JESSE CANNON: Turning Setbacks Into Opportunities, Non-Slimy Networking, and Producing Hit Podcasts

Speaker 1 (00:00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, and now your host, Eyal Levi. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's crazy to think that we're now on our fifth year, but it's true, and it's only because of you, the listeners, and if you'd like to see us stick around for another five years, there are a few simple things that you can do that would really, really help us out and I would be endlessly appreciative. Number one, share our episodes with your friends. If you get something out of these episodes, I'm sure they will too, so please share us with your friends. Number two, post our episodes on your Facebook and Instagram and tag me and our guests too. My Instagram is at al Levi urm audio, and let me just let you know that we love seeing ourselves tagged in these posts.

(00:00:55):

Who knows, we might even respond. And number three, leave us reviews and five stars please anywhere you can. We especially love iTunes reviews. Once again, I want to thank you all for the years and years of loyalty. I just want you to know that we will never, ever charge you for this podcast, and I will always work as hard as possible to improve the episodes in every single way possible. All I ask in return is a share host and a tag. Now, let's get on with it. Hello everyone. My guest today is Mr. Jesse Cannon, who is a name we all know and love in the URM community. He's been on the podcast several times, done fast Tracks for us, appeared at the summit multiple times. He's an accomplished engineer, producer, mixer, mastering engineer, author, podcaster, entrepreneur. He's done a lot of shit. Most recently has a podcast with the Daily Beast and just finished a stint doing a bunch of big podcasts for Atlantic Records. The guy doesn't stop and it's a really good friend of mine. Happy to either introduce you or reintroduce you to Jesse Cannon. Here it goes. Hi Jesse. Welcome back.

Speaker 2 (00:02:10):

So psyched to do this.

Speaker 1 (00:02:12):

Yeah, I'm glad we're doing it. I know we were scheduled for a few weeks ago, I just couldn't do it.

Speaker 2 (00:02:17):

Yeah, well, I'm glad you're feeling better.

Speaker 1 (00:02:18):

Yeah, I'm feeling a lot better. Not a hundred percent out of the woods, but let's say that I can see the light at the end of the trees starting to filter through

Speaker 2 (00:02:31):

When we were talking about this. I know I said to you, but it's a thing I don't think enough people hear, and I think it's good career advice too, which is that you're usually going up or down and it's way harder to start going up when you're going down, but once you're going up, it does tend to be easier, and when you're going down, boy is it easy to keep going down.

Speaker 1 (00:02:50):

Yeah, basically when I was talking, when I canceled the podcast, things were getting worse and worse and worse I guess for people listening. I got pretty severe gastritis a couple months ago and it started ruining my life to where I couldn't focus on anything just because just pain all day every day. So yeah, when you and I couldn't do the podcast, that was kind of like at the height of it, but now I'm three weeks into an eight week medicine regimen and feeling better.

Speaker 2 (00:03:23):

I'm so glad to hear that I have been there with horrible stomach problems.

Speaker 1 (00:03:27):

Yeah, it's one of those things when the whole gut health thing

Speaker 2 (00:03:32):

Came

Speaker 1 (00:03:32):

Out, it kind of annoyed me because everyone was talking about it, but I guess they're right.

Speaker 2 (00:03:37):

Isn't that the cycle though, that so many times I have this experience now that I've been trying to train my brain to not get repulsed by really left wing hippie things because I tend to find that they tend to be right if I just wait a little time, whereas as every time there's a thing that's some new thing, I'm like, oh, come on. Really we're doing this. Your is a great example, kale. Now all I want is kale. All I want is kale. But when that shit first happened in the ad campaigns and all that no interest,

Speaker 1 (00:04:11):

That's actually a really great point. It's phenomenal for your health.

Speaker 2 (00:04:15):

Yes,

Speaker 1 (00:04:16):

You really should eat it,

Speaker 2 (00:04:17):

But the marketing,

Speaker 1 (00:04:18):

No, the marketing made me want to burn it.

Speaker 2 (00:04:23):

Yes, there we go.

Speaker 1 (00:04:24):

Burn the kale and any place that sold it.

Speaker 2 (00:04:26):

Yeah. Then it was Usai E Bowls, all the things. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:04:31):

Gut health is definitely up there as one of those things, but I guess I didn't realize that it was a real thing until about two months ago.

Speaker 2 (00:04:41):

I mean, I spend $200 a month on it because my stomach's terrible, and so what do you get? I get this thing called Biome, which is the strongest probiotic you can buy. It's what they use to heal Crohn's disease in colitis, and then I drink non-sugar drinkable yogurt in a smoothie with that thing we were messaging about the Athletic Greens versus the Amazing Greens. Yes.

Speaker 1 (00:05:07):

So

Speaker 2 (00:05:07):

I didn't tell you this. I switched for the Amazing Greens to the athletic Greens and then back, and I didn't notice a difference, so I'm sticking with the one that's half the price.

Speaker 1 (00:05:15):

Okay, fair enough. I started taking a probiotic called Florist Store

Speaker 3 (00:05:22):

On

Speaker 1 (00:05:22):

The recommendation of my mom. She said that it helped my grandmother a lot and my grandmother had the true celiac disease, not that gluten intolerant shit that 99% of people lie about. She had the actual disease and her stomach was a complete and total utter mess, and Florist store helped give her a decent quality of life in those final years. So I was like, Hmm, I'll try that too. Along with the medication. And actually ever since I started taking the Floris store, I don't know if it's just coincidental that I started taking it maybe around the time that the medication started working or if it's related to it, but I definitely feel better ever since taking the Floris store.

Speaker 2 (00:06:08):

To your point, obviously I don't want to turn this into a Joe Rogan Health podcast, but the Celiac thing, the reason the misdiagnosis happens is that people are experiencing it, but they don't realize it's candida poisoning, not celiac disease. And what I have is candida poisoning, which is that you've just had too much yeast in your body, but if you get rid of it and cut back on it, you'll eventually be fine. Whereas Celiac is permanent.

Speaker 1 (00:06:33):

How did you discover the difference?

Speaker 2 (00:06:35):

I have an amazing, amazing doctor because I live in the most hipster part of Brooklyn, the most hipster part of the world, and she's a hipster mecca and she's like an all vegan holistic with also real medicine. So she'll prescribe you things and she'll also tell you holistic things. She's just generally very, very smart, and I'm lucky enough to have anything else I think the most. To tie it back to audio, the funniest thing I think that people underestimate in this world, and I'll call this hipster philosophy, is that the sources of your information are the most important thing, not just getting information. I think the difference between who you listen to on a subject and how deep you dig to find that, because digging deep and then getting to Alex Jones and then you have bad information, and then there's digging deep and actually finding, let's call it Adam Curtis, who's the smartest information in the world, and knowing which information to take in and finding the right sources of information is probably one of those skills that I even would say it is. If we want to take it to record production, I'll fire some shots. Mixer man books versus reading, mixing with Your Mind. One of them is the kind of just reading a tabloid, whereas one of them is Galaxy Brain Intelligence.

Speaker 1 (00:08:05):

Not to brag, but I guess it's going to come off as one learning from some people that have been on URM versus random YouTube channels.

Speaker 2 (00:08:15):

Oh, yes, yes. Funny thing is that is as somebody who takes all those things, I find a subscription to pretty much all of them. It is the truth that I get way more out of a fast track than I get out of anything. I mean shots fired, pure mix is pure garbage. Alright, you said it not me.

Speaker 3 (00:08:35):

Yes,

Speaker 2 (00:08:35):

Yes, I said it. I said it as somebody whose year long subscription last that they just lapsed that they couldn't get out. I couldn't find a single thing in that year that gave me out of 20 hours of information that gave me what I get in five minutes of a fast track usually from you guys.

Speaker 1 (00:08:52):

Well, I'm not going to say I disagree, but I honestly have never been on their site, so I'm going to remain neutral in this one.

Speaker 2 (00:09:01):

Yes,

Speaker 1 (00:09:01):

I'll be Switzerland.

Speaker 2 (00:09:03):

Let me do the damage as a YouTuber of trashing the YouTubers.

Speaker 1 (00:09:07):

Yeah, but you're not a random YouTuber.

Speaker 2 (00:09:09):

Yeah, I mean, but it is funny. Am I not a random YouTuber when I have so many less subscriptions than some of the people who have never built a fad base and are just pedaling information they read at a Russell Brunson class or something and third had diluting it really down to terrible things.

Speaker 1 (00:09:29):

Yeah, that's the big problem I think with learning online in general is that not every place can claim their actual expertise. So on the topic of you don't have as many views, I mean followers as certain other people. Well, I also know that you didn't start taking your YouTube seriously until only a few months ago.

Speaker 2 (00:09:50):

Yes,

Speaker 1 (00:09:51):

I could say the same thing about my Instagram. I only started taking it seriously a few months ago, so it's just about going to pass through 10,000 followers now. It's one of those things where if I had taken it seriously five years ago, it would be way bigger,

Speaker 2 (00:10:04):

But

Speaker 1 (00:10:04):

That doesn't change, I guess level of quality that I bring to the things I do. And I think that if you had started your YouTube channel two years ago, three years ago, you'd have a lot more followers. I don't think your number of followers in your case has anything to do with your level of legitimacy. I think also that brings me to the point that when it comes to online learning and finding sources, whether it is finding the right doctor or who to listen to or whatever, the more credible, the better, obviously. And the problem these days is that everybody has an equal voice online. It's not that I'm saying that. That can sound kind of weird.

Speaker 2 (00:10:47):

No, it's dead on though.

Speaker 1 (00:10:49):

I don't think that there should be any inequality when it comes to people's ability to speak, but the platforms make it a level playing field to where somebody with no credibility or experience in something can be just as loud as a true expert and to people who are first coming in and uninitiated who don't know how to spot the difference. That can be very misleading and it can be harmful, I think. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:11:19):

Much similar to a conversation you and I were having this morning on text where we were talking about something very different,

Speaker 1 (00:11:24):

Though we won't go there.

Speaker 2 (00:11:26):

Yes, we're not going there. But what I would say is that one of the biggest problems we have now is that because everybody's voice is equal, which is a good thing, that's great, but then the big problem we have though is that figuring out, and a lot of people are really pissed off about that pandemic thing that it got so many views so fast when it's just nothing but lies. And it's not even debatable truth, it's they full on fabricated lies and the fact that that democratization of information has gotten a thing, and I am convinced that is going to be the great thing that we have to level with society right now is how we hand out authority is probably going to be the biggest challenge of the five years. And if we really want, I don't obviously want to get down this, but I think that even there is a weird thing of that Black Lives Matter, which we obviously don't need to go down the pike of, but is about how you handle authority. We're saying that the police have had too much authority and on the internet, most of the problems are Mark Zuckerberg isn't policing it enough. This has given too much authority. Why are we laying this? Every issue is how much authority we're delving out, and people don't see that on a macro level that that's really what most of the arguments are about these days is that there's too much power in certain places,

Speaker 1 (00:12:41):

Too much power, but then also certain people are worried that not enough in other cases. So finding the exact right balance, it's like a juggling act. And I think also the problem is that since we're in a new age, not kind of, we are in a new age, there's new parameters, new rules, nobody really knows what the right appropriate balance is for power and authority, credibility, all those things. We're kind of learning as we go, and so there's going to be a lot of missteps. But that said, I do want to put this out there. I feel like anytime that there's an advancement in technology that helps evolve society or whatever, there's going to be unintended consequences and there's going to be drawbacks. Nothing's perfect. And so I've seen a lot of people who hate social media, they hate the internet because of all those bad things that we just talked about. The inability to always know if you're looking at the truth, these weird power vacuums that and power plays that take place and giving idiots an equal voice with smart people, that kind of stuff. I get it, but anytime you have an advancement, there's going to be drawbacks and then as a society, it's our job to then figure out those kinks and fix it.

(00:14:04):

If you want to take it back to audio, same thing as when digital came around.

Speaker 2 (00:14:08):

Oh yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:14:09):

It kind of sounded like poop at first. I think some people agreed this is the evolution of things. It's obviously going to go in this direction, we should learn it, but there were lots of unintended consequences in terms of quality loss at first, which I think have now been pretty much solved.

Speaker 2 (00:14:26):

I agree. They've definitely been

Speaker 1 (00:14:27):

Solved. Yeah, they've been solved, and so as soon as something new comes along, you're going to get the good and the bad. It's hard I think for people to not completely dismiss the evolution just because they don't like the downsides

Speaker 2 (00:14:43):

And to take it to another parallel in music, I think one of the most underused things right now is, so 10 years ago when we got the tune cores and everybody being able to upload to streaming, and we were really seeing the advent of all music going digital stream instead of digital download, we started to see a real big shift in power for a while where all of a sudden the indie artists really had a chance, and I'm convinced that we're now in a place where it's gotten way harder again because the majors and big indies with these fucking playlists having so much power have now made it so it's so much harder for smaller voices because they've cut so many backroom deals to give them advantages. The biggest one I always talk about is that if you're not on one of the big indie distributors or a major label, you're never getting put on Spotify radio when a song stops playing and your chances, while you do have chances of getting on these curated Spotify playlists, your chances are one in hundreds of thousands compared to if you're on one of the better distributors since they're all buying the curator's drinks and doing favors for 'em.

