John Dyer | eSports, Microsoft PR, Voice Acting, Supernatural Experiences

John Dyer is a former professional Quake and Unreal Tournament competitor. He later went on to work in PR for Microsoft where he was a key player in the unveiling of Xbox Adaptive Controller, and has more recently reinvented himself as a voice actor, landing a role in Soulslinger: Envoy of Death.


118 min read
John Dyer | eSports, Microsoft PR, Voice Acting, Supernatural Experiences

John Dyer is a former professional Quake and Unreal Tournament competitor. He later went on to work in PR for Microsoft where he was a key player in the unveiling of Xbox Adaptive Controller, and has more recently reinvented himself as a voice actor, landing a role in Soulslinger: Envoy of Death. We cover a lot of ground ranging from the early days of eSports, getting into (and out of) the corporate "Rat Race", world travel and understanding new cultures, metaphysical experiences with and without psychedelics, growing up, and finding balance in the world we live in.

Website | X | LinkedIn

Small Correction

John informed me that he misspoke at one point:

"... I said Yossarian Holmberg was the CPL network director but in fact he was the Quakecon network director."

Books Mentioned

Attached by Amir Levine
Western Esotericism by Wouter J. Hanegraaff
The Lesser Key of Solomon by S.L. MacGregor & Aleister Crowley
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

Support the Show

If you enjoy this show, please share it with at least one other person. If you would like to get episodes early, exclusive merch, and other benefits, consider supporting In The Keep on Patreon or... If you're not a fan of our other support methods, but do wanna support the show, buying me a book is a great way to do so. If you do, please let me know so that I can ensure that you are rewarded! And be sure to follow us on: X | LinkedIn. - Tyler


Chapters

0:08 Quote
0:35 Gaming Beginnings
12:55 Early Tournaments
23:10 The Rise of Esports
47:41 Drugs and Esports
54:57 The Road to Public Relations
1:07:11 Moving to Dubai
1:52:56 The Rat Race Revelation
2:02:48 Exploring Spiritual Experiences
2:10:41 Shared Hallucinations and Reality
2:18:49 The Importance of Self-Reflection
2:29:33 Personal Growth and Attachment Styles


Transcript

Tyler:
[0:00] So I'm thinking from now on, I'm sometimes going to do a little quote for each episode, or for some of the episodes where it's appropriate.

Tyler:
[0:09] Here's one. Quote. Even wild historical fantasies may have a greater impact than the carefully documented reconstructions of historians. Worrying, though the fact may be, what appears to count most is not whether the stories are true, but whether they are believed. Unquote. that's from Wouter J.

Tyler:
[0:31] Hanegreff in Western Esotericism A God for the Perplexed Thank you.

Music:
[0:36] Music

John:
[1:06] We'll be right back. well.

John:
[1:11] It all started when i was a wee boy uh no it's um i definitely had a love of gaming from a young age my parents threw me on i had like you know five and a quarter inch floppy reader rabbit on a crummy you know ibm dos machine and with all these weird mini games and stuff i didn't really care much for that and then as i got older my parents eventually evolved my uncle's big in production so when they're like what computer should we buy was always a mac of course so even then after the crummy dos machine was a mac machine it was like a mac 2gs or something i don't know what they were at the time but this mac was good enough that it had um and i had to look this up it was um what was it called vector something some wild ass like 2d game that was native to the mac os so i would kind of tinker around on that for a little bit this is when i was living in south florida when i was a little kid in fort lauderdale my parents divorced when i was a young age and lived with my mom and my sister in south florida my mom ended up dating a guy my stepdad informally really great guy named lenny kimmel was the former mayor of broward county he ran a process serving business and he had doom on one of his work pcs so when my mom picked up the admin on his process serving business i would you know she'd pick us up from school and go have to work for another few hours and so she'd plant me on the dos computer.

John:
[2:37] And i just straight he taught me how to dos prompt load quake and so there i.

John:
[2:41] Was you know idkfa and doing and all the weapons on, sorry, Doom, I think I said Quake, but Doom.

John:
[2:49] And found my love of shooters then. And I guess Lenny saw... He was a great, great, great man, great male role model. Shout out to his son, Josh Kimmel. But he saw my love of Doom and gaming, and Lenny later introduced me to Star Trek and formally to Windows PCs and stuff like that by basically forcing my mom to get a computer upgrade. And this would have been, gosh, I don't know, maybe around 90s, 95 or so. And the computer that he got my mom to purchase was a get ready for this a intel pentium 2 mmx powered machine with 30 i think we had third we were balling at that so 32 megabytes of ram that was incredible right 33.6 modem cd drive sound blaster 16 sound card and a 17 inch crt screen like i think at the time it cost like three grand usd which you know if you adjust for inflation that's probably like a six or seven or eight grand pc nowadays so like full to the tits pc right it was balling illustrate.

Tyler:
[4:00] Our age difference the first time i remember hearing like a commercial for a new processor was the pinium 4

John:
[4:06] Okay okay and that's part of the beauty of gaming right we'll touch on that more later down the road but like connects people across all ages and uh livelihoods right it's something

John:
[4:19] that connects which is beautiful yeah man um so there i was i was able to at this time in my life my dad was up in toronto where i'm from and was living down in florida with my sister and mom and so um would come up to visit my dad you know christmases and march breaks and summers and stuff like that um didn't he didn't have a computer didn't want to got one and i ended up finding myself at uh downtown on young street wandering into this place called mediascape which was a gaming retailer based out of toronto one of the first like these guys were operating with a full blown they'd they sold hardware too but it was first and foremost a gaming retailer like you know fully packaged product they were selling cd roms of games and stuff which is pretty unheard of at the time.

John:
[5:06] And I was owned by a guy named John Walsh, and he had a partner as well. They had a LAN set up in the back with eight machines on a local area network and an ISDN connection. And of course, a ton of different games. And they would charge by the hour, which is now a very established model of Internet Cafe. But back then, again, this was like 95, 96 at the dawn of gaming. This was like an Internet Cafe was unheard of. There was one other place called Electric Bean that operated in Toronto. Know these were the first two pioneers of cyber

John:
[5:36] cafes gaming cafes that I know of and so there I was as like 13 or something at the time um my dad knew that I was safe there and I guess since you know his parent eyes this was like some inexpensive version of keeping me interested and engaged during the day and so I was buying these blocks of cards you could buy them in bulk and spending all my time playing quake on their land there and online and stuff it was a keyboard gamer originally.

John:
[6:03] As painful as that is to admit uh arrow keys to look around i think i used like a and a and z to look up and down and as kludgy as that was got by with that and what was really cool about mediascape was that all of the staff you know there was a guy named ben who um did the hardware john harley shout out to demo boy good friend of mine still um a bunch of guys there after work would close down and we would all play quake on land which as you might recall like getting that low ping.

John:
[6:29] Network experience was amazing right like you just that was the joy of the land back in the day because uh client-side prediction wasn't a thing um if you didn't have a rocking connection like an isdn or up you were suffering like a high ping time probably of like you know 85 or 100 plus.

John:
[6:46] And that would have been a low ping if you had a two-digit ping that was good uh and so land was where it was at if you could get access to it like even back in those days if you were practicing for a tournament that was even semi-serious you weren't playing internet you were playing on land you'd invite people over and you just practice on land non-stop to get that local responsive edge and i think it was around that time that i eventually switched to mouse and keyboard which was great team invert i gotta say i don't know how that happened i think because there were just a bunch of computers i happen to just use one that had it inverted and got used to it um that always makes me laugh when people try and decipher like why you choose one or the other i don't think there's an answer it's just whatever you happen to get used to but i am on team invert and uh john harley demo boy actually started stoking my interest in writing my own quake scripts at that time using the console to basically build like effectively what was like intro level visual basic or like super rudimentary scripts uh where you know you'd press a key to scan through a bunch of different weapons and in a priority sequence and it would pick the one that you did have that you wanted the most and if you press the key again it would toggle to another one in the sequence and just little things like that that gave you a little bit of an edge over other plays you could do rocket jump scripts if you wanted to that was your thing i kept it organic in that respect but.

John:
[8:05] Um yeah first cut my teeth on quake one with mouse and keyboard there was always remember there was a guy that guy john walsh one of the owners would come in and he would use this controller called a space orb at the time which was this goofy ass thing it kind of looked like the size and shape of a current day xbox controller except the entire right side of it was a giant rubber ball and you would use it i think it was designed intentionally for like flight sims or flight games or like descent or games like that were like spacecraft right and so the idea would be that you'd use the ball to move up and down and around in a 3d environment and then you know you'd have a i think it had a d-pad on the left with buttons and stuff but he would clean up even with that kind of advanced control he was wiping the floor and quick with people even with mouse and keyboard at that time uh so you know getting off a keyboard was pretty important and uh that was i think right around the time when q q95.bat came out i don't know if that is beyond your ears as well sir but um basically q95.bat was like a updated version of i don't i can't don't think it originally launched with quake or if they patched it i might need to fact check on that but.

John:
[9:16] Q95.bat basically enabled quake gamers to use the tcpi protocol to play internet games and quake which before you before that it was just grayed out you didn't have the option to play on the internet right so again this is before server browsers this is before there were any server browsers in games there were no third-party server browsers yet uh so i mean i just happened to.

John:
[9:42] Know servers because the guy some of the guys at mediascape literally told me servers to play on one of them was quake.spacetech.com so that one had a dns which became nice and easy to remember but if you didn't have one with a dns you were writing down ips and you know like forward slash join and typing in that ip to get on that server right so fast forward i'm i'm going back down to florida and oh my god i got to get quake on this machine so i made lenny going by quake and was on my 33.6 dial-up it's still on the east coast you know florida toronto so not too far thankfully uh but was playing with these while i think i had like a 200 plus ping on these servers and I was playing CTF or Deathmatch or Rune. Rune Deathmatch was really huge back then. I don't know if you recall that, but... Wild wild mod where you could pick up one of different i don't know like 15 different runes that would give you some crazy ability uh and it was just chaos chaos you know.

Tyler:
[10:38] That that concept ended up becoming ubiquitous in quake later on like the whole concept of just something that comes from a mod the rune giving you these crazy powers later on becomes like a major part of the game um and that's when

John:
[10:53] Well even.

Tyler:
[10:54] If you're playing uh like quake

John:
[10:55] Champions most.

Tyler:
[10:56] Recently there are all these different power-ups other than just heavy armor you know you know mega

John:
[11:03] Health i did i did dabble in quake champions a little bit as of late the class-based stuff kind of threw me off a little bit but no.

Tyler:
[11:10] Doubt and but it's just interesting because it's made by uh sinker who was like a hardcore mapper back in the day so the game is like made by these like super fans of quake and then there's all these things that come from mod the

John:
[11:25] Modding community love to see that i love to see that and i i really wish that you know some of those community built mods it was very open source in those days for for good and for bad uh but a lot of those mods that were community built were very very engaging they're very sticky like very fun they had very original excuse me and i feel like that's kind of missed these days like i i commend that effort and And I would love to see a lot more of that sort of grassroots effort being pulled through in AAA production. And this is, you know, an evolution of the conversation that we'll maybe end up on, but, you know, not...

John:
[12:03] Uncommon to see original ideas getting stomped down or shoved out of a room because it doesn't speak to the bottom line or oh how many dev cycles or like what i'm describing is the business of gaming getting in the way of quality gaming getting made which is a huge problem in the industry today we can talk more on that in a bit um but yeah so quake quake player going back to florida playing servers remotely um getting a bit older quake 2 comes out right around the time when I switched at Quake 2 at Mediascape and started playing a ton hours on Quake 2. It got to the point where I was playing so much at Mediascape that I guess the guys like felt guilty like charging me like I'd probably bought a whole computer with the amount of time that I'd spent buying time to play there. So they just hired me as like an effective intern. I was like 13 or 14 at this

John:
[12:52] time so like look why don't you just like maintain the machines in the back. You can set up customers when they come into play.

John:
[12:58] Just take care of the customers and make the sales guys can stay at the front on the cache and you can just play for free when you're here and i was like that sounds amazing so i played a ton for free i played a ton of quake um this was right around the time when i think it was it was quake spy originally came out again this is like 20 years ago right i had to sit down and like start writing it out a little bit because my memory is the thin going back 20 years right but i did play a lot of team fortress love sniping on 245 that was my jam i think that kind of segued into into my love of the railgun in quake 2 uh high accuracy guy like super accuracy was my jam like that was what i was known for on ruthless for if i was on on a match in a part of the beauty of some of the mods talking about mods again in quake 2 as you might recall is that you could pull up all these kinds of stats you get like post game stats on um you know your weapon preference and your accuracy and shots and stuff like that and i probably average around 40% accuracy which is pretty solid hit wise um.

John:
[14:03] And then so at mediascape one day walked in this guy named brainfire boris pan shout out to boris long time friend of mine current friend still and uh he was with this clan called xeno, uh and i had joined was a clan called you know four this is some stupid clan with some guys at mediascape called four horsemen of the apocalypse there's four of them i picked famine so that was the name alias i was using at the time um and when i met boris the xeno guys were they weren't quite is good i like boris he was a cool guy and i played a bunch of games and he ended up recruiting a bunch.

John:
[14:38] Of guys that were pretty good and got better in xeno and the more i played with him and hung out with them and they started hosting lands and eventually got to the point where i was playing with them and so much they just won me over i was like well i guess i'll join xeno like they're an active group and they seem pretty good and that's where i met joseph kim aka daising I met uh Julius as well Marwan a guy named Efren or Nyrox as well these are all Toronto area quake players a lot of guys I met either directly at Mediascape or through Zeno uh just through having lands in the Toronto area um we got really good a lot of gaming going on at that time lot of quake playing I was uh much to my dad's dismay or if he even knew I was skipping class a whole lot i'd like pretend to go to school in the morning you know okay cool like you'd go to work yeah cool i'm going to school i'm sorry i've lapsed i moved back to toronto at this point there was a certain point in time when i think just for high school um which was right at the age of like 14 i think so i moved back back to toronto i was living in burlington with my dad he did buy me a computer at that point uh and this one was at this point he could kind of see how substantial gaming was in my life. And he was like, okay. So I actually convinced him to buy me, get this one, a Celeron 300A, which I don't know if you know much about chip history.

John:
[16:02] I keep me honest here on a fact check, but I think even to this day, the Celeron, it was on a BH6 motherboard, ABIT BH6 motherboard. You could overclock the Celeron 300A 150%, which is remarkable, right? Like you don't even get that much overclock ability and performance today i think to this day there hasn't even been a contender in terms of top overclock ability but if you got a so most people could run them at 450 megahertz with the right jumper settings and if you had a really good one you could run it at 504 megahertz i don't think i got mine at 504 but you had to run a big those big boy full towers you know i was going to land lugging around this massive full tower because the thing was overclocked and i needed the airflow in it so it just wouldn't crash all the time and it still sometimes did.

