This one's been sitting in the queue for a while, and I'm really glad I finally got to record it because Rob's story is genuinely unlike most of the ones I've told on this show.

Rob Gardner is a V/O Audio Director at DICE LA, and he got there by being in a band, doing QA for over a decade, almost not pursuing games as a career at all, and, his words, being way too protective of his evenings for way too long.

It's an honest, funny, and surprisingly moving conversation about what happens when your passion and your livelihood don't line up the way you expected them to, and how sometimes the skill set you built doing something else entirely turns out to be exactly what you needed.

Highlights:

• Rob's band got approached by EA to license a track before he'd ever worked in games — and they took almost nothing for it because they had no idea what they were doing
• He describes the transition from Vivendi's sink-or-swim QA floor to DICE LA as the moment he finally felt safe enough to actually grow
• The parallel between directing voice actors and playing in a band is genuinely insightful, and something I hadn't thought about before he said it
• His take on social anxiety as a drummer ("you can hide behind the kit") is one of my favourite moments of the whole series

Go give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy this one.

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