JOSH SCHROEDER & DAVID GUNN: Ideas People vs Settings People, Writing “Kill ‘Em All”, & Using Pepper Spray on Vocals

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 Levy 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 post and a tag. Now let's get on with it. Hello everybody. Welcome to the URM podcast. I have two guests today, Mr. Josh Schrader and Mr. David Gunn. This is another one of those producer artist combo episodes that are some of my favorites to do get to talk to Josh and David and explore their working relationship. Josh is actually on Nail the Mix this month, February, 2021, and he's obviously a producer, songwriter, mixer and engineer, and he opened his studio, random Awesome in 2008. He's worked with bands like for Fallen Dreams, the Carl Luer Morale, Tallah King, eight one oh and a bunch of others. And David Gunn is the front man lyricist and one of the primary songwriters for King eight one Oh and his side project. David. It's a very interesting artist and was very excited to get to talk to the two of them. So anyways, I introduce you, Josh Schrader and David Gunn, David Gunn, and Josh Schrader. Welcome to the URM podcast. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:02:31):

Thanks for having us.

Speaker 1 (00:02:33):

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm a fan of your guys' work together, have been for a while. I'm curious how you guys even met in the first place.

Speaker 2 (00:02:45):

Well, that was through the trash bag. Someone was taking out the trash and that ended up being fortuitous.

Speaker 3 (00:02:54):

It was rough because I didn't want to meet anyone and I also didn't care for any introductions. I wasn't trying to do anything. It was more just a humoring and I thought this guy has to be bozo if he lives in Michigan and I haven't heard of him, so I don't know why I humored it. I didn't have great rapport. The introduction with any part of the process, I was not feeling at all. So it was through someone else had introduced us and I went only as an entertainment thing as far as if I showed up, then they would stop asking. I thought I could go maybe get a cup of coffee then leave, and it would be pretty simple and painless.

Speaker 1 (00:03:38):

Was it because you didn't want a producer or you just thought that they were just whoever you had met already left a bad impression, so you were not interested in meeting more? I

Speaker 3 (00:03:52):

Tried to just protect whatever, I'll call it a genius since I'm on the phone with Josh and then since we can speak like that, I wouldn't do it if he weren't on, but just trying to protect it, I guess. I'm not really interested in meeting people or having conversations or I don't really care about all that stuff because nine out of 10 people aren't worth meeting, so I just didn't want to sit through those cut and dried conversations, I guess is what it would be. Of course, I knew we would need someone to do our album, but like I said, I was thinking, I don't know this, I never heard of this dude before, so we apparently live an hour apart. He must not be that good. I

Speaker 1 (00:04:40):

Understandably skeptical. Yeah. Josh, were you aware that he didn't really want to be there when you guys met?

Speaker 2 (00:04:48):

Oh yeah. Yeah, I was well aware. He hated everybody before I met him, so

Speaker 1 (00:04:53):

I was prepared. Is that normal for you, bands being I guess standoffish or not really into it when you have that first introduction, I imagine? Not usually.

Speaker 2 (00:05:05):

Oh, with me.

Speaker 1 (00:05:06):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (00:05:06):

No, I get along with just about anybody. I'm a chameleon socially. I can get along with really anybody, whether I like 'em or not. It's something that I'm thinking I'm decent enough at. It's

Speaker 1 (00:05:17):

Part of the job, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (00:05:19):

But naturally, I am pretty introverted and maybe that's one of the reasons David and I clicked right away. I can feign social niceties and I enjoy it. I make the best of it and that's why the bands thing ended up turning into the producer thing. I just didn't like being on the road and didn't really playing shows that got old. So stay at home and work on music. Yeah, I'd rather do that. But that was, I think that's something that I saw right away is that he was just introvert. I'm like, yeah, this is more someone who's really more at the heart of my speed.

Speaker 3 (00:05:52):

I would say that that's the real answer is because just the very cutting, bleeding edge of suicidally depressed introversion doesn't really lend me to many more taking on more relationships. But I would say when you ask him just to end it with a lighthearted backhand would be, of course everyone is excited to meet him because they see the genius that he gets credit for that he's created with me. So everyone is starkly mad to try to meet him and just ask him, what is it about so-and-so that, and he can't give the answer because he doesn't possess the philosopher's stone that is in my possession.

Speaker 1 (00:06:41):

I mean, obviously you didn't want to be there. It's like, fuck it. Maybe it'll get people to stop suggesting things, but obviously it was a good decision to go. You guys have a wide body of work together. What was it that made you give working together a shot?

