it for attention. They do it for narcissistic reasons. You need to understand that the act of the training is the most important thing. It's more important than the outcome. It's more important than how much muscle you build or how much fat you lose. It's the process of you putting yourself through that strain. It's the pleasure, pain balance that evens out your mind, evens out your hormonal balance. If you are like me and you essentially live with a kind of long form, fairly acute depression, it is the only way you can truly level yourself out without hanging back on drugs or any kind of a chemical assistance to help you through things.

(01:55:54):

But it's a tremendous coping strategy, and it's part of what we're supposed to do as a life form. We're supposed to spend most of our time on our feet. We're supposed to be running after Gazelle and throwing spears at them and shit, and we're not doing any of that stuff anymore. We are here talking into microphones, looking at each other through a screen across the damn ocean. It's not something that, while it's fulfilling intellectually, there's something very primordial that you want. You want to be out there, you want be in nature, you want to be near the beach, you want to be running, you want to be jumping around. You want to be star fishing, and you've got to satisfy that part of your biology as well. We can't be as sedate as we're allowing ourselves to be in the 21st century.

Speaker 1 (01:56:32):

No, I can tell you that I get a profound psychological benefit from lifting weights.

Speaker 2 (01:56:37):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:56:37):

Yeah. It is definitely something that was missing before, but it definitely doesn't complete me or anything. However, I will say that the benefits I'm getting from it are completing what was missing from my life, not the muscles or whatever, but everything that's being, that's not presenting itself as a result of all this. It was kind of the missing part of the picture for me at least. But that's not the same for everybody. And I also think that if you're doing it for the wrong reasons, it's like anything else you do for the wrong reasons. You're not going to find what you think you're looking for. Nothing really ever is what you think it's going to be. I think at the end of the day,

Speaker 2 (01:57:24):

I think people always look for the silver bullet, just like, as you probably know, you've probably delved into various dietary fads and everyone's like, is it keto? Is it paleo? Is it Atkins? Or is it whatever the fuck else, right?

Speaker 1 (01:57:36):

It's all the above.

Speaker 2 (01:57:37):

Well, it's basically the basics

Speaker 1 (01:57:39):

And none of the above.

Speaker 2 (01:57:40):

Yeah, exactly. It's you adhering to the basics that's going to lead you to the outcome that you desire. I mean, more than anything, people don't realize it's adherence and consistency. It doesn't really matter if you're in the worst diet in the world, so long as it incrementally leads you to your goal, adhering to that is going to be way better than you doing keto for three weeks, dropping 20 pounds and then putting on 40 pounds two months later because your body's ready to yo-yo back after you start to suck up carbs again. So it's one of those things. There's no silver bullets is what I'm trying to say, and I'm definitely not trying to take away the potency or the significance of what you are doing and the transformation that you are having. I know very well what that is like. So I started lifting weights again in an extremely, extremely personally difficult time in my life, and it's not really something I care to get into.

(01:58:33):

But without that crutch, I don't know if I would've pulled through. I don't know if I would've maintained my role in the audio industry. I don't know if I would've completely disappeared off the face of the planet. But it quite literally pulled me back from the brink and from that moment on, it became an integral part of my life, which is why the COVID situation was so consequential to me when they said that the gyms were closing down, that we were limited to an hour outside a day. That was basically the same thing as putting a lethal injection in my vein. That was it for me. I knew that certain psychological factors would creep their way back, and I knew what I'd be dealing with, especially given the living circumstances. That's why I absolutely had to fully invest myself in a whole new venture. So what I'm trying to say is what you get from the training, that psychological completion, there are certain things you can only get from physical exercise.