John:
[16:52] But that was, I think I had a bit more RAM, and oh, that setup had, this was pretty important too, two Voodoo 2, uh 3dfx voodoo 2 12 megabyte cards running in sli so for a total of 24 megabytes of video ram which allowed me to run in 1024 by 768 at you know 120 frames slammed which back then was a pretty big deal and why i say this is an important call out is because i personally have a theory that resolution is directly correlative to accuracy i mean it's not rocket science like you're getting extra pixels your visibility's up and if you have if you correspond that with mouse input and your dpi and stuff which way back then you know we were using ball mice and you're lucky you had to like over like use a custom dll file to overclock your mouse to like you need to know.

Tyler:
[17:48] How to flick it just the right way you really know the weight of the ball

John:
[17:52] As it rolls oh my goodness like you're breaking like cloth pads and ball mice so the gunk that you build up like people we used to have to you'd you'd have a little chamber where the ball was and you'd have to unscrew the chamber drop the ball out and there was an x and a y um scroller and they would collect dirt or debris on the interior so you'd be sitting there with either your fingernail if you were low tech or maybe you had alcohol swipes or something to clean in your ball mouse like that was a real but then, oh, how far we've come.

John:
[18:26] But yeah, lots of Quake going on. Dysing got really good. He was a hardcore MF-er. I think he was a bit older than me, right? So I think he was in college. I was just entering high school at this time. So I was playing tons, like probably putting in like six-hour days at least, playing Quake 2 on just local East Coast servers around Toronto or whatever I could find with a decent ping. Most of the servers back then were one-on-one based or they would run. I played either free-for-all or one-on-one. I really like free-for-all because it keeps your skills sharp. Um even more so than team deathmatch like just that raw like it i feel like it um it keeps you in a flow state better than team deathmatch does because everything is a kill target so you have to always be on it's constant flow whereas with team deathmatch it offers some more breaks in the flow right because all that's a teammate oh we're positioning oh where are we going we're doing this deathmatch like just strictly ffa you kill everything right um ton of great gaming with you know clan guys we recruited another guy from ottawa named mplate shout out rob jarwan and me julius dicing and mplate did some good work in building a great name for xeno whether it was two on twos or four on fours or um and what was interesting too is important to call out is that when quake 2 came out not a lot of quake 1 pros or quake 1 players liked it or like grabbed onto it you know we were kind of the exception on on winning so.

Tyler:
[19:53] Right still never moved on especially the scandinavian crowd like they just stayed in quake world forever and has are still

John:
[20:00] Playing you know i kind of get it i mean if it's if it works well and it it is what you like then why change it right um and that's that's kind of where xeno made its claim to fame not necessarily just in quake 2 you know we had we had a lot of local quake 2 lands that's when i was playing a ton at this time at that point in my career i was totally thuman in quake 2 i was smoking people entering local tournaments um there was a local toronto tournament that i was a finalist in lost to a guy named cybeck who was a really good like local talent like you you sort of you'd play on all the same servers and you kind of knew i mean back then there were no user accounts so you could change your name on the fly right so but what's interesting and what i love about arena shooters and first person shooters and the um spectatorship therein is that they're very stylistic it's like it's like dancing um like you when you watch someone like i'm a break dancer as well i'm not at the age of 40 but once was and uh when you watch someone dance.

John:
[21:09] You can tell right away like their flavor and how they elucidate their movements it's exactly the same in a shooter if someone if you're playing someone hypothetical so you know let's say i'm playing someone on 10 a.m on a wednesday morning and uh it had you know i would beat most people if they're just random gamers right but let's say i'm struggling let's say it's a really close one on one suddenly we're almost at the end of the match and now there's 20 people in the server watching because everyone's like oh who the fuck is this person like maybe i'm playing with my real name and that person's not you know that there's someone you know you're like now you're like who is this person because sometimes you.

Tyler:
[21:43] Can tell by their gameplay like specifically i know your signature this is i know who you

John:
[21:48] Are exactly right so i know you've had victor quadra on machiavelli right like he always played within an iconically high sensitivity when not a lot of gamers did so these are some of the tells that you could lean into right like how they cycle little mouse movements those habits that people form when you commit hours and hours of repetition as you do in practice in gaming right you like poker players will tell you you develop tells unintentionally right and that's totally true in gaming too and if you're spectating someone or watching a demo that stuff shines through so love it's great to watch it's great to see people sort of perform even as like a performance art and i love how you know even just again touching on some of the mods and these so these tournament mods would again create uh even this was in the raw game but these tournament mods that servers would use for one-on-one and two-on-twos um players could vote on the server like okay we want to switch to 4v4 now there's tons of people in the server great let's vote on it everyone votes bang it switches suddenly to a 4v4 and now you can jump on teams and fill them up and everyone raised like it was really well really well built really well thought out stuff that enabled gamers to do so much more with the base game than the original developers intended or had thought of and it added it added a lot of the legs of competitive gaming quake which was great.

Tyler:
[23:11] One of the things that I find really interesting about that time period is that in order to be into competitive esports, you had to be sort of like in an area where there was high speed internet connection or other people that you could regularly meet up to play with. So you brought up Machiavelli. I actually thought to do that earlier, but just being in the Bay Area at the time was a huge leg up. Being in Helsinki or Norway, somewhere like that was a huge leg up because they just had infrastructure.

John:
[23:41] Absolutely west coast was a hot spot of talent for sure i mean you got thresh dennis fong you got victor quadra you know you got guys like uh kurt shimata immortal as.

John:
[23:50] Well like a lot of heavy hitters coming.

John:
[23:53] Out of the west coast i mean if you look at and so actually.

John:
[23:57] Not a bad segue um my chair is squeaking the uh shortly thereafter wake quake 3 launch started with quake 3 test which was huge i think they released like just i think an ffa map and a one-on-one map like q3 turn e1 and another map that was death match based i'm pretty sure but um there was a frag that year running q3 test like a full-blown cpl tournament using just the test version of the game which is pretty wild we're talking like you know five figure usd cash prize which again in this would have been 98 i think it was around approximately quake 3 formally came out in december of 99 so i think q3 test would have been the previous summer so in the summer of 98 ish or so and this what was brilliant to see was that the quake one players jumped on it and so did the quake two players so you had this explosion of a player base right like compoundedly massive player base that you just didn't have with quake two quake two players were now facing this these like og pros that were crazy good with rockets and prediction and running you know running cycles on power-ups and stuff that they hadn't seen before but at the same time i you know xenoclan was a little bit of an outlier there weren't a ton of really good quake 2 clans but we were one of them where we made a name for ourselves enough that that um.

John:
[25:24] We actually got invited to the quake invitational league qil which was a big uh i think it was originated as a quake one thing and then sort of lapsed in quake two and then when quake three came out of course all the og quake one clans were up in it and xeno was invited on the east coast and we were this one random quake two clan kind of a dark horse if you will that people were like who are these guys and it was only because of all the good work we were doing in quake two and i should add that what was it the frag three tournament i think it was, uh so i'm gonna add in a bit of detail here so how did we get down to because frag is in texas right that's in the u.s i did a bunch of guys from toronto get down to the frag and how the hell did that happen beyond just being a big quake event well as our network in ontario and around the toronto area was vast and growing there were some guys out of waterloo that ran an isp a couple brothers one was named t-man tristan holmberg shout out to tristan and his brother was yossarian went by the alias of yoss man they were both really good and they both ended up joining xeno.

John:
[26:30] And lo and behold uh yossarian was the network director for the cpl he's like oh yeah i run this isp up in ontario but by the way i also run and direct the network for these massive quake tournaments down in Texas you guys should come I'll get you in the term okay so stumbled in the great uh great connection there networking no pun intended and um so that was pretty awesome having our own clan mate being you know on staff at the CPL and it was myself I I'm pretty sure it was myself and I sing again memories thin but we went down to.

John:
[27:11] A frag three event i'm pretty sure i went with him i don't can't i don't remember placing joe thought i did i don't think i did i checked the records now which are coming together which is pretty hilarious but um he placed top 32 and i don't think i did um but that was in the time when xeno was kind of warming up in quake three and then i mean being being around other quake players at events like that or most certainly would help our recognition internationally and across coast right so back on the qil in spring of i think it would have been spring of 2000 ish.

John:
[27:46] Um and xeno was rolling we at that point were a force to be reckoned with you know we had a lot of momentum coming from quake 2 um joe was placing in tournaments m plate rob jarawan was placing in tournaments uh i was still mostly i was

John:
[28:00] distracted a lot i was a young guy i had a lot of raw talent but lacked a lot of the discipline to sit down and like form formulated and like make it consistent right plus being young i succumbed to a lot of uh head games like pressure right like i didn't quite have the ability to cortisol manage and stuff like that right so these bigger tournaments kind of shook me a little bit right like i was like 14 years old right um but that wasn't and it didn't affect me playing from home you know if i was in my home environment like so all those qil matches online matches we furthered the name by like we swept negative burn huge huge quake one clan and people were like what who are these guys then we played stick men swept stick men people were like who the fuck are these guys like literal dark horses coming out of nowhere quake two clans starting to sweep these quake one clans in this invitation league i think we i think we swept a third clan in a row we swept three clans in a row that were very popular and that was right before the Frag 4, which was in.

John:
[29:04] The summer i believe that was when the full game had released and that would have been in, 2000 if i recall and that was momentous because we actually got to play death row there was a team i think uh i'm pretty sure mcavelli was on that team i can't there was one other og i don't know if it was thresh playing under a different name or and then two other guys that i didn't recognize that were death row players but that was like uh like a like um like starstruck a little bit right like you gotta hey you're trying to beat these guys but like how fucking cool like these guys that you've heard of on the on these coasts that you never really got to play with because you mentioned broadband and it was so bad back then you could we you could never play any kind of accurate match across the internet you had to land with them and that would just never happen because we wouldn't fly into the west coast they wouldn't fly into toronto but then there we were at this tournament, that was we actually lost that game uh we made it through to the i think top 64 bracket and then our first matchup was death row and we lost to them it was it was the second lowest scoring game.

John:
[30:10] Of that series which i don't know if that just means nobody was hitting shots or everyone was highly evasive you know it needs more data to figure that one out but interesting that it was such a low scoring game um i think i you know joe played fairly well i remember that game i wasn't playing well and that was definitely an example where um you know performance anxiety we'll call it right like could have been a lot better wasn't wasn't playing like i was when i was sitting in my living room chilled out you know just just clapping heads right.

John:
[30:47] But, yeah, that was wild. I will add here, for accuracy of record, I didn't note this, but it's true and it's relevant. That's when I started smoking a lot of weed at the time, too. So, you know, I was in this weird universe of like.

John:
[31:07] Oh, all these grown-ups that I know that play Quake, oh, half of them also smoke weed, and they just never told me before, I guess, because I was younger and they're not going to, you know, taint the young mind or whatever right so that was like oh how cool is this that all these friends i have now also are new friends that smoke weed too and so like i'm sure dai singh was probably and he was super cool but he didn't say he wasn't you know playing bad cop or dad or anything like he just let me do my thing but like if i was in that position i'd have half the money be like dude like we're supposed to be complaining like what are you doing right like i was just having fun and being young and what a time to be alive right carpe the dm being in dallas and isn't this cool but you know probably less cool for daising and less cool when we lost too but he was super cool but and i respect him for that um he continued to go pro after that he i think that was a point where joe could see daising could see the writing on the wall that like hey this was growing like esports was growing in a huge way the cpl's tournaments were not going away they were having more tournaments they were expanding the types of tournaments they were expanding the the cash purses for these tournaments too all that signals growth right so he went i think he was right around finish in college or he was in a much better position to just go at it full steam.

John:
[32:16] I was still mid high school right trying to figure my life out and right around the time when I started to realize women and I was like oh this kind of directly competes with my love of gaming and once I sort of came to that realization my competitive prowess started to fall off a little bit and I lost you know that that hardcore gaming edge to want to just crush gaming for eight hours a day as I think you made.

Tyler:
[32:41] The right choice in the grand scheme of things I think it's actually sad when someone says, I swore off being in love for video games. I'm like, no, wrong choice, broke.

John:
[32:53] It's, I mean, you know, everyone's got to experience the journey for themselves, right? These are things, the lessons that come from that, there are only, change comes from within, from within, as they say, right? Like, you can't show anyone these things. You got to figure it out for yourself.

Tyler:
[33:07] I think that that's a normal part of growing up, though, is kind of like, in fact, it's learning to balance you know your passion

John:
[33:13] With you said it personality life the balance is what's up right i.

Tyler:
[33:16] Was like that as a teenager i was very much like i will never let any girl get between me and you know being the best guitar player in the world or whatever it was you know whatever my dream was at the time and then uh i think as i got older i just kind of realized like you can do but like in fact all of the successful people i know are like married and have kids and like you know living a full life rather than just swearing off everything for one thing and uh i mean there's merit to both don't get me wrong you can

John:
[33:43] I i will i will tell you that having children is not a license or a milestone of maturity you know there's all kinds of people that crank out kids and have done no internal work so let's not pretend that just the act of having children is some huge feat you know like it's a great thing and yes let's all keep the population growing but um in of itself just having kids um but to your point like it definitely changes priorities you know i've definitely definitely um i'm still i'm still without kids you know i'm living that uh that gunslinger life still and i i can compare um you know my life and and i don't you gotta be careful i'm not gonna say that having children steals your ambition because that's just not true i mean it's a personal thing and some people would probably say having kids stoked their ambition because now you have something to really go out and fight for right and that's true too um but yeah it's uh life's journey and i love the way you said it about balance because that is so critical and that was definitely um at a time in my life where the balance started to shift away from gaming and uh this was in the summer i think of 2000 And when Joe was starting to go real hard.

John:
[34:58] Full-time pro, he was traveling, he was doing events in Singapore. And like, he was actually like placing internationally at big tournaments and stuff. There was one, he went to one, uh, tournament in Singapore where he like, he played blue when he lost to blue who like smoked the whole tournament. Right. And like, I'm like, dude, like he was all hard and stuff. I'm like, buddy, you lost to the guy. Like you got bracketed with the guy who won the tournament. Like.

John:
[35:19] You know, don't feel so bad about that one, man. You know but um i love

John:
[35:25] joe's passion and he he was went full on with quake and and uh he did make it's funny we were laughing it's like you got a lot of hardware at that time not everything was cash purses so some of the bigger ones were but if you were legit trying to make a living off of pro gaming back in the you know early 2000s at what i would call the horizon of esports, you were selling hardware out the ass too because a lot of the stuff was hardware prizes right sponsors were just giving out hardware instead of cash prizes so that was a huge reality of a lot of the case.

Tyler:
[35:54] I mean that's that's how you monetize sports sponsorship period is selling shoes if you're a basketball player and i think like i mean jonathan wendell i had him on years ago but i mean he was sort of an innovator in that space he was one of the first people that realized if i put my name on something no matter what it is people will buy it and i can yes

John:
[36:13] Yes he did realize that very much so you brought up fatality john wendell is uh he was a super nice guy he was a bit of uh.

Tyler:
[36:25] He's kind of a he is his own person i like him of having talked to him and everything but i will say especially younger had a bit of an ego and i even mentioned that you asked me earlier do i do intros for his episode i did do an intro i was like whatever you think of this guy hear him out like if you're probably coming to this episode with some preconceived notions and i would like for you to just listen to

John:
[36:47] I still don't think his his uh reputation was as bad as macaveli's was macaveli was a royal fucking kind of.