(00:15:59):

And I know this because my girlfriend's job and I was working on a major label until three months ago. I saw it, and the inequality is back and worse than ever and it's really, really disheartening and I hope part of what we were talking about this morning was like when something evolves, there's eventually we see the injustice and we course correct. I hope that's what's coming soon, is that we start to bring back the opportunity of 10 years ago that DIY artists had, because I think it's greatly diminished in the last, let's call it two to three years.

Speaker 1 (00:16:31):

Here's the drawback, and I agree with you, but there is a drawback. If I think back to 10 years ago, 10 years ago, it was so free for all Wild Wild West and also directionless, rudderless that the industry started signing way too many bands and it created a flood of shitty bands, basically local bands with record deals. This became a thing, and I know it because I toured with these bands. I had them in the studio. I remember having fights with a and r guys, why did you send me this band? Why did you sign them? What are you thinking? Are you trying to sink the ship? These bands should not have a record deal. I think too many people were getting opportunities and it was degrading the quality of everything. This is a great point. There's a balance you got to strike there to where you're not just letting everything through the gate and giving every single thing an equal shot musically because you end up in situations like 10 years ago where sales are dropping. You don't know if the industry is going to survive. And I think that a lot of it did have to do not just with the fact that the major labels put off evolving technologically. I think it had to do also with the quality of the music that was coming out. Overall, I think it was turning people off. I don't think that the non-musician really thought about it so much the way that I would, well,

Speaker 2 (00:18:03):

They couldn't see it the way we see it,

Speaker 1 (00:18:04):

But the fact is they were not being drawn to the music the way that they once were. I would say that nowadays though, it seems like they're being drawn back to the music. And what's interesting is the gatekeepers are stronger, much like they were back before the internet. It's like a parallel system to how it used to be. It used to be almost impossible to get a record deal. Now you're saying it's almost impossible to get on one of these playlists. There's a lot of parallels there, but I think music's been getting better again,

Speaker 3 (00:18:33):

And

Speaker 1 (00:18:33):

A lot of people think back to the nineties or pre-internet as also better ages for the art. So where's the balance?

Speaker 2 (00:18:42):

I think it's interesting because a common discussion now is that there's only two ways you're really getting signed these days to a bigger label, which is that they check their analytics software. And one of the things many musicians don't even realize is that there's now literally software that, so there's all these things like a muse that will upload your music for free and people are like, wow, why do they do that? It's like, well, it's the major ladies. Pay them to be able to see who's trending in those things. So they get access to them first. And I think particular that one's universal, if I remember correctly, it's called Muse a Muse a muse io io. Okay. But the point being, labels only now sign somebody when they get on a big management company that they already work with and they hear from them. They're like, okay, this team is good.

(00:19:32):

So they're going to bring this person up, or they see that they're trending through that thing and most of the time it's seeing that they're trending from a thing or that they've just seen huge numbers from an artist that has not been built up yet. So in one way, that's great democratization because we're seeing genuinely, it's not like when CTOs and Daphne loves Derby, notoriously confess to that, they drove up pure volume streams to get signed. And while I'll call Dene Loves Derby a terrible band, and everybody kind of used this as the example of people getting fooled because then they sold nothing and people didn't like it. But Dos obviously was just a good, smart, savvy band. But so what I like to talk about is the era you were talking about was this era of exploits. And so same thing with what's happening with YouTube right now is these idiots who just learn some Russell Brunson techniques go huge up the YouTube thing, even though they are literally giving bad and false information left, but they've learned how to feed an algorithm properly, and that exploit was when you could figure out how to build bots to drive up MySpace or pure volume streams years ago, and then some dumbass indie label will just be like, well, the streams go Burr and I need to sign.

(00:20:47):

And we got stuck with all these bands that you and I were getting in the studio that were like, cool, these people are incompetent idiots. And then those records would go, even though we'd work on them forever, you, I mean you can polish a turd in some extent, but you can't polish it to this level that deterred stumped,

Speaker 1 (00:21:05):

That turd better have some fiber in it to begin with.

Speaker 2 (00:21:09):

And that is the thing is that I think we've gotten rid of a lot of that in music, but I guarantee you that at some point this analytic thing is going to take it down a very, very bad hole because I've convinced society doesn't know how to take its medicine, so it's going to just go someplace that's very, very bad in a few years. But right now I like where it's at.

Speaker 1 (00:21:31):

Society does not know how to take its own medicine. But I do think I've said this before and I really do believe that we're in the first quarter of a very good musical time period. I agree as far as good music goes and people appreciating it, I think I started noticing it about three years ago. I think it's going to last a little while and then of course we'll go back to dark days for a little while, but I do think that we're in the beginning of a very good time period.

Speaker 2 (00:22:03):

I almost made a video on it the other day from my channel that I think even there's an interesting thing of that COVID has brought on a greater musical connection that I'm seeing on the internet in that, so there's this Robert Smith thing from when he made disintegration, so if people don't know the Cures record disintegration, it's notoriously one of the most overly emotional records of the last 40 years, sold millions of copies.

Speaker 1 (00:22:30):

Yeah, I've heard of them. They won some Battle of the Bands, right?

Speaker 2 (00:22:33):

Yes. They

Speaker 1 (00:22:34):

Won the Battle for Guitar Center something.

Speaker 2 (00:22:37):

So when I was in the studio with them doing the self-titled record with Ross Robinson, Robert told me an interesting thing that what he did on that record was he did not communicate with anybody during the time of the recording. He could say past the Salt, but he would actually not say how he was feeling about anything and express himself anyway, so he would only be expressing it through that. I think the seclusion of this time is making a lot of people feel music more because I'm just seeing so much more enthusiasm towards it, again, because we're not getting our emotional needs met. But what I also think will be interesting is since all these extroverted musicians are now no longer getting their extroversion fed, I'm curious to see if it really brings around great art and the only evidence I've seen of it so far is you watch the reaction to the latest Charlie XCX record, which she made all in quarantine, and this is obviously an extrovert person and it's like wildly heralded as this record of amazing emotional outpouring, and I will be very curious to see if this becomes a trend that happens from this time.

Speaker 1 (00:23:45):

I think it will. So interesting thing I've noticed about artists these days, so I've been doing a lot of podcasting and been talking to lots of people I know who are artists just catching up. One of the cool things about the Pandemic has been the ability to catch up with old friends, but

(00:24:03):

I'm noticing there's two camps. One camp sees it the way I do, as long as you stay alive, it's a massive opportunity and you're never going to get a chance like this again in your life to have this kind of time and fucking use it and there's so much darkness in the world, just what a great source of artistic fuel or creative fuel. There's that type and they're being super prolific and I think that we're going to be listening to their music for years to come. I think a lot of it isn't going to get released right now because of just limitations, but I think over the next two, three years, you're going to see a lot of the pandemic music come out and some of it is going to be fucking incredible for those same kinds of reasons, just like bottled up emotions mixed with very dark times for great music. However, there is the other side which has bummed me out. I'm talking to musicians that I know who are very hard workers, who really do have their shit together, but who are just being total.

Speaker 3 (00:25:13):

And

Speaker 1 (00:25:13):

So they're not motivated to write, they're not motivated to do anything. They don't see the light at the end of the tunnel and they're afraid that even when touring does resume that it's going to be like those social distance shows and the world's going to end and it's all going to be over and they basically have decided that it's over before it's actually over and they're just kind of stuck in their tracks. That's unfortunate, but I guess maybe that's the weak being weeded out or something. I don't want to think of them that way, but it is their choice to respond how they want to respond. And if you want to turn this into the end of the world, you can convince yourself of that for sure. If you want to see this as a great opportunity, you can also convince yourself of that for sure. Both are totally possible and it's just so interesting seeing who's doing which and then seeing what the results are.

Speaker 2 (00:26:07):

Yeah, this is yet again, kind of back to what we were saying with the good information versus bad information. There's a passage in my Get more fans book about a thing that actually happened, which was back in, I'm going to say it's 2010, but don't quote me on that. When album leaks were the biggest problem in the world of music, the band I managed band Overboard, we had the record that cemented that band as being a huge band after all this work we did for years of working on them, it leaked, but what we did was is we put it up on Bandcamp immediately and it ended up being a huge opportunity. We got covered in Time Magazine and things like that for it, and it ended up being a really big moment and it's been the same thing with this is that a lot of people are seeing this as an opportunity.

(00:26:54):

It's like even watching some of the album rollouts, my favorite band in the world in 1975, they had an entirely different album rollout and instead they made a totally genius different album rollout that reflected these times in all their strong suits and that is what you have to do. And when we just talked about what we were going to talk about, and this is like I had with some luck and interesting thing with it too of that when this hit, I had been working at Atlantic Records for two and a half years and they were like, okay, this podcasting thing you're doing that's

Speaker 1 (00:27:31):

On hold, can you let people know a little bit more about that just so they understand what a punch to the gut that was? Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:27:38):

I mean, so if you think of it this way, for two and a half years I've been at Atlantic doing five different podcasts series, some constant ones and basically a good amount of not only my income, my time is on making these audio documentaries around their artists and I had my own series inside the album and another one called Landed. And all of a sudden, literally on a moment's notice that's gone, and whether this is for financial security or just creative security, that's gone. So what I had to do then is I couldn't sit there and cry. So I've had a thing all my life that I've known and I've told every musician to also do this, which is that keep a spreadsheet. It's very simple to do is just devote some time once a month to look back and write down everybody who's a fan of you or has been interested in anything you've done and just keep track of it. So I started going through and just telling everybody I know, who knows? I do great work.

Speaker 1 (00:28:39):

Wait, you mean fan as in contacts and friends?

Speaker 2 (00:28:43):

Yeah, just anybody who's ever been like, Hey, I really like your work. Wow, you're doing great things. Or people who've liked to hire me repeatedly. I just basically, I write down some fast notes as I do the thing of, Hey, this person reached out. Because what's a funny thing too is people are like, oh, should I just do this with my fans too? It's like I've even had a lot of people who are just the sound man at the local place who are like, I love your records, and three years later they're an a and r person because that's usually the trajectory. So everybody that I've liked, I've made a connection with. I'm not saying I'm doing this in the most networky skeezy thing. It's like these are people literally if I ran into 'em at a show, I'd talk with them for 30 minutes probably, but I've made a lot of those as I've been doing this for 27 years, but particularly in my podcast world is like I am at that phase in my life where I don't want to produce 900 bands a year.

(00:29:36):

I'd rather produce just the nine I care about. So while I mix and master tons and tons of records, still the level of drain I get from putting my head in a production is just too much for where I am, but what I do is podcasts to do a lot of them. So I wanted to pick up more work with that, and I texted friends and within three days I got this job at the Daily Beast Newsweek, which is one of the biggest news publications if people aren't familiar, and I now produce a podcast that in our first week we went top three of all podcasts, which is 1,100,000 podcasts. We were number three, and now we're literally in the top 50 every, we released two a week and we're always in the top 50. That's crazy. But that was from a practice, and to tell you even more how hilarious it is of the practices is it turns out the head editor of Newsweek.

(00:30:30):

So when I did the interview for this job after I was recommended for it, the head editor who does all the hiring, I recorded a record with him in 1999, so the interview was three minutes after I was referred to him by somebody who didn't even know that. And that's the music world is that people go on to do crazy things after they're done with this and if you are doing great work and doing things, this guy knew I was a hard worker. I slaved for him in his band in 1999. Well 21 years later it worked out for me.

Speaker 1 (00:30:59):

Yeah, key thing you said was that it's not networking in a skeezy way because that's kind of the perfect example of what I call non-specific networking versus targeted networking. And I think that non-specific is the best way to go where it's just open-ended and there's no goal in mind. You just make friends with somebody, you just make them happy in whatever capacity you can and you let it be. And if you do that enough, you're going to be very surprised by how much fruit those seeds end up bearing basically.

Speaker 2 (00:31:36):

And I think some of it is also a bad attitude a lot of people in our world get into, which is that you're so busy you can't do this. I even think about our friendship, which is hilarious, is we both just happened to be teaching for Creative Live and then we messaged at some point and then over the years we grew to be friends who text all the time, but I don't think either of us were thinking that consciously. It's like, oh, this is a smart person, I should keep talking to them and then it grows into something bigger.

