The Compund Censored YT clips channel uploaded an hour from Ryan Katsu Rivera's last show as Gavin's producer from Feb 2025 before he left to become 5th chair with Sam Hyde.
Ryan & Gavin reminisced about how he went from fan working in a sushi restaurant to Gavin stealing him as producer from Compound.
Some Compound related tidbits:
- Ryan was living in upstate NY two hours from NYC playing in a band and working in the kitchen at a sushi joint, listening to O&A at work. He talked about only discovering O&A about a month before Cumia was fired from Sirius.
- Ryan originally got their attention from doing impressions of Pat Dixon on the crime beat, hence his Twitter handle @ AsianPatDixon. He used to call in to Pat's show, then go on the Reddit with a sock account to try to convince other fans how awesome his call-in impressions were
- his in to an invitation to the Compound studios was running into E-roc in person
- the Compound studio was so small that one of the first times Ryan walked in, Cumia was sitting there by the doorframe in the lobby couch and Rivera was starstruck
- Ryan would spend his weekdays hanging out in the Compound studios from dawm until dusk. At the time, McInnes was on the Compound network with GOML doing a morning show. When Ryan first met Gavin in the lobby, McInnes told him he had to go take a shit.
- Rivera would hang around late night with Pat Dixon. Dixon would do late night skits that would not necessarily make it to air. Ryan, still living upstate and working at the sushi restaurant on weekends, would often stay so late with Pat that he'd miss the last train and would get stuck in the city. He burned through about 7k over a few months between commuting and hotel rooms just hanging out unemployed at the studio daily. Eventually his solution was to get a job at a NY hostel for free room & board, where he got his knife and bike stolen, sleeping 8 to a room.
- he hung around the Compound studio so long that they eventually trained his on the Tricaster and soundboard, especially late night with Pat Dixon. They also gave him access to editing software to experiment with doing graphics and bumpers.
- Gavin eventually poached Ryan from Compound when he was leaving for CRTV. Pat Dixon was mildly annoyed because he was using Rivera in a lot of his late night creative work. McInnes just mocked Dixon's extra work as unmonetizable and said he couldn't afford to keep Rivera.
- Apparently Gavin & Ryan were on the cusp of moving to Austin, TX when CRTV was acquired by The Blaze before McInnes was fired as part of the deal.