Tyler:
[36:53] You try to fight people over fucking

John:
[36:55] Esports he was a spicy man that guy yeah yeah um i.

Tyler:
[37:00] Like that cowboys

John:
[37:01] Stuff yes there's a little bit of charm in it if you can break through all the bravado um i think i played fatality right before he won that um right before that cpl event talk about changing aliases and playing online so early one morning uh this was when i was still really good at quake 3 it might have been the quake 3 test, um it was before the event so this was not the frag 4 there was another one in there i don't know when it was but there was a free fraud but this is the one i did play in one-on-one where i did I placed top 64 when we went down to Dallas. Not the Frag 3. I don't think it was Frag 3. It was a different one. But Frag 4 was Team DM. I think there was another one in there that I'm just forgetting the name of. But they had a free-for-all bracket. And I was playing on servers from Toronto beforehand. Had an early morning, sleepy, no one in the server. Random guy jumps in. Could have been a girl. Random player jumps in. Very good. We played a very, very low scoring, 15-minute match, I think I lost three to one or something like that, which at that time I wasn't losing much.

John:
[38:08] So I was like, okay, who is this? And I think it was John. I think it was John Wendell practicing under an alias.

Tyler:
[38:14] Um, he definitely did that. And, I want to talk a little bit more about what made him successful, because I think it doesn't get talked about enough. He was one of those people that knew practice under an alias. He also had the foresight to train a bunch of other players to play like him and put them under NDA. So he had the fatality house thing going on. Right. And he's training all these other players.

John:
[38:37] I was going to mention that. Yeah. So if you want my take on it, it's funny because I heard Victor sort of label him. He's like oh this guy's a grinder and like that was bang on because he was a grinder like to the point where even for tourney prep i touched on earlier if you were serious about tourney prep you were playing on land only and john wendell was ruthless in that respect you mentioned his camp that was not you're not that's not hyperbole like this mfer had a dorm and he would he would bring guy i didn't listen to this episode i just know this because i gamed with him at the time right and like he would invite guy if you're good enough and you wanted to practice with him he'd be like all right well get your ass down here and you could stay with him for whatever how long and just game your eyes out with him on land and it was like you immerse yourself in your enemy so that it's a very samurai-esque right like you immerse yourself in the enemy so that you can absorb all of their tricks that kind of thing right and.

Tyler:
[39:37] Then when those players are also playing online and all of them are using smurf accounts and you're playing against these different people you don't know who you're playing against right you don't know like people would show up the tournaments to play fatality and not know what the fuck they were up against whereas like we were talking about earlier you know a person's tells you know their style you've seen their matches just like boxing or any other one-on-one sport you you study the game you study what they do you show up at a land to play this guy no idea what you're up against because he made it that way on purpose and he told all of his students you can't don't tell anybody anything you've learned Don't show any video, nothing.

John:
[40:15] I didn't know it was that heavily squelched, but I kind of get that.

Tyler:
[40:19] Yeah.

John:
[40:20] The more that you talk through the nature of the ability to change your name, your alias on the fly, that's not reflected in any, I mean, keep me honest, but I'm not immediately landing on any other comparison where that holds true. You think of pool sharks or breakdancing battles. It's all in person, right? there's no element where i mean unless you show up you're some pool guru but you're wearing a an mi6 level disguise right like that's the only way yeah where it's like the scenario i'm describing is where you're completely blindsided by a dark horse right someone that you think, is a complete no name and then 60 seconds into the match you eat a rocket on the corner that comes early and you're like that was this is not a random internet gamer like who is this i'm like you immediately know that you're in an entirely different league than when the match started 30 seconds ago right.

Tyler:
[41:20] Yep and

John:
[41:21] That at this point that's kind of obliterated because everyone is user account based and yeah you can go create a burner account if you want and have a separate one but even in some places like china where they're locked down on cheating and it's you know phone identity based and stuff it's identity it's getting to the point where it's identity based gaming it's like who was the human playing here right um and it's kind of deviating from that for

John:
[41:43] better or worse but definitely that was a unique thing for the time for sure.

Tyler:
[41:46] In many ways it was sort of like the early UFC where you have all these different groups of people that have been practicing in isolation you know and they have their own styles and and also you don't know anything about them and then they put them all in one place and see what happens yeah um and you talked about like identity-based gaming it's what used to be an accepted part of reality that you you know practice under different accounts whatever is in some cases a punishable offense now it's like oh that's cheating it's like yeah well it used to be whatever you know if it didn't happen during the game that we're measuring it's not cheating so if you practice with an aimbot and then you don't have an aimbot in the tournament it doesn't make any difference to the results but if someone finds that on your computer then all of a sudden everything you've ever done is pull into question and that's been an interesting part of the whole esports thing too um especially in quake but in many other games where you you realize someone has cheated in their casual life but you can't prove whether or not they did it in an actual tournament and then they get banned from things it's like well they did they technically do anything illegal so let's

John:
[42:56] Let's open this up i can attest to this we'll use a real life example right so So in Quake, Quake used pack files, right? Which were like basically like proprietary zips with all kinds of their own directories and structures with different game files, textures and models and blah, blah, blah, and it writes sounds as well. So... Among our little circuit, you know, Xeno guys, everyone in a clan would share tricks and your config as a text file and video settings. And all you share this, this intelligence that you accrue and develop as an individual.

John:
[43:26] However deep it may be, however deep your tech prowess and your growth mindset may be, will extend to your config and how much do you video tinker and your mouse settings and all of this stuff, right? You might have a really basic config. You might have a really advanced one. um but when you're in a clan it's sort of expected loosely informally that you share this with your clan because of course you all want to grow together and you what is the expression uh the team is only as slow as its slowest person right so you want everyone at all boats rise with the tide right yep um specifically what were shared what i had access to and what i remember which looking back on it is like you couldn't use that stuff now we're modified pack files so the first thing that people did were third-party crosshairs, introducing custom crosshairs, which might sound innocuous. Okay, but then once you start on the slippery slope of modifying pack files, you go, oh, well, hey, guess what? We can change the pain noises too, so that all of the pain noises for across all the characters are a ding.

John:
[44:25] So you're getting dinged. It's, I mean, they build this stuff in the games now so that you get built-in hit registry, audio hit cues, which is great. But back when they didn't have that stuff, gamers were literally hacking game files on the download to make that happen and then the slippery slope goes a little further and then someone goes oh i've got a pack file that actually um forces all models to the male model so that when you're fighting players um you know you can load a female model because the hitboxes in the physical model was smaller but the enemy you want the male model so that you can get the high visibility at all times around corners and what have you and then it goes a bit further and And there was a PAC file to actually reduce.

John:
[45:05] The uh explosion the full plume of the rocket explosion in quake 2 so that it was just a short it's just the base it would only show you the base so if you were blasting rockets you would still have visibility of the player beyond the rocket the plume wasn't the plume was opaque is what i should add there right so yep slippery slope right and to your point well let's shine the current lens on that yo you're modifying game files here like instaban right but whack account gets removed like that's not allowed right but back then things were so new and novice and people were like oh hey we can do this stuff and this helps me play and there was just much less awareness and education around it right the ethics of modifying game files was viewed a little differently and just less understood less mature.

Tyler:
[45:50] Even like having you know bright textures you know just it's just as simple as like making every texture flat colors you know versus having to distinguish someone but but that's what people even in quake world now like a couple of years ago i'm at qh land in sweden and you're watching if you're watching the stream from home you know you see the most beautiful version of like the most as advanced looking as you could possibly get in quake one and then you go walking road to road every single person has like neon super bright white walls so that the player stands out as much as humanly possible i mean if their if their shoulder pokes out of a corner you can see it very clearly um

John:
[46:32] Like that map baby.

Tyler:
[46:33] In modern games you know people you can't you can't fuck with the files you can't go in and change and hack the game but what you can do is fuck with the colorblind modes and you know really expand on things so players still do that um to a degree right yeah

John:
[46:49] Overlay yes Even what were people in Tarkov using, where there was, it's like a, excuse me, a post-production machine. Tool uh a lud lud right i don't do post i don't do video posts but i understand that those are common in like adopting like color sets or color themes in a certain grouping and so people were using a third-party lud app in windows to like crank their um i you know effectively i just once so tarkov banned the lud program they're like no we don't want that not allowed and you're like okay whatever um like they allow all kinds of hackers but the lud was too much right whatever um and then you could just go in the nvidia overlay and you could just manually crank your blue and your red to to get the same color shift because

John:
[47:36] tarkov super like yellow orange right so you're like oh this is kind of the same thing sure.

Tyler:
[47:42] It could be like sticking window tinting over your screen or it could be wearing blue light filter glasses or whatever but people are always if there's money involved people are going to figure out a way to get it gotta

John:
[47:54] Put my fatality gunners on before i can play my pro games hold on a minute yeah.

Tyler:
[47:59] For sure but um i wanted to rewind because you mentioned just you know you getting into into the smoking weed and shit but i've had very few people maybe one of all of my interviewing esports players that was willing to talk about drugs and esports

John:
[48:15] Oh it's incredibly important i.

Tyler:
[48:17] I think it's a huge factor and it's odd that no one wants to talk or even acknowledge it i think cy gibb was the only guy i said like no no it's everywhere everyone's on drugs i'm like thank you finally someone

John:
[48:28] Admitted it interesting you say that later in my um i i forwarded an article when i eventually started doing public relations was when i moved to dubai fast forward we're jumping way ahead but um yeah um it's there was a news article that came out gaming related article that was centric to pro gaming it was a little bit of an expose about ritalin in gaming which is probably what you're referring to when you say it's everywhere right like so if i'm going to speculate here just my armchair analysis as a casual recreational drug user at times in my life stimulants are where you want to be in the arena gaming space anything that's a dissociative or a downer um probably not going to help you too much People do use.

Tyler:
[49:17] Xanax and Klonopin and things like this. You mentioned earlier getting the jitters, having that high cortisol. People will do that too. Or weed. I've noticed everything, but definitely stimulants are the Lance Armstrong bullet in the gun barrel smoking. Everyone's on this. They all have ADHD. I'm using quotes for people who aren't able to see this. Like it's totally a thing.

John:
[49:48] It's a slippery one. I mean, smoking weed is an insidious one in general. You know, CBD is really where it's at, to be honest with you, all the perks, you know, it's like all of the, all of the marketing, I'm using air quotes now, all of the marketing language around how marijuana is supposed to help you like THC. So it stimulates your appetite, uh, you know, couch locks you or calms you down, um.

John:
[50:14] And helps you sleep well, uh, on mass, like if you do it a ton.

John:
[50:20] That actually completely inverts. It ends up reversing all those things. It eats your gut lining gives you acid reflux it keeps you up at night your brain's overworking and it makes you like hyper vigilant and hyper anxious when in fact cbd is what does all that magic right cbd calms you down and cbd will help you sleep and interestingly enough if you go into the science of it chc and cbd compete for the same receptors so it's really just the cbd like to all the weed smokers out there thinking that you're dandy like candy like maybe give it a break um the more as i got older and um the more i did and didn't smoke weeds at different points in my life and then you know compared and blah blah blah i'm at the point now where if anything it's edible i don't smoke at all me being a voice actor too obviously you got to appreciate that it's an instrument and it's a moneymaker so you got to treat that well but um edibles man like i found smoking um especially anytime I had a bong around just the accessibility of a bong it's like at the very least force myself to roll the joint like at least it's got a little bit of a ritual around it it takes some time to prepare it's got to be with intention um the bong it's just like what's going on here like you know you're you're on a you're on a straight path to um a strong chemical addiction at that point it's not really a vicious chemical addiction it's more of a habitual addiction than anything but people can get those confused easily.

Tyler:
[51:46] There's also just getting comfortable, you know, in a mindset that you can do at home. You've mentioned this also, you know, at home at your desk, if you want to have a bong and just rip that between every single, you know, match that you play and that's your level, you're trained, your brain to be comfortable at that level. You can't do that at a LAN with a major, you know, you can not get to be on stage at PAX doing that. So then you see players fall apart because they don't have their creature comforts, whatever that happens to be. It could be, I like to, I like to game wearing shorts and I can't have socks on, you know, something like that. Anything at all

John:
[52:23] That's a great call out because it's um you gotta stop and introduce some an audit like an introspection a little bit like what what what am i allowing my baseline to become right if you gotta really start if it becomes the point where it's every match or at like that's when it should jump out at you well it doesn't matter what the vice is maybe it's cigarettes maybe it's alcohol maybe it's whatever maybe it's a vape could be anything right yeah Whenever it starts to become a crutch or it's discreetly making its way into, you know, like Juul was brilliant at that in terms of their product designers, right? Like how discreet that was and how it sat in your hand. Like you just, I don't know if you fell into that.

Tyler:
[53:06] It's on a USB on your desk. Oh, dude, I was all the way in. I'm still like, even during this conversation, I'm a nicotine addict. I don't recommend it to kids. Yeah, these are like nicotine pouches.

John:
[53:18] I've heard that's all the rage these days.

Tyler:
[53:20] I go back and forth between these and caffeine pouches and I'm a true addict, but the difference.

John:
[53:28] Great conversation stimulant, that's for sure.

Tyler:
[53:30] It is, but it's also like the big difference between just hitting a vape all the time every single day and then you show up someplace where you can't do that and all of a sudden you're off your game. No one gives a shit if you have like a Zen pouch in your mouth or whatever.

John:
[53:44] No, you nailed it. No one gives a shit, right?

Tyler:
[53:46] And your school teacher doesn't know that it's there and the test monitor doesn't. There's so many reasons why if you are a nicotine addict that it's more desirable than vaping or whatever, aside from health changes or whatever. I'm not advocating these things, kids. These are not good. I'm just saying.

John:
[54:05] Disclaimer i'm.

Tyler:
[54:07] Just saying that this is a big part of any competitive scene is what are what are you comfortable with versus what do you have to be comfortable with when you have to perform

John:
[54:17] I think it's yeah i mean if you go a level deeper and if you know we talked about the level that john wendell fatality was on it's like you you gotta if you're going for money and you're taking those steps and your intention is to be victorious you gotta really get into the, What serves you? You have to get really analytic and list item things that serve you, things that don't serve you. And the things that don't serve you, if they disrupt your consistency, if they alter your headspace, if they jar your confidence, whatever that list might be and whatever's on it, you got to work to whittle

John:
[54:54] down the things that don't serve you so that there's none. And that it's just this and this is you know what as i'm describing this this is why you see like think of olympians how they live these crazy rigorous lives they're like oh that's no fun well no shit it's no fun because they're going for a fucking gold medal baby like and that's called dedication like that's that is the literal enactment of what that word means to that particular athlete and so for esports gamers it's no different like the steps required are no different you're spending your time differently you're training in different ways but it still takes discipline and it still takes commitment and it still takes a frame of mind to be victorious right it.

Tyler:
[55:34] It's interesting how um you'll see different players that do and don't consider the things aside from just what happens at their desk contributing to their gaming so we keep bringing them up but because i guess it's because he put this information out there but fatality was also a big like on exercise like physical training before you game like go run

John:
[55:57] Two or.