Speaker 1 (00:32:03):

No, it's just organic. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:32:05):

Sure. There's times that I'm like, yes, I really want to nurture this relationship because it's somebody I respect. Sure. Occasionally a musician who I actually really respect reaches out to me and I'm like, alright, I'm going to put a little bit more effort on this one, but that is naturally how to do it and I try to just with everybody as much time as I can give it, and I just find the dumb ways to give time. Oftentimes before we talked, I walked and got a coffee to get out and get some air since it's quarantine and I live in hell, hell being New York City, and I messaged eight different people who just asked me dumb questions about whether it's a synthesizer in my video onto, what do you call it? Just like a general, which city should I move to if I want to be a pop songwriter, it takes me 10 seconds and I know those relationships end up being years from now. I've had it so many times those people write me and they're like, Hey, I'm now a and r at this. I'd love for you to work on this. So I make sure I always take it seriously to just do the very little work it takes to maintain relationships. Usually one fulfilling and then two works out in my favor over the years.

Speaker 1 (00:33:13):

Interestingly enough, my friendship with Finn developed the exact same way we both used to write for metal sucks. I just messaged him one day. I liked his writing, it's great, but I felt like something was incomplete and something he said, and I wasn't being an asshole about it, but I just felt like starting a conversation and it just organically grew to this

Speaker 2 (00:33:40):

Very similar with Finn and I too.

Speaker 1 (00:33:41):

How did you guys meet?

Speaker 2 (00:33:42):

Well, the funny thing is Finn and I met when we were 18.

Speaker 1 (00:33:47):

Okay, I thought so.

Speaker 2 (00:33:48):

He was pen pals with my best friend, but I didn't remember this and what I did another smart tactic for people. So every time I learn of one of my competitors in my, let's call it music promotion sphere of talking about that, I put Google alerts and Talkwalker alerts on their names and then I see everybody who covers them and I'm like, all right, well if I'm better than them, they should want to cover me too. So I have all of them on a thing. And Finn came up as having done a podcast with somebody I thought really sucked at talking about music promotion. So I just write 'em not remembering that we've met before. I was like, the names kind of sounds familiar, but just being like, Hey, I do this too. I see you're kind of in this world. And then him and I figured out after a while that we already knew each other. So it was just literally an email. And then after that, obviously we've been working together and been very good friends ever since. Let's talk

Speaker 1 (00:34:49):

About those Google alerts.

Speaker 2 (00:34:51):

Yes,

Speaker 1 (00:34:51):

Man, you've always got the best tactics.

Speaker 2 (00:34:55):

This is one that I never get. Why? Because I've been doing it for 10 years, but it's still not a popular thing. But yeah, what I tell every musician or everybody I was telling you to do this a month or two ago, well literally I was doing what I was talking about, which is just walking down the street and texting you.

Speaker 1 (00:35:12):

I actually did start doing it.

Speaker 2 (00:35:13):

You enter in every band or person who's like you, even your genre name into a Google or sometimes you might even want to set up a separate email on Gmail for this, and then you just open it up and see who's talking about it. Through doing this, I have found message boards where I've made tons of friends that I didn't know existed. I've found so many different things and so much of where my career is finding the other, actually the video I made on my YouTube channel is I call it how you find Community and Taste Makers because what you're really doing is you're finding the other people who are similar to you that you're going to build relationships with over time. And the Finn thing is the ultimate example is we talked about it and then it turned out he needed teachers through Creative Life, which is how I then met you and obviously I've done stuff for URM, Finn and I have done a bunch. We both did stuff for Creative Live and that's how I found my community. And part of my community is also I've gotten a lot out of being in the URM message boards. I've learned a ton there. I mean, I'd be a lot richer if I didn't read that stupid URM Plugin Deals message board, but that's a different story. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:36:28):

That's just a ploy to keep everybody down,

Speaker 2 (00:36:32):

Keep everybody's wallet trade.

Speaker 1 (00:36:34):

That's just an authority tactic. Nice. Actually, the Plugin Deals group is interesting. We take no part in it, which sometimes burns my ass a little bit. I know that we're keeping the lights on for some people. You

Speaker 2 (00:36:48):

Definitely are.

Speaker 1 (00:36:49):

For people who don't know, URMs got a bunch of Facebook communities a lot like over 70, but one of them is specifically for ridiculous deals that people find on plugins. They just post them there and then it becomes a feeding frenzy. It sure does. Basically. So a couple years ago you kind of had a similar situation to the Atlantic thing where you had a client that generated about 25% of your income and they closed out the project. Did you react similarly like can't cry, got to make this into an opportunity or did you want to die for a couple of days?

Speaker 2 (00:37:27):

Let's say with that one, that one was a little bit more deer in headlights that this is somebody I've been working with for 19 years now and that was like three years ago. So yeah, I did basically the same thing is that if you think of it this way, this person booked my studio for 20 hours a week, pretty usually for about five years to do various different projects. They have a record label, but they produce a lot of things, but they're not, there were those people that they need an engineer, they don't get the gear. So I would do that a lot of the time after I'd do a 10 hour session with the band or I'd be mixing and mastering all day, I would then do a session at night with them. So it was like a real significant chunk of change going.

(00:38:11):

So not only did I do the same networking thing where I just let people know I was more free to do things and I got lots of cool jobs from that. I even went around and started making flyers around town, which I hadn't done in 16 years and that didn't get me the best business. But the thing I always tell everybody that's interesting about if you make a compelling flyer or you do any of that, if you keep that up and it's a lot of work, I probably put 20, 25 hours, but I kind of joke since in New York, what is putting up fires? It's walking from bar to bar. So I get a drink, I walk, it's nice out. I put up another one. It's not the cruelest work I've ever done or just similar to what some of my nightlife is sometimes. And then I got, let's call it, I got 25 clients from that.

(00:38:59):

23 of them were awful. Even some of them I shut down and said, I'm not working with this person. I'm just telling 'em the studios. But the two I got from that brought back pretty much all of that business and are still people who generate me a lot of money. So I think there's just that thing of the way we generated this conversation is like life's going to hand you lemons. You got to make the lemonade and you got to figure out something. And usually that's something the hardest part is looking in the eye that it's going to be a lot more work when you already feel pretty busy. The reason I didn't start my YouTube channel two years ago, I now wish I did, is that I'd always go, oh my God, there's going to be so much more work every single week. And it's true. There's no week. I don't spend 10 hours on my YouTube channel and I don't really particularly have 10 hours to give to anything. I've just had to get better and better at giving things to my assistants and getting more efficient at things like that. I can't bounce a master unless I'm going to do a phone call or go for a walk or something,

Speaker 1 (00:40:01):

But you've got the confidence that the time invested will be worth it. Not

Speaker 2 (00:40:06):

Even confidence. I mean, I just have evidence all throughout my life that I know you know how to do it. There's a thing you and I have talked about before, which is there's reactivity and proactivity and there's also outreach that one, you have to be doing things that if we're going to talk about record producers, it's like learning a new skill. My old practice was when I was starting out was I had to spend 15 minutes or I couldn't leave work for the day experimenting on something, so I'd have to work that in at some point. My other old tactic was back when this was more of an essential thing, was that I would read, I mean I've read the Pro Tools manual seven times in my life, but I used to make it that I couldn't go out and do anything I enjoyed unless I had read 30 pages of it a week and understood those 30 pages, not just sped read them because that was the proactive at getting skills where what I realized back in the day and Pro Tools was much different in 1999 is that what I got a lot of my jobs from was that everybody would be like, wow, he can do the thing that I've been asking engineers to do and they can't do it.

(00:41:17):

When I was doing drum edits, no one knew how to do drum edits. Steve Evetts was the only other person I knew who knew how to do drum edits at that time. And literally when I say this, I knew I probably had 30, 40 engineer friends and no one knew how to do it. And while that sounds dumb in 2020, that was a real thing. I mean, the story I love to tell too is that when Meddy came out, you couldn't find one person on the gear sluts message board who knew how to use it for an entire year. And I finally figured it out and then I had to teach everyone I knew how to use it, which would take three to five hours because that program was so badly designed at first.

Speaker 1 (00:41:56):

It's interesting that you say evidence. I share your thought on that. I feel like if what I do now were to somehow implode URM, riff hard, all that shit just went away. I know I could do something big within a year or two just because I have so much evidence in front of me that I've been able to do things over and over again and I know how to do it. It's not a wishful thinking thing. I know how to lay it out and make it happen. And it's important to look for the evidence of what you're able to do so that when you do enter dark times, you can just look at that. You can look at, I call it proof sometimes, but you just look at the proof or the evidence and that right there helps get you through without letting you resort to emotions or something that could be negative or scary or demotivating, I think.

Speaker 2 (00:42:58):

Yeah. Well, to even talk about more about the evidence, and here's an interesting, aside from what happened during COVID with losing that job, some people would be like, oh, well you got lucky and you got that job. The funny thing is, I actually got another one of my dream jobs during this and I had to say no to it. There's this amazing podcaster where I really respect who needed a new producer, and I wrote them with my resume. They called me in two minutes and they're like, okay, we want you. And I'm like, okay, what's the time look like? And they're like, we need this many hours. We need you to be flexible. And I'm like, this other gig I got is better. I can't take this. And that was literally also one of those things where I had texted somebody that I'm now free and they said, Hey, did you see this?

(00:43:44):

And I could have had that job too. And also aside from this, while I'm doing all this, I should also say it's like I also just started a podcast in live streaming studio in Times Square, which we can't technically use right now, which was a little bit of bad luck, but it's another one of those opportunities that happened because I was very gracious with giving advice to people. And the way I got that opportunity was like for example, this podcast network would call me and be like, do you know stuff about Paton pages? I'm like, sure, I'll take 30 minutes to talk to you about that. Because I knew one, it's a good exercise and two good people, I want the same done for me. And then I got this amazing opportunity with that.

Speaker 1 (00:44:27):

It's amazing what happens when you give of yourself to enough people for long enough. I don't believe in karma or anything like that, but it does end up coming back mainly because people have a good opinion of you about something else you said that I wanted to echo about learning melodi or how to edit drums before anybody else. One thing that Finn and I always talk about, one of our operating principles at URM is do what the other guys.

Speaker 2 (00:44:57):

Yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:44:57):

That's totally it. So we try to imagine what it's like for somebody else doing a similar sort of company and we ask ourselves, would they do this thing that we're doing that's really, really hard? Like say it's a project that's going to take eight months that we need to hire outside contractors for that's very expensive and a lot of shit work, a lot of data entry, a lot of it's not fun, but it's going to change something about our bottom line or make the product way, way better. But would most people tap out within two weeks or three weeks or would they go the full six months like us? And if we can confidently say that actually most people would tap out, we can't imagine certain people actually going through with this, then we're all in.

Speaker 2 (00:45:46):

I think that's pretty smart.

Speaker 1 (00:45:47):

That's a guide for us.

Speaker 2 (00:45:49):

I think there is that interesting thing, and this gets back to that proactive reactive thing of learning to look in the eye at where there's holes that people don't understand. There's even just a thing of the book I wrote on creativity. I'd gotten pretty bored with production because there's just only, I'm 20 plus years into this. There's always so many times you can read the same things and watch the same things. And sure, I learned new things with plugins and I've greater understanding, but really the production philosophies, I wasn't getting it. So I decided to read a bunch of creativity science, and that gave me levels where I can understand. And even for my business consulting stuff where I talk to lots of businesses about what to do, I'm able to just make better decisions that I know are right because I now understand the science of creativity and what I put into that book.

(00:46:45):

And that is the thing of so much of life is looking at your time with the pie chart. I just even made a video about so many people ask me what they should be doing their time on social media, and it's like, well, 50% of your time definitely needs to be reactive, that people just need things from you. But that other time you need to be learning something. And the other thing is you need to be making people aware of that things. One of the biggest things musicians, I think particularly just don't get is that you hear so many people, people don't know this, but I can do this. It's like, well, you got to figure out a way to make people know that then show them. Yeah, it's never been easier to show people, but the mountain of that, you got to then do the work to do that showing gets to be too much for people all the time.

(00:47:32):

And that's just a thing you got to come to grips with is that if you're deficient on either of those three sides, it's not going to work out for you is outreach, proactivity and reactivity have to be in bouts because the funny thing is then there's a lot of people who are terrible at the reactivity, which is they get mixed changes and they don't do 'em for three weeks and then their clients hate them and they don't come back to them. So that's where reactivity falls. Whereas proactivity, if you don't get better, you stay stagnant with your skills. You're just not moving on to better things as fast as other people. I do believe that there's somewhat of an arms race of learning some skills these days is that just like if you're not drastically improving all the time and finding your different skills to do, other people are going to beat you in those test mixes. So that's where proactivity comes in. But outreaches people don't even knowing to call you at all. I really see that I have to balance my time with those three legs all the time or else I will also say I fuck up all the time and make one of them deficient and I always pay the price and then I have to work longer and work more to make up for the time. I fuck that up.

Speaker 1 (00:48:43):

When you do end up going out of balance, how long does it take generally before you realize it's out of balance and you're fucking something up?