Speaker 3 (00:06:58):

Well, it's contrary to all the red flags, the things that mattered most. First off, his moniker is random. Awesome. So I immediately hate that because I'm just thinking there's nothing random about what I'm doing, buddy. So this is a very cold calculated maneuver and if you randomly happen to be awe inspiring or whatever, well, I'm not, I'm awe inspiring at will. So I was thinking, this is going to suck. And when we started talking, I realized it was not really indicative to the actual what was going on. I wasn't sold at the first chat, but I think it was by the second one. And it was just because he was talking about, I guess there's, I don't want to say jargon or shop talk or there's a certain attention or focus I guess displaced. There's a displaced type of emphasis on things that matter to me that he resonated with.

(00:07:56):

So when people do the jargon or the shop talk, and I've met maybe a couple dozen producers or engineers that we're supposed to do our first record or our second or whatever, just those conversations, those introductions or whatever by acquaintances or worse, it's bullshit. When we were doing our first record, we said, if you want to do a record with us, come out to Flint and we'll come to this drug house and we'll see how you feel about doing the record. And it was just a bunch of pansies. It was a bunch of clowns that would say this stupid shit and they just didn't really understand what was going on. I was like, I can't let this square make the record that we want to make. You know what I mean? I think they were there because they happened to be in the room when something was happening. And if you do that enough times, people think you have a portfolio, which is basically what the music industry is, but their emphasis was just misplaced. It wasn't on anything I cared about. Their stories were stupid. When someone tells you a story and you can tell they told it three times, I'm automatically out if someone asks

Speaker 1 (00:09:01):

Like it's on demand stories.

Speaker 3 (00:09:03):

Yeah, it's like that doll that you pull the string in the back and they have like 40 sayings, but they're all very disingenuine and we didn't talk about any of those. So we were talking about ideas. I guess the simplest way to put it, what we always say is we are ideas people, and most people are settings. People they dig through while they watch videos online to figure out is what's the RMS? What's the compression? Oh, you have your gates, you have your set. I put that at six. No, no, no, we comp it three. Oh no, it's two db. It's supposed to be Oh, no, no. When you're, it's like settings guy, get the fuck out of the room.

(00:09:38):

There's some real shit that's about to go down. It's above your pay grade. You're not really, we don't want to hear about settings. I don't want to hear about 'em and distress or just don't talk to me about stupid shit. If my godchild knows of what it is and you are talking to me about it and you're a 40-year-old man, it's just like, get the fuck out of here. I don't want to care about how your record was so sick because you put 30 guitar layers on a fucking break. If you say breakdown to me, then we're never going to talk again. So he didn't push any of those buttons though.

Speaker 1 (00:10:12):

Josh, do you think that lots of producers will revert to the preset talk because they don't understand the art side?

Speaker 2 (00:10:22):

Yeah, I think so. I think because all they understand is just the technical side. As an engineer now I have to know that stuff. I don't have any assistants and any interns, nothing full time. But you don't need to talk about it. Yeah, I don't like talking about it because to me that's, it's not the idea. David was saying, I'm more interested in the idea. What's the idea of the song? What are the lyrics, what's the vibe we're trying to hit here? What do we need to run it through? We need to run it through 30 stressors. Okay, sure. If that's the sound, then sure, we will haul 'em out. We'll rent 'em, whatever we need to do. And that's one of the reasons why I don't like having assistances or interns. I remember listening to one of your podcasts Think it was, it was with Gig Garth and he was talking about when they get assistance into the studio and new people and one of the first things they teach 'em is how to hang and how to not shit all over the mood of the room.

(00:11:12):

And I think that's what David's talking about is you come into the studio and just, oh man, check out this little guitar. Let do a little lick here. Lemme tell about this story about this band and this song we did and it, it's nothing to do with David and what he's trying to do. You're not listening. I have a lot of sayings. I got these. It's the me show. Yeah. A big saying that I have that I try to live by is listen to your artists. Most producers, what do you mean? No, I mean talking to them and hearing where they're coming from. Listen to music. Yeah, sure. But listen to them. Talk to them. Where are these ideas coming from? What is the goal for the song? And like I said, yeah, we could talk settings and some bands are like that. Some guys I'll work with and they're just gear nerds and I can nerd out.