Tyler:
[55:57] Three miles do push-ups do sit-ups like don't be the fat dude in your mom's basement just you know eating flaming hot cheetos and drinking code red mountain dew

John:
[56:06] And was that maybe like a later addition to his talk track once he started selling hardware and people were like listen john you gotta get Get us out of the neckbeard space, John. We got to put some lines in here.

Tyler:
[56:19] I think that's just who he was. I think that was just...

John:
[56:22] Did he actually practice that? I mean, he never was a large... He always was a lean dude whenever I saw him, right?

Tyler:
[56:28] I know that from what he told me, that was a big part of it and diet was not. Because I asked everything to all... Every player that I've talked to, I'm like, I have all these curiosities. Because at the time, I was trying to be good at Quake. And I'm like, what am I doing wrong? I have all the equipment and I have all the fucking fancy hardware. I have, I've changed my settings to exactly replicate yours and I still suck. And I practice every day. What are you doing different from me? And then, so it became questions like that. I'm like, what are you eating? What do you, do you work out? Because I mean, I've always been like.

John:
[57:00] Kind of big on right now.

Tyler:
[57:02] Yeah, for sure. I mean, that might make a difference. If you have a me undies, moisture wicking, uh, like you don't have sweaty balls while you play. That makes a difference. Like... Um, it makes a huge difference. So if you're wearing shitty underwear while you're trying to play games for eight hours a day.

John:
[57:23] What was your secret to success? Well, I powdered my tape before I came in here and that clearly put us in the lead position.

Tyler:
[57:29] It could be. I mean, a NASCAR driver is right. Like you don't want a big fat dude in the car. You need a little guy who's got his fucking uniform.

John:
[57:37] It takes all parts. Like you said, I admire your, uh, I admire your dedication to getting good, get good.

Tyler:
[57:45] I think I just accepted I was never going to be that one day. I'm like, you know what? I don't actually care about this as much as I thought I did. But what I am good at and what I like to do is talk about these things with people and offer that information to folks who do care about it. I mean, if you want to be a great esports player, you should probably listen to what other great esports players have done to get that edge.

John:
[58:07] Great inflection point right here in terms of referencing what other players have done. I wanted to talk about this. Um let's just sorry i want to finish my damn journey story because i love just jiving with you but i got a couple more things to share here i got a long journey um so we were i do want to come back let's just pin that that was um i wanted to talk about demos and spectatorship that's where i was going to take that one but we'll come back to that when i can talk about your pr whatever.

Tyler:
[58:33] You want it's your podcast i if i get on a tangent just reel it really back in

John:
[58:38] Um so we're it was a quake quake invitation league we did the team that team match joe was going pro i was figuring out women who was like oh wow this is cool and it was not gaming and then whack right in that summer um summer of 2000 we caught wind of samsung announcing the first world cyber games which the very first so it's now called the wcg or world cyber games but the very first one as you may know was called the world cyber game challenge they threw an extra little c on the end there as they do so um one is this where.

Tyler:
[59:14] Miss x took on all the boys

John:
[59:17] I'm sorry, what now?

Tyler:
[59:18] Do you remember a player named Miss X?

John:
[59:20] Miss X, in which game?

Tyler:
[59:22] She was a Quake 3 player at the time. Quake 3 player.

John:
[59:25] Was this, I know that there was a CPL all-female tournament. I don't know if she was involved in that or that's what you're referring to, but I do know what you're referring to, but I do not recall Miss X.

Tyler:
[59:35] Somebody in the comments can, this is a total tangent, but somebody can correct me if I'm wrong. I think it was WCG where she had this like shootout tournament where it was like, I will take on any man. And she beat she just crushed like hundreds of people

John:
[59:50] That's cool as.

Tyler:
[59:51] An event i could be wrong then i may be off on my timing here but go

John:
[59:55] Ahead like that style bravado that's kind of what i was doing at mediascape when i was like 12 and they were like hey if you can beat this 12 year old you'll play for free no one beat me it was pretty fun yeah um so fast forward um samsung announced the first world cyber games they announced the games so quake 3 arena uh fifa um starcraft i'm pretty sure they had age of empires in there as well if i recall and unreal tournament which because they needed another arena shooter they didn't want just one arena shooter to take everything right i think i think counter-strike was in that year as well if i recall or they added it the following year i can't recall but what jumped out to me two things jumped out to me the first thing was that well i'm like shit i'm not like i kind of lapsed in my competitive quake three.

John:
[1:00:48] Days i'm not like i knew if i was legit gonna try and place like i had a lot of fucking work to do like i was totally lapsed in the pro space i was no longer playing six hour days you know people like joe could beat me on the regular daisin could beat me on the regular at this point as he was off in singapore and playing all these crazy pro tournaments um so i knew there was a lot of work there at the same time i identified that the unreal tournament community was not that large applied a little bit of strategery here the prize money was the same but the player base there were you know what across canada because it was again national qualifiers so you got to sort of break it down and laterally think through it i was like okay so So who from the East Coast is playing.

John:
[1:01:34] Unreal tournament and that answers nobody and so like okay the canadian qualifier was being held in toronto so then the question becomes are are any of the west coast really good you i mean there might have been like one you know what i mean like the the community the competitive player base was literally a fraction of what it was plus you got to consider the evolution of the gamers in the space so who were who was going to populate this one v one bracket in unreal tournament and what kind of hours have they put into arena like quake players had like i had to actually be able to throw down and compete and the answer is that it didn't really hold up you had some outliers in the space um there was one american guy i don't know if you've heard of him or talked to him named destruct his name was brian flander i always used to joke with him that it was like he was like simpsons flanders but um super cool guy and this guy was like he was like the john wendell or the thresh of unreal tournament like he was levels above everybody else and his his signature was the the combo so like unreal tournament had secondary firing functions on guns the pulse rifle had like this ball pulse that would slowly move away from you but then if you primary fired the moving ball pulse it would like explode into this huge nova so you'd secondary fire let it go towards where you thought the guy was and then primary fire it.

John:
[1:02:59] And it would just like nuke everything in an area he was ruthless with this combo like he just practiced ruthlessly with this combo couldn't beat him that he beat he won the whole tournament by like a mile but going back this is part of what i knew that there was that uh lapse in the competitive space so i quickly identified our tournament as a vector to win some easy money and get myself to korea.

John:
[1:03:21] I also, I gotta say, uh, their map selection protocol was very poorly thought out at the time. Uh, it was like, if two players couldn't agree on the same map, it would default to a map. Yeah. And because I was switching games, I couldn't learn all the maps. So then I knew I just totally games. I was like, all I gotta do is not agree on a map. And then I've only got to learn one map. and so i played bots for that local low ping experience and i practiced with a sniper rifle which was a if you got a headshot with that instant kill and so the exercise here was drilling all of the i just learned the timing all the rotations of the weapons and the armors on the map was deck 16 again the most popular one v one map played bots boom i just dialed in my accuracy on headshots i dialed in all the angles on where i would be hitting shots based on where the player would be and then i learned the rotation and then from there i just didn't agree to whatever the other guy map wanted to play and one in the canadian qualifier five grand in my pocket i think i was 15 or 16 years old and that's when my parents really set up and i came home with this 5k usd check for playing video games in 2000 and they were like oh i never heard i never heard a word again after that right spending time playing computer games there was never a peep after that.

John:
[1:04:46] Um but yeah that got me to um and then you know to be fair like a lot of the wider canadian army tournament community were pissed because who was i and they didn't get representation and you know all fair all accurate complaints right um but you gotta you gotta play the game right don't hate the player at the game and uh what was even weirder was when i eventually went to korea so that first year so they've got you know world cyber game challenge we got these red jumpers they gave us these like deep red you know like china red jumpers right uh that had world cyber game patch in the middle of it and everyone was wearing them and you had your name tag and, flew everyone to korea which was great m plate uh my buddy m played rob jarwan placed for quake so he got to go as well our canadian coach was my buddy renee who was pretty wild uh and.

John:
[1:05:36] A couple other guys I knew as well, a guy named Dion, who was a bit of a piece of shit, and some other guy who I didn't know. A couple of the UT guys I got to know. And the weirdest part was that being a former Quake player, getting into Korea, so they kept us out of the city. You can't have, you know, a hundred gamers from around the world running around downtown Seoul. Like, that's a nightmare waiting to happen, right? International news story waiting to happen. So they put us out at this place called Everland. Everland Ski Resort. it was like an hour and a half or whatever in the burbs beautiful you know korean mountainside, um and uh so basically we're in our hotel out there and you're just in the hotel i mean we went out for a meal here or there but you're basically just in the hotel they set up a practice room on the ground floor which is just a land with like you know 20 30 machines and it's expected that you go and you practice for your game now here's the fuckery is that because i was a quake player and i just jumped games just for the you know the money and the accolade and the quick win or whatever i'm in korea supposed to be practicing ut but with all these amazing fucking quake players and i'm like like i was playing quick and people are like hey like aren't you a ut player like aren't you supposed to i'm like yeah but like i just want to play john once more and like i wanted to play all these like european guys you never get to play with like all these incredible world-renowned Quake players, and I'm like, oh, you're supposed to be practicing Unreal Tournament, sir? And I was like, yeah, I know, I know.

Tyler:
[1:07:06] Yeah. It'd be like if Michael Phelps were at the Olympics trying to play basketball,

John:
[1:07:09] You know, that's exactly right.

Tyler:
[1:07:11] Maybe wait till after the, after the swim meet.

John:
[1:07:13] And then that's exactly right. Um, it was pretty funny. I, I, I did fairly well. I placed fifth overall in, uh, in the world bracket that year. And I remember my first, it was, I think my first or second game again, I was a dark horse in a real tournament because no one knew who I was and, uh, ended up playing the best one of my early matchups was the number one korean player and i smoked him and that's when people were like well like it was like a double like a double digit difference and people were like uh okay who's sorry who's this guy again um and then as the brackets continued i think destruct knocked me out and then i lost to um someone else maybe i think another german player or something but um yeah wild times wild times i um from there grew up went to university of toronto played some world of warcraft um like vanilla wow stuff at one point i was trying to pvp, with my shadow priest i was like number 22 on the server of like vanilla wow back when players were just running around villages there were no zones for pvp it was all just raw wildly introduced stuff it was super fun um eventually grew out of that and uh definitely when i moved to the middle east um i started my work career in public relations and didn't even have a computer we.

Tyler:
[1:08:36] Gotta talk about so how does that come about you know how do you end up going to the the ua and all that

John:
[1:08:42] So i how do i end up going to the ua so when i was at university of toronto i was taking linguistics it i didn't really want to we kind of just was i wanted to go to the school was a good school, all this like, you know, paternal pressure of what should, what are you going to do when I, you know, all that boomer shit of like, you have to get a real job and you know, you must know what you want to do and right. Right. Right. So, um, was taking linguistics i did that for two years wasted a ton of money took a year off after that and my dad was like hey well good luck you know if you're not in school i'm not supporting you and i was like oh okay so you didn't you.

Tyler:
[1:09:18] Didn't gravitate like or you didn't like doing linguistics

John:
[1:09:22] Or linguistics is dry like it's cool in retrospect now that i work in the voice actor space i can apply some of that knowledge in terms of how your mouth moves to make different sounds and there is a little bit of science behind it called linguistics which is cool and i i can sort of um philology back on some of that but it's it's very clinical like it's very um you know what do you do it's not practical right like if you become a phd in linguistics you go and you learn five languages and then you teach people about how languages are made or you know you're the person in the alien movie that they bring into the alien room because it's the language that no one knows and how do we which we need the linguist right like it's just very obscure jobs and not a lot of them i.

Tyler:
[1:10:02] Studied uh at the the defense language institute so i was like an arabic linguist in the air force uh when i first joined the air force and then i i had the same experience with you where i was like i i do love linguistics but i didn't want to do that as a career like this

John:
[1:10:16] Doesn't work it doesn't offer you that much as a career it's very unless.

Tyler:
[1:10:19] You're going to be a translator working for a huge corporation or the government uh is not a lot of unless it's your obsession you know it's not very fun.

John:
[1:10:28] Well said. It was the writing. I was a really good writer. Liked writing a lot. Applied to journalism schools. Didn't get in. Um, I, I didn't, there was one really good one called Ryerson in Toronto that I applied to, made the first couple of cuts. Like it's super aggressive, highly competitive, didn't get in eventually. And then I was like, I don't know what I want to do. And my sister actually turned me onto the, uh, public relations program at Humber, which is, uh, Ontario, it's now a university, I believe used to be a college. Um, and they offered like a three, three and a half year diploma program applied to that. Also competitive got into that uh the that's i did the full diploma program and um what i loved about it is that it's a lot of writing and they position it as such it's like you need strategery.

John:
[1:11:16] And you need writing in a coupling uh under the premise that if a journalist is going to work with you as a pr practitioner if you can write at a high quality as though the journalist would they're way more likely to use your work and or collaborate with you if you can pitch them you know using emotion or logic or whatever it is a combination of the two they're way more likely to work with you right so i loved all that the tact and the strategy plus the writing i was like oh this is a huge fit i love all this went uh to humber for pr for two and a half years was living in etobicoke right on the lakeshore and uh some friends of mine from u of t would come visit me you know it's like slightly out of the city so um this really wild buddy i had very eccentric guy name Ilya Komalov, half Russian, half Spanish, was like, oh, Johnny, I'm going to Dubai. You should come. You should come to Dubai. And at that point, I was like, what are you talking about? Like going to Dubai? Like, well, you're wild. Like, not on my radar.

John:
[1:12:15] And then lo and behold, I bumped into a high school friend of mine named Robin Brooks, who was taking PR there. And I knew she had been in Dubai working for an agency. And I was like, what are you doing in Ontario on the Lakeshore? Like, I thought you were, she's like, oh, dude, this year I was doing a lot of marketing copywriting. So I wanted to come take it from the ground up and she's totally put the bug in my brain she's like you should go you should go.

John:
[1:12:37] And then I started later going for internships which right at that time was when uh the late this would have been in 2008 um when there was like a micro recession in North America a lot of firing going on a lot of hiring freezes going on right when I was trying to get an internship, um interviewed like a lot of big agencies I wanted to work a big agency I had was ambitious right I I wanted to always be at that upper, upper echelon of work and around the heavy hitters and do the heavy work, right? Um... Ended up talking to an agency called Porter Novelli in Dubai. And they were like, cool, we can offer you like, you know, 600 bucks a month. By the way, you can't live on that here. You know, please be aware. And I was like, yeah, I did all my homework. I sold everything that I owned, former snowboard, PC, literally everything I had of value to be able to save. And my dad was throwing me a bit of money every month.

John:
[1:13:29] And then I just made it work, right? Like you just figure it out if it's what you want to do, right?

Tyler:
[1:13:33] Right.