Speaker 2 (00:48:51):

Oh, I know it at the time, and I ignore it

Speaker 1 (00:48:54):

At the time that you go through with it anyways,

Speaker 2 (00:48:56):

Because you know what it is, it's even dumped. A story I tell a lot is after I got done with the creativity book, I was burnt out at a level that I couldn't even think anymore trying to form complete sentences. Some days you can say, oh, he couldn't form a complete sentence. I literally had to sit alone in my studio because I had lost so much sleep and talked so much promoting it that I no longer had anything left in me to give. And that adrenaline just depleted from my body. But then my burnout was so bad that I did nothing proactive. I didn't learn anything because basically when I wrote that book, I spent four years being proactive of learning new things and then I had no urge to do it anymore. And I feel like the last six to nine months has been me being like, okay, head back in the game, learn new things at a level that I was back. I don't think I've even hit that level a little too busy to that level, but I know when it's happening because it's very apparent. The problem is, is that we all have things in our life that we look dead in the eye and we go, yep, not doing that right now. I mean, I have recycling I have to take out right now. I haven't done that on a day, man, putting the earth last. What are you doing? I know I'm such a bad hipster.

Speaker 1 (00:50:17):

Yeah, I mean, of course I've been guilty of doing that too. I was that way with my health for a long ass time and then one day I wasn't anymore and I wish I had started earlier, but I think it's totally natural to do that. And not just that what you just said about burning out, that's a very, very real thing. Energy and creativity are finite resources, though they are rechargeable, refillable. The fact that they do run out though that is a fact, you can't sustain pure creativity for forever. There has to be a moment where you step back and take a break from it. So I guess my question is that being the case, is it even avoidable to go out of balance?

Speaker 2 (00:51:05):

So what I like to say is if we take it to science matter, can neither be created or destroyed. It all comes from something, and it's the same thing with inspiration and perspiration. So perspiration is when you create something, you make a song, but you need inspiration to do that. Now inspiration can be just sitting around with your guitar until you figure out something. It could also be listening to music. I'm sure you and I both know tons of musicians who don't listen to a lot of music, but at some point they did been there. But I think there is an interesting thing of that, what they call it in creativity sciences is tinkering. Tinkering is inspiration. So tinkering can be everything from reading or listening to get inspired to just messing around with your own experiments. You have to figure out which one of those you're going to do. I'm right now in a period where if you look at how much I create in a week, it's truly a study. But I know right now what's out of balance is, is I'm not getting as inspired as I should.

Speaker 1 (00:52:03):

Just like a factory basically.

Speaker 2 (00:52:06):

Yeah. I mean, if you think of it this way right now I produce two podcasts that make two episodes in one episode a week. Every week I'm mastering 20 U records. I'm dealing with three different businesses. There's just not the time that I usually take. I usually in most of my years in the last decade, would take an hour or two, let's call it three days a week to watch really thought-provoking YouTubes or read or something like that. And that's drastically reduced down to maybe one night a week for two hours tops. I'm just not getting inspired the way I used to, and I know at some point that's going to mean my content well is going to run dry to the levels that it's going to be a threat to my life. There was a famous thing with that author, Seth Godin, who's amazing, but at some point he got in a war with this other guy that basically like, dude, you've just been repeating the same ideas with different phrases for a decade now you got to get some new ideas. And he took it really well in stride.

Speaker 1 (00:53:12):

Kind of accurate, I guess.

Speaker 2 (00:53:13):

Yeah, no, no, listen, that was an accurate critique of him and he took it really well. But that is an inevitability that if you're not challenging yourself to get through things, I think it's the biggest problem. Most musicians have a balance of a lot of what my creativity book is about is you're taking in new inspirations, but then you also have a thing of that. Okay, so what happens when you're somebody like me who I make punk records for the most part, but I pretty much only listen to weird electronic music and for a musician, how are you going to keep making authentic punk music if that was you? Now for me, I take it, I like the level of vocal perfection and things like that and the electronic music, and I bring that to the punk music, but I think there's a very real thing of that. Balancing your inspiration with that perspiration is just such an insane task. And then nevermind what happens when you get bored of the thing that everybody likes you for and you're not finding new things to bring to it. Well, that's usually when most music careers implode,

Speaker 1 (00:54:22):

That's when you need to start feeding your brain. One thing that I wanted for this year was to not reinvent, but supercharged my mind, my creativity and my knowledge of how things work. And I just kept reading that Most great CEOs read a ton. I don't know if it's true or not, I suspect it is.

Speaker 2 (00:54:46):

My experience when I've gotten to meet really great minds who are steering a ship is that they do know more books than most now if they've just CliffNotes some of those books, but they still know the concepts of them.

Speaker 1 (00:55:01):

So I took that and I gave myself this goal of first of all becoming one of those people, but then also the goal of never being boring. That's more like a personal thing, but also it's important for business because my business is talking a lot of the time, so don't be boring. And what does it mean to not be boring? It means that you have to be interesting and in order to be interesting, I feel like you have to be interested in things. You have to be. It's like this cycle of interested and interesting to interested on and on and on. And so I decided I'm going to start reading a lot about anything I'm interested in. So whether it's history or self-help or business or war or whatever the fuck relationships comedy, who the hell cares? I'm going to be reading three books a week. I've been doing that since February. I think I'm less boring than I was in February.

Speaker 2 (00:56:01):

Yeah, I mean, it's funny is where I would connect that to is a book you read, which is where good ideas come from. That's saying that's so far the best one I've read in this series. Let's give the endorsement. That's my favorite book of all time, which is how we got onto that is you asked me and I'm like, but that saying in that book from Arthur Schopenhauer Chance Favors the Connected Mind. I take that part really seriously in that I know I have two to three real interests in this world. I have an interest in the arts and creativity. I have an interest in politics, I have an interest in interpersonal things, and I try to make sure that that information and everything I'm taking in my diet is bolstering more connections. Because what that saying is, chance Favors the connected mind is the idea that when you are trying to come up with something, if you have more connections to draw from so that you're able to see the creativity science, they call it metaphor quotient, in that you're able to see more metaphors, you're going to be able to make more connections and seeing, oh, if I do like this, and a great example is knowing how to deal with a creative problem from record production and bringing to deal with that with an employee problem in business.

(00:57:26):

That's Chance Favors the connected mind. And I try to make sure I go really hard on those subjects and not just be one of those people who's just watching a million random TED Talks and not making connections too diverse. I try to keep my focus very in my three things that I'm very interested in.

Speaker 1 (00:57:47):

I think that that's super, super important. Actually, Finn helped me with that, call it the Entrepreneur's Curse,

(00:57:55):

Which is wanting to do everything basically, not having a QC for your ideas in a way that you might have lots of great ideas and you could probably go down any of those paths, but are you asking yourself if those ideas really are serving the path and are they distractions or not? And I've noticed that if I don't keep them to three things, basically I start wasting time. I start wasting time going down stupid paths and doing unfocused things and just spreading myself way, way, way too thin. I feel like there's so many things I could do, I got to keep it on kind of a straight and narrow in order to not fuck up, basically.

Speaker 2 (00:58:41):

Yeah, and I think there is a thing that's interesting with the entrepreneur thing, even a parallel and record producers production is that you do need to know a decent amount to get certain things. Like knowing why a drum rattle occurs if you're going to be a producer who works with drums is not necessarily what you're told every day is going to do it, but boy is that essential information to know. And it's the same thing with you and I do with business is that I need to know how a programmer does changes in order to communicate with them just as I have one person I work with all the time who doesn't get how reverting back to pro tools things are. So they'll be like, hi, okay, can we revert the vocals at 1 43 from this mix from a year ago, but then revert the vocal, the same vocals at 1 42?

(00:59:35):

And I'm like, well, the problem is is that that overwrites that and that overwrites that understanding how to communicate with those people and having a little bit of jerk of trades is a good thing, but still being conscious of what your focus is and where you're failing in those things, you don't have an understanding is one of the most crucial things. And where I would take that with musicians is that oftentimes they're ignoring crucial, crucial things that are easy to know. I even joke, one of the biggest things that musicians write me is they're like, spreadsheets are intimidating. I'm like, if you wanted to be the world's most expert on Excel spreadsheets, it takes 30 hours. If you want to just be passable, it takes three. You're telling me you can't take three hours to do that?

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):

Yeah. It's like that. That's what they're telling you. The meme of the Chad who like the guys crying at him that he just says, yes, that's totally it. I'm the guy crying about the spreadsheet. Chad says, yes, not doing that.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):

It's interesting because I'm doing the Riff Hard podcast now where we're mainly talking to musicians, which are a slightly different crowd than the URM podcast, even though I bring musicians on URM.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):

This is exclusively musicians and they by and large have a very different take about business than the people that I bring on URM. I remember talking to somebody like a week ago, guitarist from Suicide Silence. He's a smart dude and that band has been very on top of their business their whole career, but he was talking about how bad they are at it and how things didn't get better until they brought in people who were good at it and that the majority of their early success was just sheer force of will, not business smarts. But as he's gotten older, he's gotten better at those things and lo and behold, it's translated into a career that's kept going and hasn't dropped off. And even when it had its temporary dip when they put out that one album, they're right back to where they were before. And I do think that it has something to do with, I mean obviously the music is the most important part, but growing up and not being like he was when he was 20, we will just let someone else handle that. We'll just go 24 7, 365, fuck the world. Taking a much more intelligent approach is what's keeping them alive. So I know that even with musicians who are the type to ignore this stuff, the ones who don't ignore it are the ones who end up doing the best. It's not a surprise at all.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):

It's funny you're saying that brings me to a thing that I only learned how to talk about recently, which was the idea that what musicians constantly do is they look at somebody, they go, those guys suck at business, but look, they got famous so I can do that too.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):

But the problem that people don't see is that there's actually an equation, which is that obviously people who make the best music, their music could spread them and then you just need to do the bare minimum of work and then that social media fan propulsion will propel you Far and everybody's songs have what I like to call a susceptibility rate, which is that people hearing them, how susceptible are they to liking them and the percentage of people who hear it and go, hell yeah, I love this. When suicide silence came out, I think they hit a nerve musically,

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):

Right place, right time.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):

Yeah. I mean I even like to go further than that. I think that that's a little bit of luck when it really is. They had the right emotional IQ to find a sound, but then the funny thing is yes, they were probably terrible at business, but their music did them so many fairs, but then there's some other bands that I think are what's called them 10% less susceptible when people hear them, but they're so good at business, they're going to get bigger than them. Now the funny thing is the music part is the obvious thing that can propel a lot. You could fuck up so much when you have great music, but truly when you see those two things joined, it's incredible. And the musicians often just instead of saying, I'm going to be the Voltron and build this as great as I can, and they go, I can get away with that, it's fine. We don't need to be that good. Who cares? I don't need to learn that. Even just the funny thing of I've watched so many times people be like, you need to read this book. You guys are so good, but you don't put it out there telling somebody they need to spend 10 hours grazing through a book too high a calling for what I call my hopes and dreams.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):

Two things. So about the suicide silence thing,

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):

What

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):

I meant by right place, right time, is it kind of exactly what you meant? They struck a chord. Their artistic thing happened to happen at a point in time where the audience was ready for it and they recognized it and then they capitalized on it by working their asses off. And the fact that it was at the right moment in history combined with brutality of work ethic, I think overcame maybe their lack of understanding of how business works. So I would say that it worked out despite their lack of business knowledge. I think that what a lot of musicians don't understand is that when you look at situations like that, it's despite, it's not because of, I have an example, it was one time when I was in Florida, a local band with some producers rented my studio. I had a really nice looking studio. They rented it to film some acoustic song with candles up.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):

I've done this rental of my studio so many times.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):

Yeah, one of those. And their vocals were so fucking out of tune. They could not harmonize to save their own lives. I could stick a gun to their head and they still wouldn't be able to though. You should never do that. Just saying. And I remember overhearing one of them say, Allison chain's unplugged, head out of tune vocal harmonies. We can do it too. It's like

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):

Sick.

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):

Yeah. There's the

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):

Work ethic.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):

That's that same kind of thinking. I think.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):

Yeah, it is. The funny thing too of I think one of the other things is is that I've learned that there's a, I like to say now that I try to, as I have each problem in life is say, figure out what the right lens is to look at it. And so the lens I think many musicians have is that they go, well, that person did that and stupid. Every time you do that, there's so much margin of error in there that's stupid with the real way to ask the question every time. Here's a great example is I was just talking to somebody, big artist has made what's called six records. They have 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. They're doing really well and they're like, I'm thinking of this person producing my record. And I'm like, why are you thinking that? They're like, well, they made a good record of that person.