(00:12:00):

Sure. Maybe that's part of me also being a bit of a social comedian. I can just pivot to the left and dude, I can talk to you all day about engineering stuff. If someone's really passionate about it, cool, then we can go that route. But David's not that David likes, we talk about ideas and what, I mean, what's the point of the song? What is the goal? What is the one takeaway thing and what are all the other layers and subtleties about it and how do we bring that out? I give him shit all the time. There's this dude, you write 30 songs in one song. We need to simplify some of the stuff. So my job is always to try and bring out and highlight these different ideas. A lot of good stuff going on here that I think a lot of people don't or they kind of miss. I think if you just listening even somewhat casually, even somewhat focused for most people,

Speaker 1 (00:12:48):

Do you think that being able to hang is even teachable? I remember that episode and I remember him talking about that and I mean, I believe what he was saying, but at the same time, part of me is thinking, man, people either have a vibe or they don't.

Speaker 3 (00:13:06):

To me it's awareness. So no, in my opinion, you can't teach awareness. It's the difference to me between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence is memorized information that you can repeat and get a good jeopardy score. It's not wisdom or knowledge. It's not applicable and usable. It's not tat. So awareness is something that you can read all the Buddhist books you want to in the world, but you can't have true awareness. And when you have awareness, you come to it on your own, on your own. Your friend is not into awareness and then bestows it upon you or tells you to read X, Y or Z or watch this YouTube video. You get it by coming to it yourself. And I think it's a gradient and it's nuanced and some people are more aware than others and some people are most aware, but I don't think you teach that because I think it's a wisdom. I think you have to come to that and the way to come to it is through experiences and you either had 'em or you didn't, but maybe Garth was kind of inducing an experience that's entirely possible. Perhaps it would work, perhaps it wouldn't. Perhaps it would be maybe at the start of something or the end of something, maybe one of four experiences they would have to have. There's no real formula. The point is I think most people are not aware.

Speaker 2 (00:14:24):

If I remember his solution was just shut the fuck up. That was the thing he taught them first day. But that

Speaker 1 (00:14:30):

Is a great solution. That's a fantastic solution

Speaker 2 (00:14:34):

For lots of things. It's one of those things. Yeah, I mean I get it. You're excited and you're in a studio with somebody that's worked with rage against the machine and his dad's done Pink Floyd and stuff, so I get it. You're excited and you know what I mean, but when people are here and they're trying to get their ideas out and you're just punishing, it really sucks the vibe out of the room. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (00:14:57):

The reason why I think I hate it is because punishing is pretty selfish. If I'm coming to you and I wasn't necessarily to begin with, like I said, it was an unsavory introduction, but the stupid idiom that everyone repeats, the platitude of two ears, one mouth, but we all say it and we all repeat it, but no one really actually acts it out. And that's another example of pretty much exactly what we're saying is if you're going to someone say Garth, which he does good records and you're going to him, I admire him to some degree or whatever he has done. Why would you feel like you have the soapbox or the show? Why wouldn't, part of what I would go for if I were going that route was I got to get as much out of this as possible. You don't really get things when you're talking. You don't get experiences in anything in life. You could be climbing a mountain, like talking to yourself is not going to just bring awe over you talking doesn't work. It's not a good, it's useless and stupid and you shouldn't be doing it when you're in the presence of someone that is light years ahead of you.

Speaker 2 (00:16:03):

Yeah, I think it's nerves probably. Yeah, like you said, it's subconscious selfishness, it's nerves, it's all these things. You want to bring something to the table. It's just like when you clearly, you know what I mean? You've just started and stuff. Yeah, I get it. But

Speaker 1 (00:16:19):

What they say about introverts versus extroverts is that introverts generate their energy on their own and being around other people sucks it out of them, and so then they need to go to their own little world and recharge it and extroverts are the opposite. They actually get energized by being around other people, but if you're too wrapped up in your own bullshit to recognize that in somebody else, you're probably going to turn them off from talking to you very, very quickly, especially if they're introverted. I think it's just a misreading of the

Speaker 3 (00:16:56):

Situation.

Speaker 2 (00:16:56):

Yeah, true.