John:
[1:13:33] And I did. and Port into Valley was where I did my internship and from there I got hired by Ketchum which is another multinational agency what's interesting in the Middle East is that all well then at that time sort of the inception or the birth of PR agencies were within ad agencies so and they the ad agencies were all sort of franchised so all these big ad agencies would be you know propositioned by some you know Lebanese baller be like hey I want to run your business in Dubai and we will call it uh TBWA slash rad like oh that's fucking brilliant let's do it printing money right like advertising was new this is some big multinational how amazing right and then they realized that oh PR is yet just another arm of the marketing mix so why don't we just tuck that in under the same agency so then you saw these same they were literally doing the same strategy with PR multinationals. So Ketchum was couched in TBWA. So when I worked for Ketchum for two years, I was put on the PlayStation business because being a former gamer, why wouldn't I just automatically work on the gaming stuff? Because I get that, right? Couldn't get away from it.

John:
[1:14:45] Um, yeah, we've catch them for a couple of years. Awesome work with PlayStation. This was right when social media was burgeoning and around the world and all these brands were like, we need, we need a Facebook fan page. What are we? And so oftentimes they looked to PR people because they were strategists and communicators and we knew optics and we knew how to like, you know, things we would now call and label, um, content, uh, creation and community management and all these things that are now thin sliced in terms of job functions or roles. Were just holistically handled by pr people or initially commonly given to pr people or pr agencies um from there ended up interviewing with edelman edelman was one of the agencies that i interviewed with in toronto really wanted to work for um they're the largest privately owned pr agency so everyone other one is like a franchise and if you do inter-office work they're like what's the job number for this so we can blog it's like it's not really the same business although they pretend it is edelman is not like that it feels like i mean it's family-owned number one, um and it is i mean you talk about strategic heavy hitters i mean what a fantastic company that was uh worked for edelman for i think two or two another two years maybe it was no one year uh i got poached by my xbox client um who just loved the way i presented numbers and knew i was a former gamer and he had some head counts so this was right when xbox was opening up its turkey and its Israel offices.

John:
[1:16:13] Those were falling under the Middle East Africa headquarters region, so MSR, multi-subregion. So you've got Xbox Global, the headquarters in Redmond. Then you've got EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, which is its own region. And then MEA is its own multi-subsidary region within Europe, Middle East, and Africa. So it's a multi-subregion in a region. and it included uh five markets saudi the gulf uh turkey israel and south africa, so i left my pr career was a bit of a hard right turn i had so this edelman was gonna move me down to south america and i had all this planned out and all this great and then my client was called me one day at six he's like hey have you ever considered a career in microsoft and i was like, what the fuck like no i can't say that i have but please say more i'm a great guy one of the best managers I've ever had named Amon Sangar. Shout out to Amon. He once told me the joke, which I'll never forget, and I tell it as my own to this day, which is, do you know the thing about the rat race, Tyler? The rat race being a metaphor for the pursuit of greed and power, right? Of course. Which is so prevalent. You know the thing about the rat race, Tyler?

Tyler:
[1:17:26] What's the thing about it?

John:
[1:17:28] Even if you win, you're still a rat.

Tyler:
[1:17:31] That's true. i have i've had there's a lot of parallels in our in our life because the whole like selling everything you have and leaving everything behind and going to chase a dream in some other country and then being moved around and all that sort of important ability right i totally had i think maybe a faster track of it but then i i very quickly realized like dude i don't want to be in this fucking rat race like i do not want to be you you

John:
[1:17:56] Got there quicker than i did okay and I commend you on that. It took me, I was in the Middle East for seven years, did some really good work for Xbox. I was a games, what was I doing? My title was business planner, air quotes. That was just what was on my work visa. But I basically was like an Xbox 360 and Xbox One, so Gen 7, Gen 8, a channel inventory manager for games. So you can imagine the volume of games, whether they were first party, second party, or third party games. Uh that played on xbox so and again all of this i had to learn right coming out of a communications background which is totally foreign to the retail landscape this is part of why i loved it and wanted the job right because i knew it would explode my knowledge and skill sets but in a totally different way which is kind of scary but kind of empowering at the same time so i went with it and it was rewarding.

John:
[1:18:48] So the three sort of retail sales functions, which are probably, this is probably antiquated now, which is wild, but, um, you know, sell, you sell into your distributor, you, the distributor sells out to retail and then the retailer sells through to the end customer. So at any given moment, you need to know what's our inventory, what's our channel inventory, what, how much stock do we have at each point in that chain?

John:
[1:19:13] And that's particularly important when managing the channel inventory, you manage it with things like pulse promotions like seasonal promotions ad hoc discounts stuff like that and so they hired me to be able to adopt and incorporate my gaming knowledge to be able to help the local market category managers for xbox throttle their channel inventory of games so it was like oh hey um new gears of war is coming out we're sitting on a ton of inventory why don't you have you thought about these kinds of bundles or you know how about you that new control it's coming out you can i can drop you some mdf funds and you can bundle that with that new game and these are the kinds of things that they would look to me to help support it was a support role right like those category managers didn't report to me so it was very relationship based if they didn't like me and didn't want to work with me my job wasn't getting done right so um had to really quickly figure out you know how to um support these people in their jobs and it ended up me doing a ton of traveling around the region and they leaned a lot on my press my former pr knowledge about you know all these regions as you might know have local gaming events like south africa has rage uh israel has one that they had kicked up at that time that i know i'd been picked up by ron kaldes shout out to ron he worked for nintendo as well at some point um turkey has their own like they all have these little iterations of local gaming events that i was familiar with and i mean And once you understand the methodology about, you know, how to formulate a press release, and this is what you lean into.

John:
[1:20:42] It becomes formulaic, right? And you can just sort of copy paste that and carry that with you to all your different teams and help them generate press.

John:
[1:20:48] And it all accrues to brand optics, right? Brand value in optics at the end of the day, right?

John:
[1:20:55] So fast forward, having even gotten to the headquarters yet, I left that job. The team was downsizing right at the time that they were downsizing. And I was like, my boss would be giving me raises. amon had gone off to a different role in microsoft and i was like oh he was such a good manager i was so sad to see him go and i kind of knew that my time as a contractor was going to be numbered once he left he kind of like kept me as his wingman um and i knew like they were paying me you know like when i had that conversation they can go pay some fresh grad out of turkey literally half of what they're paying me and he can do the same job right so it comes with a lot of less of value of gaming and stuff like that but if they just need you know reports being punched out they get that done at a cheaper rate so no hard feelings i get it so i left.

John:
[1:21:37] Right at the same time when I got contacted for an interview on the headquarters team in Redmond, there was a job opening that popped up. It was right at my appropriate level. It was a manager level role based in Redmond, Xbox communications team. And this is something I had been doing effectively for the Middle East region. You know, you get used to the ebb and flow. I'd been to E3s at this point with that as a contractor, which was huge rite of passage. It was like these gaming events that the owner of mediascape back when i was 12 years old john walsh would go to e3s and tell us about you know this epic event oh my and all these gamers this was like the hollywood of gaming basically right like and then there i was working in the space getting my own pass to e3 i gotta i kept all of them now i've got all the lanyards and all my exhibitor passes on my on the wall over there i keep them as displays as nostalgia but.

John:
[1:22:33] Um what a time like what a cool time even because the e3 doesn't exist anymore right like they've they fizzled that down too um heard i got a very uh i did get a very stern warning from a european colleague about um it was almost verbatim uh you know you would be going into the lion's den uh there's a lot of type a personalities there a lot of um alpha type people like just beware i was still young and thirsty and what yeah let's go like that's where i want to be right little did i know that my sociopathic manager was the person i would be getting a warning about in fact walking right into that one blind right yeah that's an entirely different conversation but, one of the beautiful things I got to work on there. So when I got hired, I didn't actually get hired for the job I interviewed for. There was another guy named John Gibson, shout out John, who came from McDonald's corporate Canada. He was just much like sharper corporate PR guy, like super detail-based, real sharp, real firm. I remember seeing him being pointy on emails and being like, oh my God, this guy is so sharp, like holy smokes, but really great at his job. I believe he's still there now. He worked on machine learning and he thinks back on Xbox now, but he's a solid dude. Shout out to John Gibson.

John:
[1:23:55] And so they opened up that manager was like, oh, actually, I hired someone else for that original role that you interviewed for. But one of the other roles that I'd love to hire you for is the Windows. Back then it was the Windows 10 gaming PR lead role. And she's like, oh, well, you know, as you might know the organization has a very confused relationship with gamers i was like very well aware um it's very happenstance right it's like everybody used windows for pc gaming but not by choice just by happenstance like it just happened like max sucks that was on.

Tyler:
[1:24:27] Your opera it's like the most popular

John:
[1:24:28] Operating system it's only you know it's like the lack of option right so unless you're.

Tyler:
[1:24:32] One of those linux people that you know one

John:
[1:24:34] Of those linux people those was people yeah but uh so this is the world like the creative role for me is like cool um let's do it over two years that role grew uh you know as they love to just sort of here take more here take more so by the end of two years uh i was the global pr manager for mixer i launched mixer and handed that off to someone else um i still held the windows 10 gaming pr lead role and that was pretty sleepy there wasn't a ton of first-party work they needed to be done to there was.

John:
[1:25:08] More just like developing like supporting materials for subs because you got to appreciate i mean windows spanned 152 markets at that point in time i think xbox was only 44 markets worldwide at that time and then the third hat that i adopted uh just by team changes and the like was uh xbox hardware and accessories so that included uh consoles specifically console bundles controller launches as well as system updates because i was like highly technical person i'm a deep tinkerer like build my own machines and stuff root my phones um i got it like i could sit down with the engineering team and be like hey tell me what's in the update i'll go make the you know the pr notes about what we should be talking about here so i had that objective lens about what the gamers want to hear that i knew they would want to hear um and the engineers appreciated that because like hey you got a pr guy that actually can talk to us like that's fantastic right whereas a lot of people in.

John:
[1:26:00] The comm space they don't necessarily have that ability right right um adaptive controller was one thing i wanted to tell you about that was probably the cool so i launched got the the briefing as things come down the pipeline you know oh great new briefing this is a controller for gamers with limited mobility amazing okay interesting let's hear more you get basically the briefing from marketing and that's kind of just the tip of the iceberg and then part of the job as PR people in terms of like in doing the work of how to tell the story you got to figure out what the story is so that you got to interview people right and so um sat down and interviewed all you know mostly the um the product managers a lot of the testers and the adaptive controller had a brilliant you know these are home run products like PR is at the end of the food chain when it comes to disclosure or roping in people, right? Like every team has touched it. Marketing is right there along them. And then PR is like literally your go-to-market window. It's like, hey, PR, we need some help here. And then PR gets brief, right?

Tyler:
[1:27:07] I always made a point to have a weekly meeting with the PR team. Because they're so often, especially in gaming, they're always outsourced, which is ridiculous in my opinion. But typically it's just like there's a PR firm and we meet with them, as you said, in the go-to-market window. I'm like, no, they need to be aware all the time. Every single decision, even if they're like... Months years ahead of a product they should know what to plan for that's so unfair to ourselves and to them to not keep that in the loop because they're literally going to be the people communicating this to the public and if you're if you're late which games always are or a product for gaming or whatever you know god the switch to is so late on like full year ago we were like planning games for like well we're not going to do a switch port because switch two will drop any day now you know that kind of shit and

John:
[1:28:00] Then did you see the video that they let fall out but like no like no text flyovers no people were like what like was this in the back like in the hopper and you guys just flopped it out the gate.

Tyler:
[1:28:11] Like what my reporting manager and i were watching it together and he was like wait there's no hardware specs i'm like i know right and so we're googling to find what the hardware specs are in the pipeline we're like is this even is this even like the actual specs because it's not published by like first party they

John:
[1:28:29] Were legit in a room and they were like we need to get something out what do we have and some marketer went i've got this 3d and someone's going how baked is it can we ship this and they went get it out and that's like you know how can we make this audience ready well we can throw some music on it and cut yeah good send it like get it out right.

Tyler:
[1:28:50] What is it it's bigger than the switch physically larger yeah

John:
[1:28:55] That's why you call that out.

Tyler:
[1:28:58] Um i'm still excited for it

John:
[1:28:59] I don't know i no doubt i'm not a nintendo guy myself and i don't love the mobile experience that's actually part of what disconnected me from xbox is part of why i ended up leaving at the end of the day uh i don't.

Tyler:
[1:29:10] Play them myself but i just recognize what a big audience that is like if i'm gonna

John:
[1:29:14] Make it it's the biggest games you know when i had access to those sales reports and we used a company called gsk that would give us um in the middle least they would give us like shelf share and retail share and stuff like that um nintendo always in there like it was mostly you know playstation very competitive in that region um but nintendo always had this foothold that neither brand could cannibalize like it just the the dedication of the audience is unquestionable and um it's their sauce like they just that's even i mean you know as much as i criticize that video and whatever from from the microsoft lens in terms of how microsoft would build and ship assets it's still very Nintendo and that's part of their lifeblood, right? That's part of just how they do stuff and it's just a little bit different, but that's what their audiences love. That's what that is for them and it wouldn't, it would disserve their brand to try and make it more play state. Like I feel like Sony and Microsoft very, you know, compete sort of toe to toe. They're still, you've got a cultural disconnect there in terms of where their global headquarters are, which I think gets pulled into stylistically sometimes how they approach business or approach communications or marketing deliverables let's say but nintendo is always on a different page entirely doing their own thing even you know even at e3s when they would show up to like just tie a totally different approach and it it's a great case study of how it works well for them as a brand it's a real differentiator right like it's a substantial one.

John:
[1:30:41] Um sorry yeah sorry go ahead yeah.

Tyler:
[1:30:44] Now that you're talking about

John:
[1:30:46] Adaptive controller amazing product totally changed uh i i probably wouldn't have been out of that place i was not grokking with that manager um like in retrospect what i now know like legit like narcissistic personality disorder like bonafide sociopath control needed to control everything uh and And then sort of after two years, the more digging I did, and I sort of learned that some of the challenges, oh, they weren't me. And there was like a long fucking history of this individual with doing shit.

John:
[1:31:17] And that was the point at which I learned, like I went to HR. It was like, okay, this is systemic. Like it was a real, you talk about puncturing the illusion of the rat race. Part of that illusion is abandoning the naive worldview that there's good people looking out for everyone in places. No, no, no, no, no, no. Everyone's just figuring out as we go. There's a really good Obama clip I saw recently where he's talking about equal representation at all levels.

John:
[1:31:48] It's in like a dark. I wish I'd saved it because it's so appropriate. But he says, you know, he context sets it and he says, when I first got into Harvard, I had this sort of idealist expectation that it would be full of these amazing high frequency people. And then I was surprised to see that there's all these idiots and people there too at harvard and i don't know well then he said i got into uh congress and the same thing and i thought oh here we are and no um equal representation there too there's some real shitbags there as well and he said in the white house here we go and well no even there too and you know at that level you get access to the global leader forums like the g8 and the un etc he said that's surely got to be different right no not at all you get your real you get some pockets of high frequency amazing individuals and then you get some shit bags too and it's equal representation at all levels and that really struck me because that was something that took me a little bit to learn right like there's no there's no uh idealist that's making sure everything is fair and even everyone is taken care of and that everything is on the up and up right that's not at all how things work and um you know that was part of i mentioned part of my I disconnect with my manager at the same time. I didn't love where the category was going.

John:
[1:33:04] This was when they were big on Game Pass launching. And so at these all, they would have these quarterly, I think they were monthly at that point, all team meetings, Phil was having a team meeting.