(01:07:11):

I'm like, I'll be honest with you, I've been in the studio with that person. They can make a good record with anybody because they have so much vision. It doesn't matter. You don't have that. The question that most people don't ask themselves is How do I make a good decision when you come to this decision and that decision, A good example of right now is I have to do something for the Times Square business, and I know the only way I can make a good decision on this is if I call up a ton of people who have studios similar to this and pick their brains. But the problem is I don't have that in my network, so how do I offer them value? So I've been writing all these strangers and I'm basically saying, Hey, look, I've owned this. If you'd like to have a conversation about any of these things, I know a lot about this, but you know about this thing and I'd like to pick your brain about it for 15 minutes.

(01:08:03):

Is there a way we could do a 30 minute call that's mutually beneficial for us? Musicians just go producer, make good record. They don't say, does that guy fill in our blanks? We have all these deficiencies. Is that the person who's going to know about them? If your drummer is terrible and you go to a guy who only understands how to make guitars really good, you're fucked because your drummer's going to make a terrible record. If your vocalist needs tons of harmony help and the guy's only good with drums, you're fucked. So people don't look at the decisions, and I've been trying to teach people that that's really the most pro tip you can do.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):

Have

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):

You read Farsighted? I think that's been on my list. Is that Kevin Kelly? No, it's Steven Johnson. Oh, you're right. That is No, I actually did not read that one. I own it,

Speaker 1 (01:08:53):

Which is funny. I'm like a hundred pages in. It's about this topic exactly how you make good decisions. I've been buying up all his books where good ideas come from so good that I just decided I'm going to read all of them except for the one about pirates. I don't give a fuck about pirates.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):

But I'll tell you the one about how cholera spread is amazing ghost maps. It's really interesting about how they figured out how to stop cholera from spreading is actually really about entrepreneurial decision making.

Speaker 1 (01:09:20):

Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):

What's funny, that was one of those books, I was so excited to read it when it was going to come out and I'm like, I can't wait for this. I bought it and then I never read it. What you do with books,

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):

Yeah, it happens. But farsighted is good. I think that any musician who's having a hard time making decisions should read it and think about it. It does talk a lot about just the different things that go into making a decision that's going to be a good long-term decision. I think that one thing that a lot of people make the mistake of, and this is not just musicians, this is when looking up a successful person to emulate what they did. There's a few problems in doing that. Number one, you don't know. You're getting the whole story first of all, right? So when you find out what a musician did or who they went with, you don't know the whole story, you weren't there. So you don't know what actually went into that thing. When you hear about Mark Cuban creating some company, so you think you have to do what he did, it's like, well, you don't actually know how that went down. You don't know what went into it. You don't know what the situation on the ground was or what the conditions were. So it doesn't even apply. So first of all, they're not looking at the whole picture.

(01:10:42):

Second of all, they're not realizing that they're not the person they're comparing themselves to. So for instance, I bring up the example of when bands would go to Bob Rock after the Metallica Black album

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):

Wanting

Speaker 1 (01:10:56):

That sound, and he'd always be like, well, you're not Metallica. I can't give you that sound. People need to realize that they are not whoever else they're comparing themselves to. Whatever it is that you do is going to have to be new. And so by definition, you can't just look at what someone else did, let alone the fact that you can't ever truly know what someone else did in another project. You shouldn't look at it too much because it doesn't even really apply to you. And then number three, there's that thing that you just said that people aren't doing a full analysis of whether or not the solution that they're seeking is actually going to solve the real issues.

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):

And it's like my favorite thing too is that, and you only realize this when you're successful and other people are talking about what you've done is that my favorite

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):

Thing is scam people. I do scam them out of.

Speaker 2 (01:11:58):

I'm more saying the thing of people would be like, they did this because of this. My favorite thing is somebody would be like, well, there new record sounds like this because they got on a big label and they told 'em to do that. It's like, well, we finished the record before we had a label. It was handed to them done. So I guess you're not right about that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:17):

And maybe the label approached them because they had a record that sounded appropriate for a big label.

Speaker 2 (01:12:23):

I have tended to learn that even also most of the mythologies about the big records I've done even get distorted. My favorite hyperbolic story I love to tell is that I worked with this band and I'll even say the band. There's this band called Bad Wizard. They were doing really well around when the strokes were doing well, they were in rowing stone and I go and read an interview and they're like, well, we did the new record at a castle. And I'm like, we did that at my parents' basement, not a castle townhouses in the suburbs, and you just learn when Joe Buri was running around telling everybody, they recorded the tool drums in a helium filled room just as a goof, and yet you still see that on the internet that that happened. And it's like you learn that the mythologies that you've learned through all these things are nine times out of 10 good for inspiration that maybe you can get a good idea from, but if you're going to just emulate this shit, it's usually bullshit.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):

Want to know what another great one is? What's that? The myth of the Lone Operator Superstar, the Myth of a Trent Resner. Those people always have a team. It's never just one person, even though there might be one good looking person

(01:13:42):

Or that team might have collectively decided, or maybe one of them is the leader like Bon Jovi or something, but it's never one person. It's just not, I don't know of a single situation where it is. However, there are lots of situations where it's billed as one person and in the example of the Trent Resner, a lot of people will look up to him and not think about Atticus Ross or Danny Loner or any of the people that were involved. They'll just look at Trent and say to themselves, well, I can do it all myself. And no, you can't.

Speaker 2 (01:14:16):

And that is the interesting thing too, and Steven Brolin Johnson talks about this a little bit, is that there's this myth of genius and what they call the lone wolf genius and what we're seeing now, the most interesting thing, I just literally edited a video on this, is that since 1975, no invention that has been considered innovative in a field that has changed, a field has been invented by one person, yet the majority of them were invented before 1975 were invented by one person, but we've now picked all the low hanging fruit. I believe this is the truth in music too, which is why you see so many of the artists now have so many different songwriters and producers because to make a song that really has exceptionally like that, you're like, oh, where the fuck did that come from? You need so many different minds that have just looked at it and done it. Yes, you could still find examples of a Billie Eilish and a PHUs that are going to see things through such a lens, but that's so rare and if you want to replicate that

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):

Repeal, but that's still more than one person,

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):

But more even the thing of that, if you want to replicate genius on a sustainable level constantly all the time, more than once every couple of years, you need to employ multiple very smart people. And so that's why you see the memes on Facebook, love to make fun of a Beyonce song, having nine songwriters, but it's also like, Hey, that pop song is way more out of left field than most pop songs, and that's the way they get a result to make it. So Beyonce has a record every two years.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):

Yeah, that's increasing the possibility and likelihood of adjacent possible brilliance basically.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):

Yep,

Speaker 1 (01:15:58):

That is exactly. It all goes back to that fucking book. Yes, I really does. I feel like a Jehovah's Witness or something. I've talked about it so much.

Speaker 2 (01:16:07):

The world would be a lot better if people read where good ideas come from more than most other books.

Speaker 1 (01:16:14):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):

I completely agree. We need to make a pact right here if that one of us can ever get Steven Johnson on a podcast that we double team this. Hey,

Speaker 1 (01:16:23):

I'm totally down. If that ever happens, I've tried. If that ever happens, I will bring you in. Nice. And now I'm going to hold you to that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):

Yes, I've tried numerous times and to the point that I even thought I saw him in Brooklyn once because he lives here and I was fully going to just accost him with his family, but that was just another white guy who looked like him.

Speaker 1 (01:16:46):

How have you gone about that?

Speaker 2 (01:16:48):

I've emailed a bunch. I've tried to be like, I know he's really into music. He writes a lot about music in his newsletter and how much he loves that podcast song for. I'm like, Hey, look, I do something like this. I'd love to talk to you. Please, please, nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):

Is he a bestselling author? Is he big?

Speaker 2 (01:17:06):

I don't think it's that big. I think he's like the smart people know

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):

That shit is way too intelligent for mass consumption, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):

Yeah, I think that that is the thing. I mean, it is funny. One of the dumbest people I knew recently, I saw the book on their bookshelf and I was like, well, that's something. But there is just a thing that sometimes what you're writing about is not going to be understood by everybody, and that's not going to be what sells. Just as I would argue, the big argument I made right now is everybody's saying, Charlie XCX made the most forward thinking pop record of the last 20 years. Well, it was 111 on the pop charts, and she's on the Atlantic records. She had all the resources and yet the ears that fell on not so much.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):

Yeah, I didn't realize that it was only 111, but that makes sense. As far as books go, I call a lot of these books airport self-help books, and I actually like some of them. Same. I just read The 10 X Rule by Grant Cardone, which is totally a superficial book, but it's awesome and it's totally an airport self-help book, but it actually really helped me out to focus myself. But I think that the Steven Johnson books are not airport self-help books. They take a lot more thought. Therefore, I think that they're not going to be as appreciated by the mainstream unless if he starts a big YouTube channel and debates college students or something.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):

There we go. Got to debate the college students. I think the other big problem we have in learning now though is the thing of that, and I know you guys go through this with video length, is that there's a certain amount of information people are willing to bitesize and a book like Berlin Johnson's are big bites, and it's the same thing. I read a thing that you can tell from the data on the Kindle. Somehow that book, thinking Fast and Thinking Slow is the least finished book that's bought, and I know it because it took me forever to finish it. So fucking dense in trying to understand it. You have to look up so many of the terms to understand it and yeah, I'm moving slowly through it. Are you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'll be honest, I think that book, I probably finished 10 books in the time it took me to read that, and I think I false started it like twice.

(01:19:29):

And it's an incredible book and it literally changes the way you see the world, but it's so hard. Whereas most of these books that are at the airport, which should have been a 20 page article, but 20 page articles aren't profitable at scale, so they become 240 page books with a large font. They tell you to never put out a book longer than 240 pages or it doesn't sell. And so then we get this industrial complex of books that just reiterate the same fucking idea six different ways in a really long blown out way. And it's the same problem with YouTube right now is that YouTube doesn't reward videos under 10 minutes. So half these videos have crazy long explanations. I literally watch people bitch about the lead up all the time, and then I also get comments that are like, thank God you don't do that. And I make it a business plan to go, okay, I have to hit 10 minutes, but I'm not going to bullshit through any of it. I'm going to just find the way to do this deep dive on a subject.

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):

And that's why people appreciate it, and I think that's also why people appreciate Finn's YouTube channel.

Speaker 2 (01:20:34):

Perfect example of it is that no filler actual finding the deep dive and how to do the thing on it and putting the time in and yet again, it's kind of where we started the conversation is people have realized these stupid exploits, and it's even the thing of a video on how to repair a Herman Miller Aron chair in order for it to get picked up by the YouTube algorithm has to be six minutes. So some guy sits there and tells you how much he loves the fucking chair for three minutes and then shows you turn a screw one time. Lovely world we're living in right now.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):

Well, that's why we didn't focus on YouTube for a long time at URM because I don't think it's the best medium for education. I think it's a good medium for information. There's a difference between information and education because sometimes education really is as simple as do these three things, but do them over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Come back in two weeks after you've done that, write down your results. We'll talk about it. That's not a very interesting YouTube video.

Speaker 2 (01:21:37):

Yeah. It also is that thing of that, the saddest thing I've learned with YouTube too is that yet again, the medicine is not the thing I want to take. What's a really funny thing is I put out a video on how to do social media yesterday, and it's of course my fastest growing thing. And I say at the top of it, I'm like, you all reward these videos by clicking on them. But when you're an artist, because my video's all on how you get to 10,000 fans when you're under 10,000 fans, if you're mostly focused on social media, you're going nowhere because that is not where the answers lie. The funny thing is the answers lie, and that thing we were talking about before, which is the Google alerts and the Talk Walker alerts and finding your community and all that, that's where it really works. Social media works at scale, but it's unbelievable how much people can't get that through their head that they do it and all they do is click on that and then that becomes the whole algorithm. And because of that, society doesn't take its medicine and then everybody wonders why they can't build their fan base.

Speaker 1 (01:22:37):

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I've actually talked to some people about this topic about growing on social media because it's something that I actually didn't focus on until recently. I was fine not focusing on it until recently because everything was going well, but then I just started thinking, well, how much better would it go if I had 50,000 people on Instagram or something? So I've been focusing on it really, really hard and about to pass 10,000. It's shot up exponentially, and I have been very focused on social media tactics and strategy. However, and this is the big, however, kind of to your point, it's only working for me because what I'm feeding into those tactics and strategies are my 20 years of experience with everything I've done. Guitar, entrepreneurship, production, all of that, that's all feeding this stuff, all real world shit. If I was starting at zero and then did the same tactics and all I did was try to base social media on nothing, I think maybe there's a small chance that could build a following, but I think that the odds would be stacked against me.

Speaker 2 (01:23:54):

And I think the other thing though is is that the most underestimated thing right now about social media is that at the core of it is connections and you have a lot of thoughts people can connect to and a lot of things, and you also create a lot of content people can connect to. I always think of it as that if you make one podcast every two years that I find incredible, I somehow still stay bonded to you. I keep you in my feed. I might still follow you in social media. I do that too, but it's like a funny thing. If I read 10 tweets where I'm like, this person's a fucking idiot, they're gone. But it Instagram where they're just telling me who they've interviewed lately, I'll give you two years of terrible content as long as you give me that one podcast episode.

