A lot of times in life you'll find yourself in these places where you would expect the people with seniority or authority to have their shit together.

Pretty early on they had me cooking omelets and I had not been trained in food handling in any way.

This is like a big, in theory, finely tuned machine and they're just handing me a bucket full of egg-like material and telling me to make food for paying students.

And they're just trusting I won't kill them or myself in the process.

That's Kevin Sanzaki.

If you spent any decent amount of time on YouTube in the past decade,

chances are you've heard his work without realizing it.

Kevin is a sound designer, largely self-taught.

You gain a better understanding of what you're doing by not knowing what you're doing

for a long time, but you're kind of teaching yourself through your own mistakes.

If I sort of do it the wrong way myself, then I kind of figure it out, I feel like.

Like Kevin, before sound design was feasible as a means of living, I had my own unique variety

of day jobs, so everything I did

was largely self-taught. Sound and writing were my passions outside of work, and any free time

I had went into making what I loved. We both came up around the YouTube scene in the early

2000s, when it had just been purchased by Google. You know, right when we got into film school,

we were told that, you know, professional

film cameras were a quarter million dollars and then something came out at essentially

a tenth of that price point.

So it seemed like, you know, we were on the verge of this more democratizing, you know, a media

movement, which in hindsight is perhaps naive.

So while YouTube and the internet were still sort of a Wild West frontier, Kevin, having

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