John:
[1:33:15] All team meetings i will say before i get to what i didn't like what i also did like beyond the adaptive controller and uh penning the narrative i mean like i got to write the the narrative that introduced the controller to the world and i love doing that because i got to that was like.

John:
[1:33:33] Important work it wasn't i wasn't just busting my balls for some bullshit controller that some people might buy and it ends up broken on many floors no one gives a fuck about it like this with this device had impact like this and you learn that when hearing about it you hear about the gamers with limited mobility and the foundations that they work with and through who all were involved in the testing of it and the extensive testing and how that pulled through in the design of it and the inclusive design and of itself and how that was a breakthrough space and even right down to the packaging was inclusive like it was all it was a fucking home run and so the PR person's job is just to not fuck it up like you just gotta also hit a home run at that point it's a home run coming down the pipeline to you bring your a game and you also hit a home run right and so we did and uh penning that narrative I had I gave me the opportunity to distill what I knew and loved about gaming myself which was as a kid it was a little bit of distraction was a little bit of competitiveness it was all of that land time all of these amazing friends i'd met john harley joe kim boris pan uh plus plus plus plus plus plus um you know like these now lifelong friends of mine.

John:
[1:34:51] Like i went backwoods camping with joe and my dog last summer or two years ago like i'm seeing boris later on today seeing john harley like these are now like 20 plus 30 plus year friendships of mine right and i got to sort of distill and incorporate a lot of that beauty and joy of gaming and the connectedness that it brings into the introduction of the adaptive controller and i knew that i knew also um just through experience that the xbox controller was used in medicine i knew that it was uh you know critically acclaimed and had been awarded third-party awards and all this kind of stuff and used by military and drone applications and stuff so like what are we talking about it's a best-in-class controller and so that's it was like hey let's pull that in so the basic entry to the narrative was like this company makes all this incredible shit and yet if you don't have two hands ten fingers and two arms you're unintentionally excluded from gaming well here's a new device that changes all that.

John:
[1:35:54] People loved it. And it set the stage fantastically. We did a pre-announce in spring. And then the controller launched in September. We were at E3 that year. I got to meet Reggie, Nintendo. We'd do behind closed doors or BCDs at E3. Well, when we were doing E3s, when they were doing E3s. Or basically, you'd bring your choice marketing people and some hardware.

John:
[1:36:16] It's primarily focused on games where they'd show off new games, first party, third party that were launching in the BCDs. and you'd use the touchpoint to bring in international press. And so you just have this blocked rotary of like international press rolling through and you're doing the same canned demo, just trying to maximize your international coverage around that beat, right? So we're there with the Xbox controller. We got our demo and Roddy Ra and then suddenly ad hoc went, oh, hey, Reggie from Nintendo wants to come in and see the controller. Do you guys want, you ready to do that? We're like, let's go. Sure. Like it just, I love how it galvanized the gaming community across boundaries that weren't crossed before that's the beauty of gaming right like that's it it stoked this sense of uh camaraderie you know coming out of that meeting it didn't matter if we were competitors right she was like hey let's let's have some conversations about how we can maybe get some apis running on the nintendo platform so the adaptive controller works and you know like it just triggered all of this collaborative spirit immediately that people just wanted to be a part of it wanted to support it saw the beauty and the joy that it brought um and i mean that's incredible like that's some of the stuff that i love it too right was seeing gaming was so quintessential to me in my childhood and my upbringing in the different ways at different times that it served and things that it showed me and taught me.

John:
[1:37:40] How important is that to help bring to other people like so important right so critical and that's part of what kept me waking up and i'm it's all the bullshit that i was going through my manager i was like hey let's fucking get this done like this is something that needs to happen right once that was done and the the xbox one s launch was on the horizon she's like oh we got a console launch coming up and that like that six months we took to launch that controller was so fucking grueling collaborating with her i was like no i made a move to move to my marketing team they had an open role i interviewed for that they liked me did the last step and they eventually hired another candidate. When I knew that in mind, I was like, look, if I don't get that, I'm out. I'd been to HR. I learned how systemic this fucking toxicity was. I wasn't changing that person going anywhere, and I certainly wasn't dealing with any more of the bullshit. I knew that was for sure. I was out. At the same time, I had some really good friends of mine. Throwing in my it's sort of been scouted passively during my time in dubai with uh the ad agencies i've been in sort of informally scouted to do voice work that i was kind of just popping out on lunch breaks and doing it was very much as a side hustle i didn't know anything about audio engineering i was just some new guy who had a voice that was reading into a mic on my lunch breaks, and then i said as i started to do it more and i got a really good uh client base like i'd done some really good work for mcdonald's dodge uh nivia gillette all kinds of stuff.

John:
[1:39:07] Um i went to my buddy james's wedding shout out james retty in new zealand in 2018 i think it was.

John:
[1:39:17] Fall february of 2018 and uh he put the bug in my brain him and my buddy lucas ritson shout out to lucas we're like hey what if i was like oh what if i just quit this stupid toxic job and just go do a voice thing full-time and they were like what if what if you went and did that like you should totally go for it and it was scary as shit i mean you talk you know we talked briefly about you know hitting the reset button and starting anew and that's a very uh it's an incredibly important muscle and a skill i think everyone should undertake at least once but the reality is that it's only scary from the outset and that in reality all of that knowledge and experience stays with you right and so the ability to recreate yourself in fact you can do even better than the first time you know you're able to accomplish tasks easier you see challenges differently uh you take things in stress and stride more often hopefully and uh now looking back what are we five so i left uh xbox i mentioned the town halls with phil and so sort of the third thing in there was that i didn't love where the category was going at that time which i can talk about now at those internal town halls they're show they were showing like cloud gaming on a fucking mobile phone like here's forza playing on a mobile phone and isn't this great and it was so fundamentally disconnected from the pc experience everything that i knew and loved about gaming.

John:
[1:40:43] Like it just it did had no personal resonance with me i wasn't going to sweat my tits off and deal with you know whomever doing whatever the circumstance was for something that i didn't enjoy.

John:
[1:40:55] Um and at the same time i had a i had another potential redirection in voice and, i thought what if and so i ran with it and five years later and now uh a burgeoning voice actor i do a ton of commercial work um just started getting into some more character stuff lately and actually just last year got my own imdb page because i was featured as a a villain in uh the recent q4 patch for soul slinger envoy of death is victor which was really cool so now getting to voice come full circle getting to voice characters in video games right like how awesome is that.

Tyler:
[1:41:31] It's actually really just to rewind a little bit cool when people reinvent themselves over and over again. And I think that most people just suffer from this extraordinary fear of getting out of their comfort zone. But I mean, I've done that so many times and I'm only 29. I've already just like, nope, I'm going to do something completely different. And they're like, well, how does that, how does that apply to your skillset or anything that you've done before or anything? I'm like, I don't know, but I'm sure it'll all, I'll learn something new. And also things that I've done before will apply to it. When people are sending me like their cvs and shit like that and they're like you know uh i really want to get into this particular space or whatever and i don't know how to do it and i'm always like just just do just literally do it like it you just look at your resume what what skills did you acquire during any of this that apply to the thing that you want to do now don't think about it like i need to have

Tyler:
[1:42:27] Experience and all that kind of stuff and i think another people other people really struggle with they see the first layer of this doesn't I don't apply or this doesn't apply to me and then they give up right then and there so like you'll have an interview where it says like oh you need this you know many years of experience or this degree and then they're like oh well I'm just not gonna apply because that doesn't apply to me and I'm like no no no no all you need to do is get into the first interview and explain why despite that you don't have those things you are still the best candidate for the job because of these other things that you did do but people just give up right in there like fuck that advice so in your in your transition from like all of this PR marketing whatever I'm just going to go be a voice actor sounds kind of insane but I'm like think of all the things that you've done up to this point that make you uniquely qualified to be a voice actor for a video game you know marketing you know what works for people you know people who are gamers for years you have all of this experience that

John:
[1:43:26] You like even as a PR person a lot of your depending on where you sit in the chain and what else you're at and what clients you have um some of those duties might include either document review or asset review so you marketing might be like hey did pr sign off on that video we want to publish so as a pr person you're up you're you know trying to slap on the value add as best you can, And you're putting on that director's hat, you're putting on that producer's hat, you're judging the content and all the parts of it. And that sometimes includes voice and vocal delivery. So, you know, it wasn't unfamiliar to me to be able to wear the director's hat. And that's part of the approach I take into my voice business is that I'm able, and this is a common, common criticism amongst newer voice actors when they take coaching. It's that you have to learn how to self-direct. And to your point, Tyler, that's something that, again, in my former decade-long comms career, I've already done a ton. So I can shine that director's light on myself, like when I'm literally reading a script, and I say it, and I'm thinking, is that how I want to land it? Like, is that it? Or maybe there's more. And no, I'll hammer it out two, three more times, four. Bang! That last take, that's the money take right there. I'll mark that one for the client, and then I'll send them out to the client, because maybe they want to hear and cherry-pick one for themselves, right? But it's that ability to self-direct that's so critical and just on the point of recreation and.

John:
[1:44:49] It's such a you know i use the video game analogy as well of like it's very similar to like playing an mmo and getting to end game and final level and oh good i don't start a new character what all the work and the geo it's like it's a lot of sunk cost fallacy right it's like you there's this delusion that you've invested so much in this other thing, you can't let it go. And it's the same sort of delusion or limitation that clicks with people when they identify with their job title, which is super unhealthy too.

John:
[1:45:20] When I left Microsoft headquarters as the global PR lead for hardware and accessories and mixer live streaming and windows gaming, and I'm back in Toronto, i ended up i needed some quick income i couldn't just live off of savings and stock and whatever right so i need some income lo and behold i go back to the bar where i was bartending at as a college student before i moved to dubai and so i went from you know audi driving i will i still kept the audi that's a different story but um you know kind of um global pr guy going to e3s and blah, blah, blah, business flights to Germany to exec handle Micah Barra as his media guy, which is a different story altogether. Shout out Micah Barra. Um so can i clear your wing bowl for you like how humbling of an experience that was to go back to like bar slaving again working for like to wage and tips again after being it but again you know you talk about life experience and again it's the truth and reality that there's no it's not just a con success is not a constantly upward journey it's the dance any dance also has steps backwards as well too right and it's critically important that you take those in stride these.

Tyler:
[1:46:31] Are characters Being willing to, to like start from the bottom when you move into a new space is also very important. I think that it's very common for people to think like, well, I'm above this because I was, I worked as a manager.

John:
[1:46:44] That's ego talking and you got to kick that shit out of there. Right. Yeah.

Tyler:
[1:46:48] Yeah.

John:
[1:46:48] Well said.

Tyler:
[1:46:49] I definitely like, you know, in pro wrestling, I was in Denmark and I'm working for this new wrestling company and I was talking to them about, you know, like, what are we going to do? All that kind of thing. And then I'm not going to end up being the main eventer at this new company in a new country where no one knows my name or anything like that. I'm like, I will show up. I will help build the ring just like I would did when I was 18. I don't care. You know, like that's not a big deal. And it's it's part of like being on the ground with your people, even owning a company. I have no issue whatsoever, like taking the gloves off and getting in the dirt. If if the team is pushing,

John:
[1:47:26] It's the it's the 60 year old drill sergeant that runs the mile. Faster than any 20 year old that he's currently bringing up in his platoon, right? Like that's what it is. You got to keep that craft sharp, right? It's your trade craft. And I love the way that you say, you know, you're never too senior to get your hands dirty. Cause that's absolutely true.

Tyler:
[1:47:46] Yeah.

John:
[1:47:47] Love that.

Tyler:
[1:47:48] So, I mean, all of, all of this traveling around everything that you've done, everything that you've seen companies you worked for, whatever. Um, what, what are you, what would you say that world travel has brought to your life and meeting people from different cultures.

John:
[1:48:09] Critical thought um seeing the different ways in which people live living in the middle east was a great thing because they snap to the uh european work-life balance in terms of your contract and the amount of personal leave you get every year so you get like you know 22 working days i mean this is entry level too right you might be making you know 45 50k at the gate and you're getting a month off per year which is incredible coupled with the fact that it's tax-free there's no personal income tax there so what you what's on the offer letter is what goes in your bank account which is what stays in your pocket at the end of the day which is great coupled with the added fact that geographically it's close to a lot of really cool places and i mean the middle east right so you've got all of europe that's just barely six hours away you go the other direction you're five hours from thailand i got some all this is hand poke on my arm and on my chest that i got done in thailand all of its hand poke.

John:
[1:49:11] I went back like i think six different times between 2013 when i got my first piece done to 2015 or 16 which is when i had left like new year's parties and stuff like traveling with buddies my buddy ilia that crazy guy i mentioned call me up like johnny i booked us on a flight to amsterdam we're going tonight grab a bag i'm like oh my god okay like that guy was a maniac yeah um but it's seeing how people live differently um.

John:
[1:49:41] Certainly traveling um you know on a microsoft dollar and that level of means is eye-opening as well um with regard to how people receive you um you know we talked briefly about identifying your ego with your job title and stuff like that and that that plays into it a little bit as well in terms of um giving you that perspective or what it shows you um did.

Tyler:
[1:50:03] You ever fall into that trap

John:
[1:50:06] Um i i, i i really i probably i can't say no i'm not gonna absolutely say no um i really do a lot of work to not live in the ego i'm big on uh big on psychedelics uh have done ayahuasca you know big dmt guy um big on spiritual journeys and introspection and um so i as i was saying i try not to live in the ego It's an incredibly important exercise to not be that way.

John:
[1:50:39] It's altruistic, of course, and it's how we operate as humans. It's how our brains form and function. But if you can consciously take yourself out of that space, that's a very good place to be. And you might find people that do try to practice that and are successful at it can live happier lives. Like it's, you know, like what, this is what I love about having transitioned to the voice space. I'm probably jumping into a question you might've carved out, but like, you know, I, I, it's gig work. So I work for myself. It's my business. I work when I want. I love what I'm doing. Um, there's more passion in it that way. Um, and I set my own level. It's not like I'm out of the rat race. Like I've, it's helped me understand what an appropriate level of like what my own personal level of desired living comfort is and what financial freedom means and what that looks like to me as a person.

John:
[1:51:38] And then once you know you're in that space or that range, you can just sort of enjoy life and taking yourself out of the rat race and not being about that constant drive and strive for success. I had a boss once who called a keeping up with the Kardashians and that's exactly what it is, right? It's like people spending, overspending on their credit cards using money they don't have to buy cars it's like the fight club line right it's like shit we don't need to impress people we don't fucking care about right yep and uh these are things it's right up there next to false idols and uh i just bought a book called collapse but you know we are most certainly in late stage capitalism and uh it starts to look a certain way and once you start to see once your data set increases and you start to see corollary across data points you're like huh this is interesting where is this train going right now is real tick tick tick tick tick you know going up on the roller coaster right.

Tyler:
[1:52:33] Every great representative of democracy in history eventually turns into an empire. I mean, it's literally in Star Wars. So it's very interesting how those patterns play out. We could probably do a whole other show on just that kind of stuff.

John:
[1:52:47] I love your side channels in cryptozoology.