Speaker 3 (00:16:57):

Yeah. I think there's something also to be said, an afterthought. I've kind of sat around thinking about this, but extroversion speaks to, there's a Dr. Krishna Erta quote that says It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. I think that is the extroversion condition ad nauseum when people say people get their energy from other people and extroverts are this, that and the other thing. Extroversion only seems to be something positive or optimistic or manageable or usable in a society that in my opinion is sick. It's like today you have the wake up at 4:00 AM guy and do 17 pushups and you don't know I'm reading a Kindle while I'm driving to work. I got an audio book when I'm jogging and I'm doing all these performance things and all these hyper performance things and all these life hacking as they call them, it doesn't mean they're inherently good

Speaker 1 (00:17:54):

And to what end is all that stuff Anyways.

Speaker 3 (00:17:56):

Yeah, say I do X, Y, and Z and I got my YouTube channel smash that like button as follow and subscribe and thumbs up. I make 3 million this year. We would call that successful.

Speaker 2 (00:18:06):

I think it's busy work

Speaker 3 (00:18:08):

Exactly

Speaker 2 (00:18:09):

To fill a void that you're not sure why it's missing. To me, it's kind of symptom of someone that doesn't know what they want. I know a lot of people like this and they do a million things. They do the clothing line, they do the photography, they do the streaming, the twitch and all this stuff because there's a void. It's the jack of all trades, right? That's the cliche. But why is that? Why do people do that? And I think it's, yeah, you don't have what you want to do actually outlines. So the thing we talk about is beginners novelty. So there's a million things that that can hold your attention for a limited amount of time because when you start them, your output is zero. So today, let's say I want to be a country singer, okay? I've never sang country before, but my output would all of a sudden go from zero to a hundred. So I feel real good about myself now if I do 2, 3, 10 songs, how much will I improve? And you start hitting a bit of a plateau, it's

Speaker 3 (00:19:00):

Going to be 10% once you hit 10. Exactly

Speaker 2 (00:19:03):

Right. So then most people give it up because, well, it's not what I want. I mean, if you really wanted it, you would stick with it like that 0.005% improvement is something that will, yes, you will be well aware of it. You'll pick up on it. You'll see those subtle differences. You'll observe the other examples of greatness around you and chip away and chip away at it, but when you don't really have your goals or your happiness defined, then it becomes just kind of a buffet and you're just taking a little spoonful off the top of everything without really being satisfied at the end of it. Well,

Speaker 1 (00:19:35):

You just said makes me think a lot of newbie gains at the gym.

Speaker 3 (00:19:39):

Exactly. Oh

Speaker 1 (00:19:40):

Yeah. Same thing. People are going from basically if they've never lifted or worked out, they're going from no strength to strength. So they experience transformations, minor transformations, very, very quickly because again, they're going from zero to something in the first place, but then once a year out, that's when the super hard work actually begins and the progress slows down. And then that's where if someone actually wants it, that's when it gets tested. There's this book by Seth Godin called The Dip. It's exactly about that. It's, there's always that initial period of being into something and then the real test is what happens after that initial period,

Speaker 3 (00:20:25):

Which isn't always good or bad, stick it either stick out. You could just be indicative to how much into fitness is this person? You talked about gains from zero to one year, but if you want to talk about taking this to the highest level, bone density and things like that are not happening for six to eight years out or training or training. A muscle density fiber might be two and a half years, and this is for a single muscle group. That really is a testament to how far you actually want to take this thing and if your goal is to get in shape, maybe you don't want to make your bones more denser, you don't want to do 10 years. Some people don't, but I do think we do live in as Josh as the Buffet society, I think this contraption rewards those things and I think most of the time people are to keep using the shitty platitudes that we continue to repeat. They're putting the cart before the horse because they're talking about things like sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber in their garage so they can get their swim time down when their swim time is four minutes outside of the 3000th place athletic swimmer in the state. You know what I mean? You're thinking because Michael Phelps does it and when his 1000000th of a second means he's the best in the world or not, that's giving you maybe 100th of a second, but you happen to be 40000th, get off the computer,

Speaker 1 (00:21:53):

Get to work.

Speaker 3 (00:21:53):

Yeah, swim.

Speaker 1 (00:21:55):

That's that awareness you're talking about. It's interesting too. I feel like you can't buy your way into things like fitness or being good at something. You can't buy a chamber and then suddenly be world-class at something. There's really only one way to become world-class at anything, which is don't do anything else. Just do this thing and fucking focus on it for a really, really long time. And that's just not nearly as enticing or sexy as getting romantic a chamber. Yeah. It's not as romantic as getting a chamber and putting it in your garage and doing what Michael Phelps does.

