[laughs]

So I've had a long and storied background as a musician, yeah, with a jazz performance and education degree.

Went to Berklee for a year, and also did, like, a lot of touring, had one artist that I played with also win a couple of awards that were pretty significant in Germany.

And so, of course, coming into this moment that led me to pivot to sound design, yeah, a lot of just, like, sunk cost mentality has sort of built up to that point because despite all of the stuff I had been doing in music, yeah, like touring, running a little recording studio back in Germany, eventually moving to the US to live with my now wife and focusing more on production when I came there, yeah, I've just tried to make it work as a professional musician for the better part of 15 years or so.

And of course, like, I even was at a stage where I was full-time for a while before I came to the US, but then five years later in 2022, when, yeah, things never really went back to that stage of being able to, yeah, full-time just worry about making music and producing and mixing and all that stuff, there was just a definite point in time where both my wife and I were like, "Well, this isn't really working.

I can certainly keep trying," but I've also sort of run out of motivation for working with musicians to some extent because I've specifically dealt with a lot of very flaky artists, artists who I did stuff for unpaid basically as well, who then went on to other producers later when they moved to LA and then actually paid them and that sort of stuff.

And so, yeah, after a sort of stretch of that, being kind of demoralized about trying to work in music, it took a lot of overcoming of pride and, yeah, the whole, like, sunk cost thought to be like, "Okay, what could I do that is still creative, ideally something with audio, where there is actual jobs [laughs] and that sort of plays into, yeah, some of my other strengths and passions?" And that was sort of the point where I realized, wait a minute, pretty much since I was in elementary school, I've always wanted to be part of the video game development process.

[laughs]