John:
[1:52:52] I love all that stuff. I'm huge on that stuff.

Tyler:
[1:52:56] Yeah, I mean, I spent so long just talking about video games. And, you know, the more I did it, the more I, you know, talked to different developers and like we all have these same sort of like esoteric interests. That's what makes art good is that you have all these different interests that you put into your art. Right. So then I, you know, tried to expand and like, that's another one of those things of like getting out of your comfort zone, getting out of your lane. I'm like, why don't I have a comedian or a, or a Western esotericism doctor or a medium or what else? Why don't I talk to these people? Why is this podcast just got to be about one thing? have

John:
[1:53:30] You ever had a supernatural experience tyler.

Tyler:
[1:53:32] So it's an interesting thing for you to ask me on my own podcast for sure uh for me i i don't think i've talked about this on the air so it's interesting that you should uh bring it up on this day divulge so i mean first of all we got my

John:
[1:53:47] Own podcast chops here okay shamelessly but please you should.

Tyler:
[1:53:50] You should do your own podcast for the for the voice acting game i would gladly come talk to you uh so for me i i got really into meditation when i was about 18 and i think the first moment when i really like i was for the longest time like a deeply scientist person and scientism was like my religion and if you couldn't prove it to me i would not even consider it like if it's not established and accepted i'm not going to talk about it i ended up being literally a meteorologist in the air force and did very well it that but it's all within the confines of known physics and fluid dynamics and all that kind of stuff that's and then thank you thank you um tip to that uh so anyway when i got into meditation i had this moment when i realized that consciousness is not isolated i'm not a pilot behind my eyeballs like in that eddie murphy movie day meet dave or whatever it's called where you imagine yourself as a little version of yourself behind your eyeballs piloting the the craft it's like no no no this is bigger than that like if

Tyler:
[1:54:58] You can self-project stare at a wall and look back at yourself even for a brief moment and realize that like no this is all bigger than just what you're seeing here and that i think was the biggest opening journey like that was what made me think i probably should reconsider a lot of what i'm thinking about and there were you know drug experiences and all kinds of stuff that furthered along that way.

Tyler:
[1:55:24] I definitely have had At least two very impactful, like, I don't know what to describe them as, but I would just say paranormal experiences where I felt a presence or saw an entity, that kind of thing.

John:
[1:55:40] Saw an entity. Sure.

Tyler:
[1:55:43] Saw is a, when people try to describe these things, I don't think we have the language to describe it. Right. Because it's so grounded and, you know, movies have conditioned you to think when you see a ghost, you see an apparition, which is a form of paranormal experience, but it's not the entirety of it. And I think that if you haven't experienced something like that, or if you've only heard people describe it, they don't have the descriptive terms to talk about something that they can't describe.

John:
[1:56:09] Unless you're Dan Aykroyd, then it's going down on you in a Hollywood movie. What kind of ghosts are these?

Tyler:
[1:56:13] But even that was his way of kind of in a way turning what he had experienced and what he thought about into a metaphor that could be understood by a lot of people and obviously connected with people um so one of these experiences i'm not going to talk about because it was deeply traumatic but i'll probably tell it at a different time the other one i had been going through like a really really tough time and my mother despite me having all these really strong scientific scientifically grounded beliefs my mother is a she'd get mad at me for using the word but she's like basically a medium she's has literally solved cases like for real and i always struggled with the dichotomy of like i don't believe in that but there's something going on with this going on there um so then i was uh really really struggling personally and i was laying in my bed and i knew that there was a guy who had died in the house that she owns right um long ago and he was a you know a sports coach and a really nice dude but for whatever reason his spirit never left this house or at least visits from time to time and stays in the upper is

John:
[1:57:31] That good or.

Tyler:
[1:57:32] I don't know but for whatever reason like multiple people have said like there's this dude is still here you know in some fashion or at least an echo of him is still here but i was distraught i was like crying in my bed like i did i felt like my life was over and i just woke up to the feeling of a hand on my knee like like a like an older man would be like hey son it's gonna be okay don't worry that kind of thing comforting and i wasn't hallucinating because i'd or at least i had to have had a psychotic break because i wasn't doing any drugs or anything at the time so this was just like a really like wow and i didn't feel scared i didn't feel was

John:
[1:58:15] This at night or like a daytime nap or.

Tyler:
[1:58:17] I believe this was like early in the morning i want to say but and so it wasn't like station

John:
[1:58:23] Or presence the sensation of the presence woke you out of your slumber.

Tyler:
[1:58:26] It woke me i don't know i don't want to say it woke me up like it i was probably already somewhat awake like between sleep and reality so maybe that's a potential scientific explanation i don't know but i did have this experience where i felt someone who was corroborated by other people to have had a presence in this space comfort me that was one of the other one is way more intense but again it's just like it's too much to get into I'll probably start crying and shit.

John:
[1:58:59] And the level of comfort was so profound that you're saying it changed your outlook. Is that right?

Tyler:
[1:59:07] Yeah, for sure. At that moment, I definitely went from being like, hey, I really need to reconsider the way I'm thinking.

John:
[1:59:14] That is profound.

Tyler:
[1:59:17] And I've talked to so many people that have experiences like this. I'm a huge Art Bell fan too, and that's a treasure trove for anyone who wants to get into it. Studying paranormal stuff just to hear like the kind of people who call into a radio show but no doubt yeah and then there's i think it's all connected like the i've got the the x-files poster behind me and i noticed that yeah it's i think it's all part of the same thing we just don't understand it yet no

John:
[1:59:46] I would completely agree with that that's uh an interesting way of putting it in, I don't want to say extrasensory perceptions, but things going on, like we're basically locked into these meat bodies that we've got, right? Like these structures, the brains, the way our brains work and we're locked to our senses, sight, sound, taste, smell, touch. It's like, it's all very rudimentary and it's all rooted in 3D space. But if you've done, you know, psilocybin or anything that's even remotely psychedelic, you quickly learn that there's things, I mean, it's DMT specifically, very aggressive, psychoactive, but there's things to see that aren't necessarily visible with the naked eye, so to speak, right?

Tyler:
[2:00:34] Well, how do you explain empathy? Just as a very simple go-to, like how do

John:
[2:00:41] You… explain empathy well.

Tyler:
[2:00:43] I mean you but i mean in general we like what is empathy what why do we feel this connection with other people why is it that you can sense someone's emotions even if you're not in the same room with them

John:
[2:00:54] Yeah like.

Tyler:
[2:00:55] That sort of thing and people have it to greater and lesser degrees

John:
[2:00:58] So that's funny that you use that explicit example of feeling emotions across distances geographic distances because i have only ever had one what i would describe as a paranormal experience uh and it was actually when i was in korea playing for the world cyber games it was immediately halfway through the trip i had a dream one night that my dad died, excuse me and uh it was a very gripping dream like i don't normally dream like that um and then i it was so gripping so intense and jarring to my brain when i woke up like to the point where I wanted to call him like I was like I better call my dad like that was a very strange dream and over the course of the morning all but forgotten about it and you know it didn't end up calling my dad and whatever so fast forward to getting home I'm in the car ride with my sister came to the airport to pick me up with my dad and in the car ride home halfway home they're like hey we didn't want to tell you while you were in Korea because we didn't want you to feel conflicted about coming home or not but your grandfather died my dad's dad died when i was in korea and i was like get the fuck out of here like it floored me like at.

Tyler:
[2:02:11] The same time too like

John:
[2:02:12] Exact if you.

Tyler:
[2:02:14] Go back and check your messages and corroborate the time exact

John:
[2:02:16] Same time i had this crazy again like once removed because i felt it was my father but like what is that like so many other questions fall out of that right but like just to have that kind of and i didn't dream about my dad like that i didn't you know just something that was so out of place in of itself and so powerful at the same time and then to hear that from i was like holy smokes like didn't know what to make of that but definitely not just um randomness you know like.

Tyler:
[2:02:48] Why it's it's so common and so profound that i just think it's ridiculous to dismiss it as we can't prove it yet so it's not real in the same way that you know it wasn't so long ago that people were dying of radiation poison and they could not figure out what a you know what the half-life of an isotope was and then they figured that out and now we know don't go walking near chernobyl

John:
[2:03:11] There's even uh do you i'm sure you do as a avid fan you are of the paranormal but Are you a Y-Files fan?

Tyler:
[2:03:19] I enjoy the Y-Files. At first, I really hated the stupid talking fish, and then I've grown to love the stupid talking fish.

John:
[2:03:25] He's the comedic outlet. Yeah. I, you know, that guy, AJ, I'm pretty sure I recognized his voice from voice work. And then the more I furthered myself along that journey as like a creator voice actor, I sort of, his work resonated with me because like, I'm pretty sure he was on that journey. And then he just was like, well, I'm just going to produce this thing, right? So like, he's the voice talent. He's the key anchor. um he does the characters the fit you know what i mean like i was.

Tyler:
[2:03:50] Like best theme song in all of podcasting too by the by far what's that worst his his theme song is

John:
[2:03:55] The best it is not fantastic yeah when it comes on i'm like um but they did an episode recently on um nuclear energy as a trigger to um quickening evolution that they're seeing in in wolves was it the example that they use i think.

Tyler:
[2:04:12] There yeah the wolves of chernobyl there you go that's right

John:
[2:04:15] So um i mean further to your example not even only something that we once knew nothing about and was feared and misunderstood or not understood but in fact something that might be quintessential or a cornerstone to a building block of how we got to the thinking ape in the meat cage body with the cerebral brain connection to something going on somewhere else right.

Tyler:
[2:04:38] Oh yeah when i when i was asking earlier about world travel another thing that i find very interesting is how different cultures to a higher and lower degrees feel a connection or even talk about these things so coming from the i'm from like the gulf coast like mobile new orleans area right and it's there granted there's a lot of christy Like Protestant Specifically Christianity That I think overrides People generally are spiritual But maybe deny A lot of the parts of it That you would otherwise discuss More so in New Orleans I think they're More open-minded to it Because of You know The Haitian Voodoo African influence Huge part of

John:
[2:05:19] It Right down there Yeah New Orleans Get that voodoo culture.

Tyler:
[2:05:22] Going to Europe Especially Northern Europe I You could feel Like an absence Where like No one here believes That And therefore, it's not here. It's just very strange. I think that there's so much merit to belief itself is part of our consciousness that has a an impact on our feelings and on reality or to some degree like just if you believe something is real and lots of people collectively believe something is real and that makes it a factor in the way that you operate that is the definition of magic uh it whether or not people believe specifically in magic and that's it's such a diluted term because it gets used in like harry potter context but i mean the change to to create change through the will and getting multiple people to create change through will is that's what a witch's coven is that's what going to a sports game and all of the people on one side are dressed up in animal costumes going rah rah rah that

John:
[2:06:25] Is a great.

Tyler:
[2:06:26] Corollary it's the same thing true that's

John:
[2:06:29] A great example to bring that point to life i never considered that.

Tyler:
[2:06:31] Yeah what

John:
[2:06:33] You mentioned which is covenant and uh one i in my in some of my dabblings and readings i did pick up um a copy of the lesser key of solomon which which.

Tyler:
[2:06:47] Iteration like yeah

John:
[2:06:49] I don't know.

Tyler:
[2:06:50] So there's there's lots of different translations of this i I mean, I have Alec, uh, Aleister Crowley's version, but there are more scholarly translations.

John:
[2:07:00] It's on the Aleister Crowley version, but it's got illustrations and stuff added to it. Um, and what was interesting in the, in some of the, uh, early pages of that where it's like the, not quite the appendix, but it's like the opening, like the intro or whatever, where they sort of context set everything. And they touch on sort of different um i'm gonna really use some of these terms loosely but like these practitioners like ideologies or perspectives and it's interesting i made a couple highlights and stuff and it's really it's it's not dissimilar from what you were just saying it's about um you know like the the wizard was denoted as someone who had the ability to to manifest Like this was the literal definition of a wizard. It was someone who had an advanced knowledge of the physical world of, you know, galvanizing sights, sounds, smells, incantations, you know, verbal.

John:
[2:07:59] I mean, you could consider a series of positive affirmations, incantations, if you will, right? You know like um but who could galvanize these different aspects to create and focus a certain outcome and way back when when you know self-help and things that we now know are demystified you know we were talking about the example of um nuclear energy to fall out like same same but different greater understanding of these things that we now know and demystify and it's not woo woo and it's not wizardry and sorcery and blah blah blah but just things that people say oh it's it's actually not called therapy and you go and talk about something with someone and it helps you feel better and accomplish more you know like yes it's a wild twist but some of the highlights what was really staggering was around that same time i read uh vice did a really good article on operation stargate was it and uh the cia papers the 25 cia papers that were declassified and they then included the 25th paper and they did a really cool the article that vice did was cool because it was sort of visual as well they had like a pdf of an lsd sheet and i don't know if you remember this it was maybe two or three years ago now but each tab of lsd was a different page of the cia paper yep so you could kind of zoom in and out it was really cool like really well thought out.

John:
[2:09:20] Sort of re-execution of the story including that now released new page but what's wild is if you go through so i don't know if you've read this document does this ring a bell you know what i'm referring to yeah.

Tyler:
[2:09:30] So i've done a lot of reading in on the multiple different cia operations it's mostly during the 60s there's astral projection

John:
[2:09:39] Projection the report that was issued air quotes report uh.

Tyler:
[2:09:42] There's like the remote viewing sector too is project stargate and a few other things

John:
[2:09:46] So they're yeah what i'm referring to conflated the two or the report at least covered all aspects of it. And as you might recall, it basically outlines, all of these different practices like it breaks down like five or six different disciplines one of which is lucid dreaming one of which is meditation one of which is uh adapting your brain to hemi-sync using um staggered frequencies across three hertz to force your brain to harmonize it like all these different things and you go down this list but what was weird is that you start seeing some parallels and stuff like in the the pretext to the, um alistair crowley book mentions you know the the incantations leading to experience presences that aren't seen by the normalized stuff and that's kind of what they

John:
[2:10:38] talk about or allude to in the stargate stuff too right it's like and.

Tyler:
[2:10:41] What are the elves that you speak to when you're on a dmt trip well what are these symbols that you're seeing and if it what's damning about the whole dismissal of it is it's all just a you're just putting drugs in your brain is why do so many people report seeing the exact same

John:
[2:10:56] So shared a shared hallucinogenic experience is the unique part right like an individual they.

Tyler:
[2:11:02] Would call this mass hysteria yeah if we rewind you know 30 50 years this is mass hysteria but the more people cooperate the same story the less you and they're not connected they don't talk to each other they're not telling it's not like you heard this story before from someone else then took some drugs were influenced by what you heard and then had the same hallucination. It's that you're interacting seemingly with the same entities. And you can get there without drugs too.

John:
[2:11:30] You can, but still on drugs. There's another example. There's another book I read called Don Quixote's, oh, that's similar. I think you're holding up The Lesser Keeps Solomon. It looks same, same. Yeah, it's very similar to the one I've got.

Tyler:
[2:11:47] Okay.

John:
[2:11:48] Mine's not as cool looking as that one. I've got a white cover, but...