(01:24:42):

I talked with people a lot about this because I'm constantly consulting on podcasts and it's a funny thing of you are making so much great content that it's easy for you to have something sticky. Now the funny thing is when we're talking about musicians or producers, I mean how many posts of just good morning to the picture of your studio from the same angle before it gets boring, but a oh my God, just tried out this new Soothe two thing and showing something helpful. That's something that keeps people around. It's knowing that value and connection key is so much thinking of that instead of the dopamine hit is so much of the key

Speaker 1 (01:25:26):

A hundred percent. To prove your point back before I cared about social media, even though I had social media, I would sometimes post those studio pictures and they did okay, relatively speaking, like we'd go do nail the mix and post a control room picture. Cool. June 28th, 2018, I posted a picture of Yen's bore's room and I gave a recap of my trip in Sweden, 650 likes. Alright. Now I realize that giving people a recap of my trip isn't exactly giving them too much value. It's just talking about me. But it's a really great picture.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):

Yeah, I remember that picture.

Speaker 1 (01:26:10):

Yeah, it is a nice one. So I reposted it May 11th this time I spoke about room aesthetics and the difference between vibe, like where vibe and functionality intersect. Much shorter caption, but much more I think thought provoking. And people love to think about the vibe of their studio and the aesthetics involved and it's actually a very important thing that could be the difference between a client coming to you or not or how their experience goes Aside from the music, this one has 2,800 likes. Now granted, I'm doing better on social media now overall, but it's the same picture

Speaker 2 (01:26:55):

And the number shows also what the differences, the increase in your followers and just the type of engagement you're doing. People don't get that lens switch really is the difference is that you need to not see the lens through the shallow thing. You need to see the lens through how am I creating something people can get something from?

Speaker 1 (01:27:16):

Yeah. What was interesting was that when I posted it originally I was going through a really hellish trip to Sweden.

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):

Oh yeah, you had a terrible time getting there. I remember now.

Speaker 1 (01:27:26):

Yeah. So I was posting about it and it was happening to me. So I was thinking it was interesting, and now I realize it's just interesting to some of my closest friends, but nobody else is going to get any value out of it. Most people haven't even traveled and they're just hearing a travel nightmare. There's no value in that. So same picture, total different angle of attack, vastly different results.

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):

It was that. The thing too of that, it's very easy to cite that if you keep doing the same thing and don't get a result, your insane thing. But really with social media, there's a bunch of different ways to attack things and trying them out and seeing which part of your personality and things like that. People often get really tripped up and I believe it that you do have to be authentic, but you could be authentic from lots of different lenses. And even Finn's talked a lot about the negativity versus positivity thing. I've messed with it on Twitter in the last week and it's very funny. I'm such a peppy, optimistic person a lot of the time and celebrating good. And the funny thing is I just started posting a bunch of negative shit recently and it is astounding how much more engagement I got on Twitter. It's

Speaker 1 (01:28:43):

A bummer, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (01:28:44):

It's kind of a bummer. And what I had to do is I had to make it more about that, yes, it's negative, but more like I'm going to roast the bad thing. It's totally true that framing something in a positive light is not what gets people spreading your message. It's that people are channeling bad things.

Speaker 1 (01:29:04):

I feel like framing something in a positive light only really works if you're addressing something negative that has to be reframed into a positive basically.

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):

That's a great point because it really is true that you can get a lot of mileage, unlike what we were just talking about is how you make the lemons out of lemonade, but you're not going to get a lot of mileage out of,

Speaker 1 (01:29:27):

You mean lemonade out of lemons?

Speaker 2 (01:29:29):

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You're not going to get a lot of mileage If I did a thing of trying to put a positive spin just on, let's call it the album leak, and I'm just like, well, we actually got this many things where it's really like, Hey, you idiots. You don't think of it this way, but this is how it actually works. All of a sudden calling people idiots has a lot more engagement.

Speaker 1 (01:29:52):

Well, yeah. Also, you're speaking to them. I think there is one exception which is interesting, which is animal videos.

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):

Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 1 (01:30:01):

People will watch a family of ducks crossing the street and stop their whole day to watch a five minute video of ducks crossing the road. They're cute.

Speaker 2 (01:30:12):

Alright, I'm going to get heavy on this. Here's my theory.

Speaker 1 (01:30:15):

Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):

The reason some of the Black Lives matters protests could happen this week is you didn't have to have a moral decision that you've been having so many times, is that everybody who's going is saying Yes, while it's kind of bad that I might be killing people with a pandemic thing, I feel a greater good here. I could do this. And they didn't have to have this moral quandary that they've had with a lot of other things lately. And what I think does so well, what moral quandary do you mean? So the idea of every other time you were going out of the house, it's like, am I going to bring this home and potentially kill people around me?

Speaker 1 (01:30:57):

Yes. Okay. Am I going to kill my neighbor?

Speaker 2 (01:30:59):

But now it's saying, okay, people are dying and I have to do this so people stop dying. So I'm now actually helping lives be saved so there becomes less moral quandary. And when I'm convinced with animal videos, and I think here's the tip for musicians, animal videos, your number one key to internet success is because you never have to think is that a bad dog or a good dog? It's just a good dog always because it's dogs are good. And I think there's a funny thing of we need points where we don't have to have a huge moral argument these days because I've believed it for 20 years that every decision in your life is a political decision. You can't reason your way out of that. And society making us more and more aware of that is very burdensome on our brains. But getting away to not have that as much and just going, Hey, here's two animals. You don't got to think because you always root for the animal. I mean, aside from people who hate pit bulls who are the scum of the earth, that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:07):

I'm not a fan. I guess I'm scummy.

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):

You're not a pit, you're not. You

Speaker 1 (01:32:14):

Eat kids and I don't like kids, so maybe I should pit bulls.

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):

Oh, well see, I like them for that reason. Yes, definitely eat the kids for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:32:21):

Yeah. So maybe I should like them as long as they don't eat me. I don't care. Sacrifice some kids.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):

I'm shocked. I figured you as such a big dog person.

Speaker 1 (01:32:34):

I am a big dog person.

Speaker 2 (01:32:35):

Yeah, I figured you'd be pro pit bull.

Speaker 1 (01:32:38):

I'm not anti, I just love German shepherds. Yes. Well that makes two of us. I'm like a breed elitist when it comes to dogs. And I don't mean that I'm not into shelters or saving dogs or anything like that. I just always want German shepherds in my house. They agree with me. They're like the perfect blend of beauty, loyalty, intelligence. Plus they'll fucking die and kill for you. And they're funny.

Speaker 2 (01:33:07):

Yes, they are. I've had a lot of different dogs. The German shepherds I've lived with are the funniest dogs of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:33:13):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (01:33:14):

That's totally

Speaker 1 (01:33:14):

True. Exactly. They're hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:33:16):

I will say this, why I don't think you should ever engage in classification supremacy. German shepherds are the funniest dogs.

Speaker 1 (01:33:22):

Yeah. I say the classification stuff with, I'm halfway kidding when I say it, but I just really love the vibe. I just love their personality and then all those other things, how trainable they are. That was super important for me. When I had a studio, I needed to make sure that first of all, people would be scared to break in, but also that my dog wouldn't eat the clients. So they're the perfect dog for that situation.

Speaker 2 (01:33:50):

Not eating the clients is important,

Speaker 1 (01:33:52):

But then also having it be able to be controlled is important too.

Speaker 2 (01:33:57):

If you ever have a Ross Robinson on, you got to get him to talk about his dog trading method, which is every time the dog does something bad to just say good dog. It's truly remarkable how well it

Speaker 1 (01:34:10):

Works. As in why is it like

Speaker 2 (01:34:14):

He said,

Speaker 1 (01:34:14):

Golden re, is it rebel? So he says, good dog. And he dog stops doing

Speaker 2 (01:34:19):

Whatever he gets praised for. It's a golden, he said two golden retrievers at the time I've known him. And it's like they're never doing anything that bad. They're stealing your food or farting a lot. Yeah. It actually just makes for good comic relief in the studio.

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):

Yeah. And I'll say this, I've said it before, but people who have a problem with dogs are weird, Don.

Speaker 2 (01:34:40):

It's a personality test don't get. Yeah, because you know what I'm convinced it too is so we were just saying, I fucking hate children and babies, but you know what I do? I smile around them. I say, hi, if you ask me if you want, I want to hold the kid. I say, I don't think that's in your child's best interest. But there's a thing with learning to be good around dogs. That's just also just a common personality test. It's the same thing with kids. When I see a kid, particularly one yelling in a pool, I think, fuck this little piece of shit. I wish it was an abortion, but I smile Jesus Christ.

(01:35:18):

I mean truthfully, I'm just being honest here. I hate the inconvenience Many children bring my life, especially at an airplane or in a pool, but I smile the whole time because what you learn to do as an adjustable human being is you say, this isn't their fault and I have to be good around them who's not good around them fucking assholes. And you just take the loss and you give yourself to it. And if you're not good to a goddamn dog, that is just usually a source of goodness in the world, you're a fucking asshole.

Speaker 1 (01:35:48):

I agree. It's also because of the fact that they're designed by us for us.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):

That's a great point.

Speaker 1 (01:35:53):

I know a lot of people that are like, it's just a dog and it's like, yeah, okay, maybe it's just a dog, but name me another animal that we basically created and engineered a dog is A GMO basically. But a good GMO that we created to be so many different things. But for instance, all the traits I named about German Shepherds, those traits were designed. It's designed to be that way. It's such a useful and perfect companion to people that if you have a problem with them, what the hell's wrong with you?

Speaker 2 (01:36:28):

Strong agree. And I think that that is the thing. We have to also remember, we come from the subculture where you're allowed to be a bad fit to society really easily. Some of these people, they thrive on that part of their personality. I know that I have to be a good fit to society if I want to keep advancing myself. So I smile at the baby,

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):

Man, keep your babies away from

Speaker 2 (01:36:53):

Me. Strong agree. Really not trying to be around that baby.

Speaker 1 (01:36:59):

I don't really know how to smile at kids. I guess it's because my brothers don't have kids. I don't have kids. And most of my extended family who's had kids, I've never really had much of a relationship with their kids. A lot of people have nephews or whatever that they have good relationships with. I've had no relationships with kids in my life ever. So they're kind of just like this weird foreign entity and I'd like to keep it that way.

Speaker 2 (01:37:26):

You are luckier than me. I don't get that pleasure.

Speaker 1 (01:37:28):

Yeah. Well, I'll just keep bragging to you about it and you can be really, really, really jealous. So let's talk a little bit more about podcasting. Are you looking to open up your own podcast studio at any point?

Speaker 2 (01:37:43):

I've had that. My studio in Brooklyn has been very largely a podcast studio. We produce a couple of very big shows there, particularly in African-American entertainment we do there. And then the one in Times Square. We have tons of people who are already signed up to do things there like Samantha B and all sorts of stuff. We just need to be able to open and operate it because New York City is still locked down right now. But yeah, I mean I am putting two feet into podcasts because the idea at 42 of yelling at an 18-year-old to tune his guitar is just not something I can do anymore. The other thing I will say too is how there's producers will make fun of the person who hits record versus the producer who really goes in and does things on the podcasts. I do. I do such a high level of production and development, and that's why that I'm doing podcasts that are in the top 100 and things like that and producing these high level things is because putting a level of thought and production and work that most people are doing, and that thing we were talking about before of what are other people not wanting to do?

(01:39:04):

We literally do that on the podcast I do all the time. There's a great example is we tape probably three four interviews and drop two all the time for a show like that. Wasn't that interesting? That wasn't that good. Let's keep the best things. And a lot of people are like, oh, that person's going to be mad at me. It's like we make a good contact. And the other crazy thing that we do,

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):

I do that too, by the way.

Speaker 2 (01:39:29):

Yeah. I mean you got to do it

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):

Not to that ratio, but there's a graveyard of URM podcasts now.

Speaker 2 (01:39:35):

That's good. I made that mistake with, I was still doing interviews with noise creators as I aired them, even when they were, I had one guy get in a car while he had been drinking, so he is drinking and driving on the podcast and I still aired it even though,

Speaker 1 (01:39:47):

Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):

Yeah, it was awful. And you can hear it. Holy shit. Even the other big thing I do is we try to put, I make Venn diagrams of what every segment should be in how that would be good. And we try to hit those marks. We just develop and develop and develop every podcast. I'm doing one right now that's going to be out in a few weeks. That's amazing. It's called Killed by Desk. So Killed by Desk is interviewing people who are no longer making their main living from music about their new living and their new shitty day job.

Speaker 3 (01:40:25):

And

Speaker 2 (01:40:26):

We don't let them talk about their music career, but we talk about how their job has affected their lives.