(01:59:27):

That's true. But there are certain things that you get from simply investing yourself into something wholly and building it and seeing the returns. It isn't only weightlifting. I'm not saying that you don't have to be a bodybuilder, you don't have to be a powerlifter. It can be a Brazilian jiujitsu, it can be dancing, it can be whatever, man, strip teasing, pole dancing. It doesn't matter so long as it satisfies that primordial need to move to create, to make something to grow, you can use it as that sort of surrogate completion sensation that you may require in your life at that point in time. Because I know a lot of the guys I used to speak to over the years, I would say, yeah, the idea of training is good. I don't want get too bulky. I don't really want muscles, I don't want for whatever hangups and whatever reasons they may have,

Speaker 1 (02:00:15):

As if that's easy to do.

Speaker 2 (02:00:17):

Yeah, you're going to wake up looking like Arnold tomorrow. Yeah, you're just going to curl too many weights and you're just going to wake up fucking Jack. There are guys that spend 20 years trying to get to that level and cuts, and you're just going to end up that way. I think a lot of it is due to the BS spouse in the fitness industry, especially towards women. They always cop the worst of the propaganda. They always get the whole like, oh, you don't want to do heavy weights. You don't want to get bulky. You don't want to have muscles. You don't want to do this. You don't want to do that. It's like, dude, unless you're injecting yourself with horse loads of testosterone, you are never going to get large and muscular as a woman. It's physically impossible. You cannot grow a certain amount of muscle.

(02:00:57):

So if I didn't train for the next three years, I could still probably out bench some of the strongest natural women on the planet. It's just genetics. So got to be mindful of certain things. And I think unfortunately, women are told the crux of the bs. They don't realize how powerful and beneficial that lifting heavy weights can be, even for women, for safeguarding them against things like osteoporosis, bone density, fortifying them in just day-to-day life, making them less fragile, making them feel more feminine because they tend to fill out, they tend to fill out in the thighs, they tend to fill out in the glutes, and they tend to look way more voluptuous no matter what their initial body type was. And so much of that is robbed from them by this propaganda of, no, no, you need to spend two hours on the treadmill and you can only lift half a pound weights and all of this BS

Speaker 1 (02:01:46):

Three pounds if you're really going for it.

Speaker 2 (02:01:50):

Damn straight man. And that's on the bench. That's not even curling. So I'm, I'm sure you've heard this BS yourself jumping into the thing scene. Yeah, of

Speaker 1 (02:01:57):

Course. Oh, absolutely. And also, I flirted with the fitness scene many times, many failed attempts. So yeah, I'm familiar. It really does remind me a lot of the music scene, there's a lot of parallels in that. There's a lot of people who are in it for the wrong reasons. Lots of people who think they're going to get something out of it that isn't there. You have to have a very, say you're playing an instrument if you want to get good, you have to adhere to a practice regimen's, a ton of parallels to getting good at music or audio as there is with the fitness thing. However, fitness being a much larger industry, there's much more bullshit too. It's rampant, fucking widespread and rampant.

Speaker 2 (02:02:48):

And there are so many guys running YouTube ads with the classic how to get shredded six pack abs campaigns, and that pays, they make bank, they just turn over so much money selling that delusion to people. And it's ultimately what it all boils down to is that you're telling people to take in less calories than they're expend and to basically do a couple of very elementary core training exercises. That is literally it. There's no rocket science to what we do. Our genetics and our body, they handle the fat distribution. You can't spot reduce fat. It doesn't matter how many, I don't know how many leg raises you do. You're not going to reduce your thigh fat stores. Your body's going to appropriate based on your genetic makeup where you store fat. So for someone like me, the last place it hangs onto is the love handle.

(02:03:34):

So the very last thing that gets revealed for me is the lower level of abs. So very frequently, unless I'm at my very, very lowest body fat levels, you'll only ever see a four pack on my body. That's when I'm at my peak as well. So you just have to make peace with certain things which are genetically determined. And when you finally elicit the truth from top tier bodybuilders, when they finally run the gauntlet, they've had their success. They have nothing left to lose from telling you the truth. They'll tell you the two most important things were one, the amount of hormones that were injecting and two, their genetics.