Tyler:
[2:11:52] This is a SL McGregor Mathers and Alistair Crowley's Lesser Key of Solomon, but I have other copies, I think somewhere I had my wife like, Hey, bring me the one that's next to you.

John:
[2:12:05] Another book about sort of not dissimilar theme stuff is by Don Quixote, Don Quixote. He read, he wrote two different books. I've read one and I'm, I haven't yet started the second one, but I, The author, this was in the 60s, I want to say, goes down to spend time in the Arizona desert with a Mexican shaman. Yep. And partakes in a number of different shamanic ceremonies. One is something that he smokes. One is a paste that I think he eats. And one of them is eventually peyote. He's doing buttons of cactus, right, which is peyote.

Tyler:
[2:12:45] Yep.

John:
[2:12:45] And they also, the shamans there and the people that undergo the ritual, they come to a moment, he comes to a moment in his trip reporter's experience where he's describing having seen a man, a small looking, sort of like a Mayan or a Mexican looking man who has black eyes, but it looks like there's stars in his eyes or they're lit up with like galaxies or stars. And that is a profound shared hallucination that many people who do peyote in this shamanic ritual like the shamans asked him they were like oh and did you see the man and he was like how the fuck did you know about the man like that kind of a thing right where he's like staggered and like what are you talking about shared hallucination again different substance different uh set and setting, but yet a shared hallucinogenic experience, which is very interesting.

Tyler:
[2:13:41] It's really wild how this stuff just gets dramatically overlooked. I just finished reading a book that's called Western Esotericism, A Guide for the Perplexed, which is basically an introductory textbook on just all – everything from magic to religionism to theosophy to alchemy and how they intersect over history. And largely this is the stuff that has just been left behind by institutions of religion and science, oddly enough. But it has this great graph where it's essentially like showing the differences between faith and Gnosticism and religion. And it's sort of based on is it communicable and is it uh i forget the word that they use particularly but it's like can you communicate what you've experienced and can you uh observe what you've experienced or i think is what the two i'll post it in the article on this episode or something like that but so with gnosticism in particular when people have these experiences that they can say i had this experience right what they can't do is cooperate it with another person and so this you have to go up this tree it's like i've had an experience

Tyler:
[2:15:10] I can tell you about my experience but i can't actually tell you i can't get another person to say that they've had the same experience up up the tree is how these things are formed so you go from

Tyler:
[2:15:22] I i experienced something no one else has experienced it too i've experienced something and other people have collaborated that story and then you get up to the top where it's like and lots of people have. And this is now an institution of belief. Forget the word religion. I mean, it doesn't really matter. But... As these things are sort of presented to individuals and then communicated to other people, and then lots of people grow to believe in them, that is how it seems people create ways of divining these things, ways of taking them apart and saying, this seems to work. Replicable is the word I was looking for. You can replicate it.

John:
[2:16:02] Replicable, yeah.

Tyler:
[2:16:03] That's exactly the same way that scientific experiments work. You have to have a person with a hypothesis test it get other people to test it see if they get the same results and it's just crazy to me that this stuff just gets thrown out having been as skeptical as you can get until i was maybe it also

John:
[2:16:22] Doesn't fuel the rat race now does it tyler everyone is freeing their minds and often these lovely la la lands and self-actualization and live in the ethereal well you're just not focused on your promotion and paying your credit card and that mortgage that the bank wants you to take now are you tyler.

Tyler:
[2:16:41] But this is what now can we this is what you know buddha teaches you not to do this is specifically what is like do not worry about things in this world they're not real they don't matter what matters is what's inside and your connection to consciousness to other people and the more people do that the less they give a shit about getting a raise or a promotion or a clout or ego and all these things that run this reality low frequency shit low frequency is a very good way of putting it and that's we could get into like swedenberg on that stuff too where he's talking about you know the entities from lower frequency uh dimensions versus higher frequency dimensions and how they are you've

John:
[2:17:27] Eclipsed me now in terms of references but yeah that sounds interesting.

Tyler:
[2:17:31] Emmanuel swedenberg wrote the the famous book heaven and hell i mean the rock band is named after that but more or less and it's the idea it's the quintessential i mean catholicism orthodoxy talk about this stuff but it's in every religion the idea that there are beings from a higher plane and beings from a lower plane warring for our souls and we live in uh In like Kabbalah, they refer to Earth as the kingdom, right? You live in, as you said, like this plane of reality where you can't see things that we don't have the perception to do so, but you also are maybe not aware of.

John:
[2:18:05] Unless you do DMT.

Tyler:
[2:18:07] Right. Or if you – I'm not dismissing those things. I have had my fair share of psychedelic experiences, trust me. I think I was more careful about talking about these things because previously I had been in the Air Force and all that stuff. And I was like, and I also think that people take you less seriously in a lot of cases. So I think it's, it's important to note. Yes, you can have these experiences with drugs. You can also have very profound experiences through meditation, through fasting, through trials, through anything. So it's not just isolated to, I guess my point is it's not just isolated to two drug experiences. That is a tool in the tool belt. Yeah.

John:
[2:18:50] I mean akin to that too so too is partying like I mean even if you're a big party or whatever like you know a lot of my gaming friends uh introduced me to raving partying if you will and it's like, if you're going out and getting giddy all the time on substance you got to reach a point asking like are you really like what what are you going out for again that we talked about um the athlete's journey of what serves me what doesn't serve me it's like are you going for the music are you in the connection with friends and going to dance or are you going for other reasons that you you know like substance wise right so always personally made it very important to be able to go out and party sober at times like if you feel like it's getting to a point where that's changing then party sober like remind yourself why you're there go out and dance with your friends dead sober and if you can't do that what's going on like what's really going on there and why are you there right.

Tyler:
[2:19:42] It's all part of it too i mean the experience every experience is you're taking in sensory input and you're making whatever that experience was for you and even there's all these famous like the star trek episode where there's a murder and then they have to like grab every

John:
[2:19:59] Person's which star trek this.

Tyler:
[2:20:01] Is next generation that i'm talking about

John:
[2:20:03] Oh the best star trek i'm a tng guy as well yeah.

Tyler:
[2:20:06] So there's a murder mystery where riker is framed for a murder right and then they they literally replay everyone's account in the holodeck of what happened and they all and this is in every you know this is in so many different tv shows and books and stuff but each person has a different experience of the same thing and then they have to isolate put them all together to figure out what's the truth you know what really happened here or the best approximation that we can get to

John:
[2:20:31] That's why i say tng was the greatest okay because and i hate this oh what's better star wars or star trek it's like it's come on you can't even ask that question like tng specifically, was so good at coalescing these like quintessential life lessons and these like teachings that just you would just not get at all like it had that edgy sci-fi stuff which we now call chat gpt which they were using on the damn ship all the time um but like all the different range of characters sure it could have been more genderized and more equal blah blah whatever you want to say but they did for the time it was created and they did a fantastic job of pulling that all together and then you got patrick stewart at the helm right with his grace and charm they.

Tyler:
[2:21:18] Also made a point to base the characters on youngian archetypes

John:
[2:21:23] So i didn't know that i.

Tyler:
[2:21:25] Don't know if it was a hundred percent on purpose but you can map them you know like you you have counselor troy is my favorite character we were talking about empathy earlier yeah they presented in the show like this is an alien superpower but there are so many human beings who are like no i have that same experience like i know dozens of people who have that same experience that's a human trait and each of the different races even like wharf like the even though they're presented as like this alien thing they're still innately human like this is a part of being human is to be the angry guy who wants to you know the adolescence of war and youth and all that sort of thing and then there's data who is borderline autistic if not exactly that where it's i don't have this emotional experience but i have such a grasp of data literally is his name i have a grasp of like an analysis also a human trait and they represent all these things you have so much of that in star trek um it's hard to explain to people who don't like the show i mean because they're put

John:
[2:22:28] Off by the sci-fi i mentioned my stepdad lenny kimmel getting me into star trek that was what he was watching at the time that was what i watched with him yeah man he would sit down on saturday mornings and turn that on and i would just soak it up with him that was part of how i started to enjoy it oh yeah they all fell off after that have you seen any of the new ones.

Tyler:
[2:22:47] I i actually really like deep space none i think in the third season it becomes really

John:
[2:22:52] Yes not awful definitely seasonal some some uh sets of episode way more compelling than others for sure yeah i'm not huge on that series as much as i was um as tng voyager i didn't mind as well like some of the characters were a little fucking annoying but um the store like the the stories and the story arcs and stuff were pretty cool like pretty pretty adventurous and compelling and the whole plot like they were way out there and like trying to make their way back and stuff pretty cool they.

Tyler:
[2:23:22] Definitely do some really cool things in both of those series but then i think i really they lose me at enterprise not because it's bad but just it's not the same thing um The more recent stuff, like I enjoyed Picard to a degree, but I can't keep up, honestly. I don't watch a lot of TV.

John:
[2:23:38] So there was, is that the new... The new, new one with the young, attractive black chick, that's the captain. She's a sub-actor. I've watched a season or two of that.

Tyler:
[2:23:51] There's Picard, there's Brave New World, and then there's the other kind of main series. I can't remember what it's called.

John:
[2:23:59] Is it Voyager? No, it's not.

Tyler:
[2:24:01] Some nerd is going to put it in the comments.

John:
[2:24:04] I know, we're going to get slapped for this one. Dork. I just felt it was a little forced. Everything just felt a little forced like it's it really lost that it's a lot of um i mean you get all the benefits of a tv show adopting you know hollywood high quality production so lighting cg costume everything you know great actors everything's on its a game which is great the production value but it's it's too overblown in the mindless action plus cg space and it abandons a lot of what we were talking about like the great example that you gave about that episode with the Riker like thoughtful some episodes are like that there's one sort of weird episode where everyone's singing but like it's it's kind of vapid it's very like one-dimensional right like, the example you gave and the stuff that I'm thinking of with TNG was very it had depth to it it had um you know those lessons had legs on them like it could cascade into other stuff and was very thought-provoking and inviting in that way and i just don't get that at all from any of the new star trek stuff at all it's totally different losing.

Tyler:
[2:25:14] Gene roddenberry as the chief visionary was a huge loss like that because i mean it's just his story he's telling here and he's gonna have a lot of impact on that so him passing away and not being involved in the later stuff is part of that um but i also think that it's it's more about they they sort of lose the focus on this is a story a human story Star Trek is literally the same show as Wagon Train but instead of the American frontier it's space that's the difference they have exactly the same elements of we're going on a journey we're finding different interesting things and we're asking questions about what do these experiences mean

John:
[2:25:56] We don't know what will await us.

Tyler:
[2:26:00] Super interesting stuff This has been super fun. I'm actually, this is one of the rare times when the guest has come to me. So for people out there, I'm a sucker for like a cold open. Like if you have the balls to just be like, I have a story to tell and I'd like to tell it. I'm into that shit.

John:
[2:26:16] Hey, I wouldn't be much of a PR guy if I didn't pitch myself successfully, right?

Tyler:
[2:26:21] Yeah, man. And that's, I think more people should learn from that.

John:
[2:26:25] Yeah. Appreciate your receptivity. um.

Tyler:
[2:26:28] Is there i guess like kind of closing questions here any life lessons that you would like for everyone to know

John:
[2:26:36] Look for a way to get out of that rat race if you have the opportunity to partake in life-changing experiences that seems scary daunting or with out of your reach trust yourself and go for it and if the extra icing on the cake is that you get out of the fucking rat race because at the end of the day if you happen to win you're still just a rat yeah.

Tyler:
[2:27:02] Man uh is there any person maybe a friend of yours or a colleague or even just someone you can think of who would make a great guest for this show

John:
[2:27:14] Oh definitely i would say probably daising you should chat with joe kim i've referenced him a couple times um he's going to be able to give you much more insight into what trying to live off of i i dabbled in i happened in you know i happened to have some raw talent and dabbled my pinky toe in the pro gaming circuit a little bit and squeaked out uh you know a wcg title just by switching games at the 11th hour but joe made a bonafide run at being a quake pro and uh had a much more sustained career in that in that respect um and uh he can probably tell you a lot more uh quake stories about traveling around to singapore and other places like that he full-on traveled for a couple years see.

Tyler:
[2:28:01] If you can get us in touch would be

John:
[2:28:02] Really absolutely i will and.

Tyler:
[2:28:04] Uh i guess last question one book everyone should read

John:
[2:28:10] Oh, well, one book everyone should read. Um, I'm going to say attached, which is all about the author is evading me in the moment, but, um, teaches you was sort of the tip of the iceberg for me was recommended by a friend, uh, a woman who I was dating, who giving me the signal that I had some inside work to do and was the tip of the iceberg of a whole bunch of insight and learning about um you know my pathology how i was brought up uh complex trauma and blah blah blah all kinds of stuff that i'm now super deep into and learning about and incredibly eye-opening incredibly introspective and yeah attached is a not too long book that covers it in a very sort of succinct um but direct way that's um it's sticky it's simple and it's straightforward and it's one that you can sort of remember and might help you grow into other areas about learning about yourself and your partners it's.

Tyler:
[2:29:10] Called uh attached the new science of adult attachment and how it can help you find and keep love by amir levine md and rachel sf

John:
[2:29:19] Heller into your relationships it will take you into your parental upbringings and it will maybe hopefully give you some insight about uh potential relationship in the future i'm.

Tyler:
[2:29:29] Gonna add this to my list

John:
[2:29:31] But the fantastic one.

Tyler:
[2:29:33] It's i know i said that was the last thing but i have to say a couple years ago uh same sort of cycle of me i was saying earlier like going through this sort of profound like is my is my life a lie like have i you know why have i done all this stuff and then one of my really good friends her name is vini so hey vini she was a trained psychologist and she had told me at one point i think you should just like she sent me an article like just tell me what your attachment style is oh there you go yeah and

John:
[2:30:02] Then that sent.

Tyler:
[2:30:04] Me on the same rabbit yeah exactly like you described it man there you go

John:
[2:30:08] Sometimes it's the uh that polite nudge of someone close to you or who knows you that is the pull of the thread that is in just the right amount or in the right direction that helps you.

Music:
[2:30:22] Music

Tyler:
[2:30:43] Thank you very much to John Dyer for coming on the show. Sharing the story is really, really incredible to actually hear a lot of that, man. We walk several parallel paths in this life, so I hope we can catch up again. Thank you to John of the Shred for our amazing theme song here at In the Keep. Thank you to our Patreon supporters, Shannon, Bridge, Michael, Frederick, Brad. You guys rule. And I want to give a special shout out to all of our folks who have signed up as free members.

Tyler:
[2:31:16] Frederico, Lil Ruff, Ralph, Jig, DJ, and Michael. Y'all will too. Thank you for tuning in. And, you know, sometimes I do drop stuff for the free tier members. And it's just good to know that you guys are getting the emails and whatnot. All support rules. The number one thing that you can do to support this show is to share with at least one other person. Episodes that you do enjoy. Which presumably is every episode, so you might as well go ahead and give them the whole show. Yeah, and I don't see why you couldn't also go ahead and rate the show five stars on whatever you're listening on. I've noticed it's actually kind of hard for Spotify, but, you know, it can be done. Click on those three dots and figure it out, if you don't mind. I love you. God love you. Till next time, stay in the keep.

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