Speaker 1 (01:40:31):

Is it a little bit, not like this, but kind of like Doc,

Speaker 2 (01:40:35):

It's more comedy and the crazy thing that these guys do because comedians I just produce it is they interview their coworkers and then come at them with a knowledge that is just ATO dig of what they do and it's all very humorous.

Speaker 1 (01:40:50):

Can we talk a little bit about your podcast prep? I'm actually very curious about this and I also want to talk about it some because I think I want to start a podcast is the Let's start a band of 2020.

Speaker 2 (01:41:02):

Oh yeah. The too many podcasts that are not thinking about why anybody would enjoy it aside from them.

Speaker 1 (01:41:09):

Yeah, I bet you do more prep than I do as we do the pre-interview, which serves a few purposes. I don't always follow them, but it's because a lot of the people I interview don't have a lot out there about them. The musicians do, but a lot of the producers have very, very little. So I need a way to learn about them, learn about who they are when there's nothing really out there about them besides maybe three tutorial videos they put out and some bio. So it helps me be prepared, even though I could wing it, it helps me be prepared. And then also with repeat guests, it makes it to where we don't have the same conversation. And to me that's the minimum. If there's more I can do, if the person has written books, you, I'll read the books, I'll listen to their music. I make sure that I know who I'm talking to, but I don't do Venn diagrams and stuff like that. And maybe I should want hear about what you do.

Speaker 2 (01:42:08):

Okay. So the Venn diagram is a lot of the time, let me even, I'll look at one that I have in front of me right now. So the podcast I produce for the Daily Beast, the one that's a top 50 podcast, that one their brand is. So the main, there's two hosts and one of them, I don't know if you've been seeing all those really crazy ads against Trump that it's like the Confederate flag and how Trump celebrates it and these ads are getting millions of hits.

Speaker 1 (01:42:40):

I have all that stuff blocked.

Speaker 2 (01:42:42):

Oh, okay. So it's the guy who writes these ads and this guy literally is like the thorn in Trump's side. Trump tweets at him being pissed off at him. He's a former Republican who hates Trump. And then the other is a female left wing agitator. So I figured out what they're good at talking about. I'll make a Venn diagram of for this segment, what's interesting that a lot about that people probably don't, but what also are you going to? So the idea is some of it is do you know a lot about this subject that most people don't? And then as well, do you have something funny to say because the other thing they're known for is being very funny. So either of those two things get us into that Venn diagram, but I want to find things that hit both and then I'm going to prioritize that content for guests what we want. Podcasts obviously are supposed to be more candid, and when you're talking politics, most of it happens on cable news. But what's interesting with podcasts is you can get people to be very unscripted and very comfortable. So we try to find guests who seem like they don't have a ton of discipline to stay on message and then get them to say Wild, wild shit.

Speaker 1 (01:43:54):

That sounds awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:43:55):

Yeah, no, and it's been incredible. We've made a lot of big news and it's very weird to watch the world and the discourse get changed because you started a fight between two people with a lot of power is the weirdest experience of my life after the worst thing I would have happen is somebody be mad that I trashed a plugin and I'd get a letter from a company or something. Much different world, but I try to, so for example, with Killed by Desk, we're in the developmental phase. We've been taping some episodes that will put out, but we're still learning. So what I try to do too is we had a lot of questions that people were literally like, wow, this is going to be a real great podcast. This is pretty boring. And then they'd see the funny stuff and they're like, oh, this is the funnest time I've had on a podcast ever. So we had to learn to put that earlier, doing the analysis. And then also the lens is, it's the magic question in podcasting. What have you been telling people that you don't think is discussed enough? What is something you know about that no one else knows about it? The Tim Ferris question. What's something you believe that everybody thinks you're crazy to believe? Those are magic questions for people.

Speaker 1 (01:45:10):

Yeah, they are. Actually, I should ask that sometimes.

Speaker 2 (01:45:14):

Oh yeah. I mean on Noise creators, I asked that when I still did interviews that Tim Ferriss one, I just stole it. I don't care. And it's funny because people write me, they're like, that's genius question. I'm like, I stole it. The other ones are actually my development stuff. But I think what are we trying to do with podcasting is we're trying to have conversations that the mainstream has not allowed us to have. At some point, we will move past that and have a different, what do you call it? Worldview of podcasts will become some different type of storytelling. I actually think that there's a lot of them are changing. Even as we speak of that, a lot of what narrative podcasting is becoming is that if we tried to tell this story with video, it would be too expensive. But audio, have you heard Wind of Change? No. Do you know what it's No. Dude, you're going to love this.

Speaker 1 (01:46:06):

I know a scorpion song called Wind of Change.

Speaker 2 (01:46:09):

Well, guess what? Did you know the CIA wrote that song for them? Nope. Well, there's an eight part podcast done by a very famous journalist all about how that's true. Really, dude, it's amazing. When you listen to it, you're going to be texting me and you're going to be like, this is amazing. But the thing is, if you tried to do this on video, it'd be so expensive for the amount of viewers you'd have, it would never work. But audio that's becoming

Speaker 1 (01:46:32):

A really great thing. Oh, this is an actual topic. Are you sure this isn't this 5G and Coronavirus?

Speaker 2 (01:46:40):

Dude, when you listen to it, it's not conclusive that it's a hundred percent, but man is the evidence in all. The other thing is too is it talks about the history of the CIA doing things like this. It's just an amazing story. You know what? When you get to the end, you don't even care if it's true or not because just like a David Lynch movie, it doesn't matter what the ending is, the ride is so good that it doesn't matter. Fair enough. And it's just we're now getting the thing of that. If we think of podcasting from the lens of what are things people want to hear about that aren't being heard enough? And that's basically what I'm always chasing is when I'm looking at the podcasts and I'm developing another one that I'm not quite there with enough to talk about publicly. But with each podcast, what people don't ask themselves is what is not being discussed that there is an audience for?

(01:47:37):

And that could be sometimes hard to see. You have to be an expert at these things, but you can always put out feelers and see what happens. And I think with Killed by Desk for example, it's like, this is really interesting to me. It's really fun because the guys who are hosts are funny. But we're going to see when the pavement hits the road with the new abnormal, the political one I hit, it was an instant hit from the second it started because people were like, what I like to say is Keith Berman during the George W. Bush provided a two minutes hate towards George W. Bush doing dumb things. No one's really tapped into that with Trump as well as they should. It's like there's a lot of corny mockery of Trump of calling him a Cheeto, but it wasn't actual educated why you should hate this man. And providing that to people is proven to be very successful

Speaker 1 (01:48:28):

Man. Even with something like the Riff Hard podcast, it's less extreme on the what's not being talked about. But still at the end of the day, the whole idea is adding something that's not in the market, which is there are no interesting guitar podcasts period. And I've listened to them. All the other guitar podcasts are basically watching Paint Dry. They talk about the same boring shit that you see in any interview and you don't get any real feel for who the person is or what went in to becoming fucking awesome and making it a real thing in real life and what the internal and external battles are that they had to go through and what their priorities were. That's not out there. The other guitar podcasts are exactly what you would expect, just like guitar magazines done in podcast form.

Speaker 2 (01:49:21):

Yeah, I think the funny thing is you and I were both doing record production. I was still doing Noise Careers as a interviewing producers, we'd have totally different conversations with the same producers. We would literally hand guess back and forth to each other. And the funny thing is, there's so many bad ways these people could do it, and I'm convinced that nine times out of 10, it's one, a lack of development, and two, just not figuring out what people actually would want to hear instead of just the same thing of like, oh know I got a four truck and then just started futzing around. It's like there's so many better conversations people can hear. We've all heard that. And yes, you may want to know that one person's story. And yes, some of that can be fun. But when that's the same thing and over again of I got my first real six string over at the fucking five and dime for the 90th dime. No one needs to know that it's like how did you get to be great is that's what fuels that. A lot of great podcast content is what is the mainstream too afraid to discuss and there's mainstreaming guitar and there's mainstream of message boards and then there's all sorts of things that where people can actually go deeper who want to find that, and that's where podcasts live for now.

Speaker 1 (01:50:40):

I'm happy in that place

Speaker 2 (01:50:42):

And they are going to get corrupted by network forces. Every network is now learning they need a podcast network and they're making very dull content. I mean it's like a crazy thing is I learned because their numbers are public that some of these podcasts that are big, big names, people don't get 5,000 listens because they're just imitating TV content on podcasts. I literally find that to be the, yeah, not even 5,000 listens. Holy shit. These are people who have shows that have hundreds of thousands of people, so you're retaining less than 1% of your audience because you're imitating TV on podcasts and people don't want an imitation of TV on podcast. We smoke that

Speaker 1 (01:51:24):

Crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):

Yeah. Finn and I were talking numbers the other week and it was that funny thing of he's like, oh, I want more of this. I'm like, Finn, you're already in the 1% like yes, strive for better, but also don't be so hard on yourself. The 1% of podcast listens is a great place to be the one I produce. That's on politics. Yes, we're in the 0.001%, but

Speaker 1 (01:51:50):

That's where I want to be.

Speaker 2 (01:51:52):

But there's also a certain point where you hit the cap on the audience.

Speaker 1 (01:51:56):

Yes, I was going to say, I can't do that in these markets. I'm doing them in.

Speaker 2 (01:52:01):

Yeah. You can't do that in record production. You can do that in politics and especially if you figure it this way. There's about a hundred million people who hate Trump, so if you even capture, what I would say is this is about 200,000 listeners per episode puts you in the top 50, so it's pretty easy to capture that out of a hundred million.

Speaker 1 (01:52:24):

There are not a hundred million people who feel strongly about metal guitar enough to listen to a podcast. It just is what it is. I understand where Fin's coming from though. I get those same kinds of feelings, like the one percent's not good enough. We make the error of comparing ourselves to people like Joe Rogan or something like that, and it's like how many podcasts exist in the world right now?

Speaker 2 (01:52:46):

Yeah, 1 million, 100,000 are in the Apple store

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):

And you're comparing yourself to the top 10 that are not even in the same market. So if someone wants to start a podcast, normally what I tell them is this isn't what I would tell you. Obviously you wouldn't ask me how to start a podcast, but assuming that they've never done it before, the thing I always tell them is record eight episodes before you release anything and see if after recording eight episodes, if you still feel like doing it because it's a lot harder to keep generating content, then you realize, and first of all, you're going to suck at first, so make eight episodes and then decide where you want to go with it. I always tell people that because I feel like a lot of people are like, how do I monetize

Speaker 2 (01:53:38):

Right

Speaker 1 (01:53:39):

Away?

Speaker 2 (01:53:39):

I do have a strong opinion on that, which is that you should in subways, but what's way more important than the monetization? It doesn't happen unless you do these things. I think it's actually you record eight episodes that you have no intention of releasing, and if they're good enough, great, but then you need to record another eight episodes to be ahead of the game in just releasing content for when guests cancel, things like that. You have to have eight ahead of what your audience hears and then as well, you're exactly right. The content thing, all those problems is that can you really sustain this with having different interesting conversations with people all the time? There is a very real thing of that. There's big dropout. The biggest thing people talk about is, and I think you and I have had this conversation is that you listen to about 40 Tim Ferriss episodes and you've heard about meditation enough that you're kind of bored. Then you drop out and you'll only listen to the episodes with people you're really interested in. Whereas you used to be able to listen to an episode with anybody you had on and that does become a really big problem of if that you're not interviewing and this is the third time you and I technically, I think this is the fourth or fifth time we've podcast together and we're not having the same conversation and that is a real hard skill for people to do.

Speaker 1 (01:54:59):

It takes effort. It's not by chance that we're not having the same conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:55:06):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:55:07):

I actually want to see how many times you've been on, I believe this is, I

Speaker 2 (01:55:10):

Think this is third for me being on yours and you and I did one to two of mine.

Speaker 1 (01:55:16):

Yes, that sounds right.

Speaker 2 (01:55:17):

I think yeah, you did Off the record and noise creators. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:55:21):

Yeah, and this is definitely a completely unique conversation.

Speaker 2 (01:55:24):

Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:55:25):

I will argue with you on this monetize from day one, but how do you monetize zero? You can't multiply zero.

Speaker 2 (01:55:31):

You should give the opportunity, so what I tell everybody is don't waste a day of having people who would back you because I'll tell you this, here's a great example is I work with a guy who's beyond incredible and very popular, I should say like million followers on things that has a podcast and he only started the Patreon about an episode 100 and he's really struggled. Whereas what he sees is though is that thing we were talking about is with podcast episodes, what they really are oftentimes is a bonding to somebody at some point, and I've seen it, I have lots of people who bonded with me from an episode and have stuck with me for years and have patronized me and sent me gigs or just kept mastering records with me because they liked my approach and my attitude. You should allow people to do that from day one, and that's the greatest thing about Patreon is Patreon from episode one, you can say, here's a dollar to just say, I support you $5 to get, let's call it the 20 minutes of content. You may put it on the cutting room for or 20 minutes behind a paywall and then as well do a merch plan.