Speaker 1 (02:04:06):

Yeah, that's what I've heard too,

Speaker 2 (02:04:08):

Because those guys, a lot of them, they literally would show up to the contest, Mr. Olympia having just dieted and having done a few elementary exercises because they were naturally shredded. They naturally had a six pack. They were naturally not to take away from the insane work that many of them did. Guys like Dorian Yates had ridiculous workout regimens that pulverized their bodies. But then there were other guys that never did a crunch in their lives, like quite renowned for never once doing a leg raise or a crunch coming in with completely shredded abs just because their genetics were that on point. But you can't market that. You can't market good genetics. You can't sell it in a powder. So people aren't going to tell you that stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:04:48):

No, and also it doesn't change the fact that even if your genetics aren't great, you can probably make huge improvements. You can take things pretty damn far, even if you're not gifted much the same way as in music. Even if someone's marginally talented with a lot of hard work they can do, all right, maybe they're not going to be the best in the world, but they'll probably be better than a lot of talented people who don't work at it. So I think there's also a parallel there. But yeah, I mean, what's funny with those YouTube ads that you're talking about where there's some dude with 7% body fat selling a program or something, it's like that program's not how they got to look that way, except that's how it's being marketed. And lots of people do believe that they look that way of this thing they're selling, which is fucking bullshit.

Speaker 2 (02:05:43):

There was a great story in a documentary, which you may have seen called Biggest, stronger, faster.

Speaker 1 (02:05:48):

Nope,

Speaker 2 (02:05:48):

Oh man, you should a hundred percent jot it down for yourself. You'll love this bigger, stronger, faster. It's to do with basically the role that steroids played in the promulgation of the fitness industry as we know it. And basically watching this band of brothers as they absorbed all the propaganda from Hulk Hogan about eating your vegetables and saying your prayers, and then you can look like him. And then it comes out. He's getting busted for his Coke stash and all that fun stuff. But one of the things they do in this is they interview a male fitness model and he's selling this powder or whatever the hell it is that he's selling. And they managed to get him in a very honest moment where he says, look, it doesn't mean that I don't use this product, but whether or not the viewer decides to associate my body and my results with that product is not really any of my business.

(02:06:35):

That's kind of how he absolves himself of what's going on. He's like, well, technically I am using the product that I'm promoting, but the fact that it has very little impact on how I look is completely, it's up to the viewer to discern. However, that admission in and of itself was enough to get him dropped by his main sponsors because he alluded that he was injecting hormones beyond what he was taking. And there's such a stigma about this, and part of it is related to the, I dunno how it's scheduled in the us. I think they scheduled steroids really high up there with heroin and stuff like that. They really went after male hormones at a very, very high level. So

Speaker 1 (02:07:13):

It's pretty illegal.

Speaker 2 (02:07:14):

Yeah, I mean, this happened in the early nineties, I believe. So that and Mr. Olympia where everyone was natural and that was a complete disaster. But moving on from that, the problem with doing something like that is that the steroids are going to continue being a massive part of Olympic games. Any kind of high level sports, any kind of high level performance, and especially bodybuilding. The bodybuilding could not exist without androgens. And the problem with this is you create this two-tiered industry where there's this facade of bullshit being sold to everyone, and until they can wade through it, until they can look between the lines and understand what's actually going, your mass selling these insanely unattainable dreams to all of these impressionable kids that may not have developed the faculties to read through the BS and understand what a human body naturally can peak potential can actually look like.