Speaker 3 (00:22:34):

They don't want to wake up at 4:00 AM and do four or five hours before noon. They want to get a chamber because

Speaker 2 (00:22:42):

It's instant satisfaction. I hear it all the time of like, oh, what sitting you use for this? I mean, that has nothing to do with it. It has nothing to do with it. I was doing great records with just awful, awful gear for many years. You remember all the sharpies and markers that were separating my rack here at the old joint,

Speaker 3 (00:23:03):

A system that was held together by

Speaker 2 (00:23:06):

Bubble gum and hopes and dreams. I mean, you could take, you know what I mean? As someone that's, you see it all the time with modern music and with Billie Eilish and stuff like that where it's made in the house, A lot of hits are just being made on laptops. You know what I mean? You could take someone, I love that. Someone that's mediocre and throw 'em in the best studio in the world and it's going to be awful. And I had that moment, and that was one of the reasons I realized, oh, I can actually do this because a friend of mine went to a nice local studio. It sounded so awful, and I was like, my piece of shit computer sounds way better than this. So there's more to it. It's the person, it's the person behind the board or behind the keyboard or whatever it is, has nothing very, very little to do with gear itself.

Speaker 1 (00:23:47):

That's actually why recording studios, those mega studios have zero value. Even though they have millions of dollars of gear in them, they can't keep 'em open. They can't sell them. They have zero value because at the end of the day, we all know what happens when a shitty local band or something goes to that multimillion dollar studio. They still come out with a shitty product. The studio

Speaker 2 (00:24:10):

Itself doesn't matter. In that way, it is kind of good because it does really hold the mirror up to you and be like, yeah, you suck. It's just polish shit. These are all the best microscopes that audio has to offer, and they are showing you in your fantasy, and when you're jamming around a home with your friends and you think you're some rockstar and then you actually record it in a place. I mean, like you said, it is kind of sad about these studios that they, I mean, it's tough because there is a value to it for sure in just like there's value to film and shooting film and movies like that, but

Speaker 1 (00:24:43):

Well, yeah, if Christopher Nolan's making the movie,

Speaker 2 (00:24:46):

Right, but if you're, again, like David was saying, put the cart in front of the horse. If you're worrying about the medium and about the tools, and that becomes the focus is that's your idea. I mean, that's the boxer ideas go into

Speaker 3 (00:24:59):

Diminishing returns as we always say.

Speaker 2 (00:25:01):

Right?

Speaker 3 (00:25:01):

Your idea can't be on the shelf at the store for 23 grand. That's one thing that we always say is aside from diminishing returns would be the principle, but I cannot stand when someone says, if X then Z. If only X, then I would be Z. Or if only I had this, then I would be, that shit is such bullshit. It's never true

Speaker 2 (00:25:26):

Symptom of procrastination, I think. Right?

Speaker 1 (00:25:29):

It's easier to say, if I only had this external thing that's out of my reach, then I'd be able to do this thing. That's so awesome. It's easier to say that than to admit to yourself and be like, maybe I'm just not that good at this. I need to work harder.

Speaker 2 (00:25:46):

It's really a great way to skirt accountability is because as soon as you say that, oh, if only if only I could clear out my spare bedroom, all this shit everywhere, it's so messy, then I can start my grow op, then I can start making this cash just like, well, right. Don't,

Speaker 3 (00:26:02):

Whenever someone says that to me, I just, especially coming from a place where I come, which was hell, I'm not willing to listen to who I consider a bunch of Nancy. I can just dweebs. You know what I mean? Just basically have a silver spoon and beyond. Tell me I'm so lucky because X, and it's just like you want to see luck. Luck is how bad I am going to hurt you when I'm going to stop. It's like luck, your luck. It comes back to awareness.

Speaker 1 (00:26:33):

Do you even believe that luck is a thing?

Speaker 3 (00:26:35):

We always talk about it constantly, but I believe both of us believe it's a thing. We just define it as different.

Speaker 2 (00:26:42):

It really, to me ties into chaos theory or let's say you buy a lottery ticket and you have a one in a million chance. Well, someone's going to get it.

Speaker 1 (00:26:49):

It's more than 1 million. It's like one in 200 million,

Speaker 2 (00:26:53):

Whatever that odd is, someone gets it, right? So are they lucky? Are you just a product of natural born chaos, essentially? Are some people luckier than others? I mean, again, what's the dumb saying? A broken clock is right twice a day, right? So yeah, sure. The odds are that someone is going to have things that are perceived as lucky happen to them more

Speaker 3 (00:27:13):

Often favorable in this universe.