Speaker 1 (01:56:41):

Maybe I should make a Patreon.

Speaker 2 (01:56:42):

Yeah. I mean for this, it's interesting because this podcast really just like Noise Careers was for me is an advertisement for a service and expanding a network. I wasn't as concerned with monetizing that in a way, but a podcast killed by desk where we're just interviewing people to have fun. We want to do it. I mean, to be honest with you, the other thing we put a lot of time into and have a lot of effort into is literally a plus tier merch. The merch we're putting out with that podcast you would wear just as a statement and putting that on three different designs, but just as you'll regret not getting on other platforms from day one. The big thing I tell everybody too right now is if you're doing interview podcasts and you're not putting them on YouTube, you're fucking up so bad right now.

(01:57:38):

It's unbelievable because the funnel of people searching someone's name on YouTube that seeing that that's their hitting play on it and then subscribing to the podcast is one of the most powerful funnels I see right now and YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world right now, and that is where people go to look for interviews and even if they're just a single screen, as Finn talks about all the time, people don't watch his videos, they just listen to him talk while they work. People don't see the power of that and everybody's going to regret not being on YouTube in five years.

Speaker 1 (01:58:12):

The only issue I have with monetization at first, I actually completely agree with what you're saying. The only issue I have is people misprioritized.

Speaker 2 (01:58:22):

Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:58:23):

At first. Yeah, I agree. You should get into that stuff as early as possible and for instance with platforms, if you don't get on the platforms early enough, you then have a lot of technical debt and it's a pain in the ass and you're missing opportunities, but until there's solid content or ability to do it or the knowledge that you're going to continue, what exactly are you monetizing? It's almost like both are important, the content and the monetization, but I feel like you got to deal with the most pressing issue first, which is the podcast itself.

Speaker 2 (01:59:00):

Well, so here's what I would say is since Patreon offers a way to do the free feed through it for very low fee is you sign up to Patreon and then you take the effort of making two little things no matter what you do so that it just, it gives you some sort of opportunity for people to compensate you. Let's be honest. Also, compensation means that you can delegate more time to promotion. You can pay to do it. If you're one of those bands that's thinking about starting a talk show type podcast, well now you have the time to hire an editor to make it better or you have the time to hire a publicist that publicizes, I think of the singer of Silverstein's podcast. It's like there was a time where the publicist was pushing out all those interviews and that's what was doing the work for him and it was getting new converts to his band.

Speaker 1 (01:59:52):

Yeah, true. Very true. If you're starting from zero, and this will be the last question I don't want to take up your whole day, we're probably going to talk about this for 15 minutes. If you're starting from zero, how do you suggest people get the word out?

Speaker 2 (02:00:10):

The biggest legwork on the internet, and this is something I definitely learned lessons from you guys from is that Facebook message boards and Reddit message boards are where your initial connections and starting base are always going to come from. Now anything you're doing, if you're starting from zero, is going to probably be people who are hyper interested in a small part of what you do and the relationships you build with them, and you and I have seen this so many times that so many bands that are legendary bands now, where did they start? Well, they started by being the superstar of the message board. In some ways I would even say that that's like you and I was a big poster on gear sluts of times I'd see you on Andy, things like that. I was more of a luer by the time Andy sne was around, but I got a lot of my initial work done on Rec Audio Pro Usenet and Gear slots, and that built me up to a lot of things and built up a lot of, while I could call it connections, what it also was was like I had a band still and that did it, and today I see it being even more powerful.

(02:01:31):

One of the things I tell everybody is when I worked at Atlantic, one of the things I would do is I'd work with the new signings, so I'd be like, okay, how did we get here? First things first, and I would say if I interviewed what's called a hundred people about that, that maybe one the story was not making the connection from some sort of internet community, so that to me tells you everything that the bonds you make, whether it's Porter Robinson and Madon connecting on a message board about making eight bit music, and then now they play together doing huge festivals because one brought up the other and the other brought up the other. That is the essence of how you go from zero to one and then after that is what I call the accumulating subtleties, which is like an Alan Douch just saying of that you're just doing everything. You're always being available, that you're on all the social medias, you're on everything as well, so all the little things are doing work for you to accumulate to. Then when you hit that 10,000 mark and then you have so many people who follow you that they're helping spread you, but the zero to one is all about the early days of community.

Speaker 1 (02:02:48):

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Facebook communities are a major, major, major, major, major part of why URM took off a hundred percent before we had our own community still it was through tapping into the power of that and that's something that people could use regardless of where they are in the world and how much of a career they have. That's an opportunity that everybody has to make themselves known and make connections that frankly didn't use to exist.

Speaker 2 (02:03:23):

It really takes very little time per day. I will be totally straight is stupid as it sounds. I do it while I'm on the toilet. It's so easy to fit this into your life. I don't care how busy you are, half the time I read my Reddit feed, it's literally while I'm going to the bathroom and I make great connections with people and it ends up building up what I do a lot.

Speaker 1 (02:03:50):

I think that sometimes people don't know what to even talk about, but then that to me, when that's the problem, that makes me wonder, well, if you don't know how to connect with people or what to even talk about then why are you thinking about a podcast yet? Maybe you should still be working on that thing, developing your expertise and working on your life so that eventually you do have something to talk about. People starting a band before they know how to play anything at all.

Speaker 2 (02:04:19):

Yeah, that's exactly right, and I think that that is the hardest thing for a lot of people to hear is that you aren't enough of an expert or an interesting enough person, and yes, you could be the Joe Rogan who's just good at asking questions, but you do have to get good at that too, but it's not like he just sprung out of

Speaker 1 (02:04:39):

Nowhere.

Speaker 2 (02:04:40):

But there is an interesting thing that if you're like, you kind of would expect Joe Rogan after all these years to be a little bit better at asking some of these questions. Sometimes they're so bad, it's unbelievable, but at the same time there is this thing of that this is a person who's grown to have an understanding about so many things that they're able to carry on a conversation and know where to go, where so many people can't do that

Speaker 1 (02:05:09):

And he is an expert at one thing, which is the fighting commentary

Speaker 2 (02:05:15):

And I think the biggest other mistake people make and to your point about how much content should you make is that man, the well is going to run dry. And you know what also people get so mad about is when they've heard that same story 10 times. If it's the Tim Ferriss, how he got Lyme disease story or whatever it is, I remember I read a white paper that work paid for on why people hated who are avid podcast people, why they stop listening to a podcast and that was it. I'm always very conscious of, I'd rather put that on the cutting room four than leave it for a hair of insight when it's like I repeated myself. If our hosts repeat ourselves, I literally mark that to just get rid of it because I'd rather not do that. I'd rather have a 25 minute podcast that doesn't say the same thing I've said 3000 times.

Speaker 1 (02:06:11):

Yeah, I should stop talking about swine flu

Speaker 2 (02:06:15):

Somehow never bring it up again. Somehow I had somehow not heard that story until you texted me a month ago or something. But yeah, we all have that and trust me, actually, it's funny, I'm doing a podcast next week and the guy did a pre-interview with me and he was like, okay, so let's talk about your start in the business. I'm like, are you depending on your audience listening this or my audience? He's like, oh, I'm hoping you'll spread this. I'm like, my audience is going to hang themselves if they hear me talk about my start or if they hear me talk about depression one more time. They've heard it 60,000 times. Trust me, they don't need to hear yet again that I recorded bands in exchange for Doritos and Snapple.

Speaker 1 (02:07:00):

So was that kind of a shock to him?

Speaker 2 (02:07:02):

Oh yeah. I mean it's a really funny thing of you can always hear when you've ruined someone's day on a podcast, and I've been joking, two of the last two weeks I've turned to my girlfriend and been like, well ruin someone's day on this podcast. I did one recently where the guy was talking about building a fan base through Facebook ads. I was like, yeah, that doesn't work at a low scale and I have evidence on my side and I've been on so many campaigns that have tried to do this. I can lay out the assassination of why Facebook ads do not work when you don't have 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and I could literally watch this person wilt away inside and it was the same thing with this guy where I told him, you're not talking to me about how I started off. If you want my audience to enjoy it, this podcast

Speaker 1 (02:07:54):

Then has to do some actual work.

Speaker 2 (02:07:56):

And that was the thing is it's a very funny thing too. It's like that and it really is the hardest thing, and I'll tell you, I'm so far into developing things, but I've even had moments, we had a moment with Killed by desk a few weeks ago where I was like, man, I didn't see this part of it. Fuck, I got real depressed. I'm like, this idea, I believe in so much, what if this is wrong with it? And I hit the depression hump and then I started texting them and then we figured out how to get around that all we saw on the thing and I'm like, this is what we should be doing, and then we figured it out and now it's working great. The solution we came up with for that thing, and that is the thing, is you're going to hit in any development of things, you're going to hit some real bleak realities. You have to stare in the eye and go, oh shit, we really fucked up and didn't think about this. And then you got to think of a solution because that's what gets you to the next level of anything.

Speaker 1 (02:08:55):

You will reach those points, but what you do from there kind of determines everything.

Speaker 2 (02:09:00):

Literally. The sink or swim is always, I can even think of it with noise creators. Johnny and I were so excited about the idea of this and what we didn't see in advance was that while we had a lot of clients, the type of clients they were, the literally, and I don't want to say this about everybody, we worked with some great musicians, but a lot of them were the worst type of people looking for the worst types of things in producers, and it became very unenjoyable to try to deal with those people. So it didn't become very worth it a lot of the time because one, we're helping bands that we really don't want to help, and yet again, I helped a lot of bands I really proud of with that service, but the vast majority were horrible people who wanted deals and to scam people and try to fuck over producers, and it became such a fucking ordeal to deal with.

Speaker 1 (02:09:58):

Yeah, I can imagine. And sometimes you just won't know that that's part of the deal until you get started.

Speaker 2 (02:10:06):

And that is exactly it. It's like a funny thing of every good idea is why isn't somebody doing this the way I see it? But then there's also a lot of time it's because you don't see the flaw in what's there and that's somebody's tried it and wanted to hang themselves doing it.

Speaker 1 (02:10:24):

I mean, you can't really know unless you've tried it. And then even when people tell you, don't try this thing of this, generally people don't listen.

Speaker 2 (02:10:34):

Yeah, I mean it is funny. I think I was talking about that thing of that email I've sent to a couple of live streaming videos places is that I'm trying to learn a certain lesson from them, and you can get that by doing some interviewing and some m around and every you read that book, the Lean Startup or whatever, he basically is like fucking interview everybody who's done something similar to you and learned those lessons. That really is a real thing, and it's even like when we talking about, to go back to the start of this question, people are like, well, what do I do on message boards? I'm like, find someone who's barely ahead of you and just start talking to them about things because you know what? People who really don't know a lot love to do run their fucking mouths.

(02:11:20):

We know this from the message boards we frequent. It is stunning how somebody with a little bit of knowledge wants to talk like they're the world's biggest expert, but literally when you don't know anything, starting to just get that data and comb through it, one, you're probably going to build relationships. That person's going to get a little smarter and a little bit more humble over time after they get owned in the message boards 90 times about being a fucking idiot. And then two, you're going to gain a lot of information from it. So just be inquisitive, ask around. I mean, truthfully, the other thing I could say I've learned at 42 is most of my friends who I found at cringe, how many questions they asked are more successful than me.

Speaker 1 (02:12:01):

It's true though. The more questions you ask in the right questions you ask generally, the more successful you'll become.

Speaker 2 (02:12:07):

It's totally true.

Speaker 1 (02:12:09):

I always regret when I don't ask enough questions and miss an opportunity,

Speaker 2 (02:12:14):

And it's like that funny thing too is as you get older and you get a better network, you and I turned to each other all the time. I wrote you about SE O2 three months ago. I didn't know somebody that I wanted, and then you were like, talk to Finn. And then I hired the person Finn suggested, and I had written Finn too, and it's like you learn that thing over time that you'll have quality people that you know more than you on subjects, and I always write you, when I think of that, I'm like, yo, you probably know the answer to this, but when you don't know anything, go to a fucking message board and just start building bonds.

Speaker 1 (02:12:50):

Yeah, I completely agree. Well, Jesse, thank you for coming on. I'm glad we did this.

Speaker 2 (02:12:57):

Always the best conversation. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (02:12:59):

Dude, it's always great. I'm just glad we got to do this and I'm looking forward to the fourth episode.

Speaker 2 (02:13:07):

Yeah, there we go. Awesome.

Speaker 1 (02:13:09):

Okay, then another URM podcast episode in the bag. Please remember to share our episodes with your friends as well as post them to your Facebook, Instagram, or any social media you use. Please tag me at Eyal Levi URM audio, and of course, please tag my guests as well. Till next time, happy mixing. You've been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make suggestions and interact, visit

Speaker 2 (02:13:38):

URM Academy and press the podcast today.