(02:08:08):

So we have to go back in time and point to guys like Steve Reeves, one of the earliest Mr. Olympia in the 1950s, the way that he looked on the beach, and you look at him now and to our impressions, he's so unimpressive because we're so used to seeing Mr. Thor get juiced up three months before the next Avengers movie and then come out rippling with fucking veins and neck muscles and traps that we think that that's what a man in peak potential looks like. Fucking Wolverine. Well, yeah, I mean, look, not to take anything away from those guys,

Speaker 1 (02:08:42):

No, it's not like they don't work hard. Of course they work hard, but the thing is they can't talk about what they actually do either. So when you hear the interviews with them, how Christian Bale put on, was it like 90 pounds in six months for Batman or something? They can't talk about the drugs they're doing, so they'll just say Chicken breast, broccoli, protein powder, and a ton of exercise. Now, I don't think they're lying about that part. It's just not the complete truth.

Speaker 2 (02:09:16):

No,

Speaker 1 (02:09:16):

They are definitely working out a lot, and they obviously are getting enough protein, obviously. I'm sure that part's true. I'm sure they have some pizza here and there, but I'm sure the discipline part is absolutely true. There's no way Thor could look like Thor without lifting lots of weights and eating right. However, that's just part of the equation.

Speaker 2 (02:09:42):

Absolutely. And one of the sad conclusions of Bigger, stronger, faster is that, I mean, steroids, they work, they quite simply work and they work well for certain things, and we can't get past that reality that they're going to be used for high level performance applications in any kind of athleticism where people benefit from it, whether it be fighting or bodybuilding or wrestling or whatever else. It's simply just part and parcel of where we are. That's like,

Speaker 1 (02:10:09):

I don't know why they wouldn't do it, especially movie stars when they've got that on the line, why would they not?

Speaker 2 (02:10:14):

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing to stop them. They have all the access to it. Nobody's going to tell anybody. I mean, they're trainers are all quite clearly on steroids. If you ever see the guys that train these people, they have veins in places you didn't realize veins fucking existed, and you're just like, you cannot look like you're tensing all the time at rest unless your skin is thinned out from injecting androgens because you get a skin thinning effect basically when you're on certain drugs, other ones bloat you. And the chemistry of it is a whole nother subculture that there are scientists working on. So every bodybuilding coach is as much a chemist as he is a workout coach and a dietician. So it's just another layer of things that I think people don't really understand. But to bring it back to why we're talking about this is the saddest part is that it creates a false conception in the public eye about what is possible and what a natural human body sound like should look like. Especially that's the sound of it coming up to 2:00 AM here in Australia.

Speaker 1 (02:11:19):

Well, it's kind of like when the hyper edited stuff started to take over metal, and kids thought that that's how people actually play. I don't know if it helped or hurt for me, the jury's still out on that.

Speaker 2 (02:11:36):

I think for me, having produced records during that time, it hurt my sanity. That's for sure. The level of attention to detail we put into those performances, and

Speaker 1 (02:11:45):

However you get freaks like Alex Inger as a result. So you get these freaks that can do stuff that was previously unimaginable because of this unattainable standard that digital editing created. But anyways, I think there's a good spot to end the interview saying that it's 2:00 AM for you. It's only 9:56 AM for me. Dude, it's been a pleasure talking to you again.

Speaker 2 (02:12:14):

Likewise, man. Thank you for having me back on. This feels like it's becoming a quasi regular recurrence, but

Speaker 1 (02:12:19):

Yeah, we should do it again.

Speaker 2 (02:12:21):

No, a hundred percent. I love the amount of things that develop in our lives in between each one of these. Every time we touch base, it's always like, Hey, this is awesome, and everything's always picking up. So I hope to hear about many, many more great things about the way that URM is going and riff hard and every other venture that you're a part of, man.

Speaker 1 (02:12:36):

Likewise, likewise, and good luck with the release. Thank

Speaker 2 (02:12:40):

You very much, man.

Speaker 1 (02:12:41):

Okay, then another URM podcast episode in the bag. Please remember to share our episodes with your friends, as well as post them to your Facebook, Instagram, or any social media you use. Please tag me at al Levy URM audio, and of course, please tag my guests as well. Till next time, happy mixing. You've been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact, visit URM Academy and press the podcast link today.