Speaker 2 (00:27:15):

Sure. Yeah. Or let's say artists that, oh man, the timing is just right so that this particular sound really popped off. Whereas if they would've come out five years earlier or five years later, nothing would've happened.

Speaker 3 (00:27:28):

Ridley Scott. What? Ridley Scott, you're ahead of the curve or behind the curve. Either way, you missed the mark, right?

Speaker 2 (00:27:34):

Yeah. You're not, I think what he says, you're not making money if you're ahead of the curve, too far ahead of the curve, too far behind it, you ain't making cash

Speaker 3 (00:27:40):

And you can't control that. No.

Speaker 2 (00:27:42):

Right.

Speaker 3 (00:27:43):

I always take my hands off the wheel when it comes down to things we can't control. We talk about this with each other all the time, and we define the unknown as luck because it's easier just to say, look, not as a blame game or anything, but there are things happening in the unforeseeable universe that we can't no touch or control, and I think that is what we call luck. When you try to keep your head in the right spot and you try to keep your thoughts in the right direction, you try to keep your intentions good, but I have a complete blindness to if something does good in the world, say business-wise, whatever, I have a really hard time caring if someone sells 4 million records. I don't think they're 4 million times better than the guy that sold one. It's not indicative at all to anything.

(00:28:37):

That's when I said it's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society. The Krishna Murti quote that is that too, it goes back to the lifehacking people because this particular society has rewarded you with what this particular society proclaims as great success. It doesn't mean anything. You don't get anything. You're not owed anything. You're not better than anyone. And I think this about myself as well. When people say whatever it is, people say to me, it's like, I thought I was the universe before you did. Before you fucking people knew who I was. I had this already. You didn't give me anything, so you can't take anything away from me. This whole thing that you think I have or whatever this attention that you feel like giving me sometimes good or bad or whatever. I didn't care when I didn't have it, and I don't care now.

(00:29:34):

I don't care if anyone takes it away because I was sitting at home making music before there was any such thing as a reward or I'm not motivated by people in a world that I can't stand full of people that I hate, that I don't respect, love or admire or want anything to do with. There's no extrinsic type of material motivation that gets me to lift a finger. And I say this kind of in the song Red Queen that we just put out the video for a couple months ago is like, I don't want to say you can trust me because I don't care if you don't care about trust, but I don't have any ill intention motivations. My hand's not being twisted a certain way. I don't have any political alliances products to sell. I'm completely uncompromised because I don't care about anyone outside of my circle. It doesn't matter if someone comes down to me today, which they've already done this and said, you'll never play a show again, wow, I'll probably sleep longer today, then I don't care. There's nothing in this world that someone can give or take that's going to move me.

Speaker 2 (00:30:50):

I think just that whole attitude, what you're just talking about, I think that's exactly the reason why I was immediately interested in working on stuff together because that's, to me, like authenticity when it comes to expression.

Speaker 1 (00:31:04):

It's the right reasons,

Speaker 2 (00:31:05):

Right? I have this conversation with bands all the time because you hear it, oh, sell out so-and-so's a sell out. Oh, I don't want to sell out, et cetera, and I tell 'em, the second you show your art to somebody, you have sold out. You've sold out socially, right? I'm showing you this piece of paper that I drew on David, because I want you to see it now socially I've sold out to you because I want you to see it. So on some level, we all do, but it's a gradient. It's a great, it's a how much do you want to compromise? How much social gratitude do you want? How much monetary rewards do you want? You know what I mean? You're saying the society, you have to love the society that you're in to be into the rewards that they deem fit to give to people who they deem to be successful.

(00:31:48):

So if you're not into that, you know what I mean? That whole structure in that system, it's not you. What I mean, and some people are the opposite. So after the gratitude, the compliments, the reinforcements and the encouragement and stuff, and you know what I mean? It lacks, it's like, aren't you making this for yourself first and foremost? That's why I do what I do. I didn't go into recording because I want to make a career out of it. I just did it and people paid me enough until I just could quit my job. I'm like, cool. I'd rather do this than push carts at Target or something. So it wasn't something I sought out with money. I want to do these records. I can make some money. I don't really care. You know what I mean? And I haven't cared for years. It's paid for my bills for 10 years now, and I haven't had to really worry.

(00:32:36):

It gets thin and thick here and there, but at the end of the day, I'd still do this. Whether people come here or not, people don't show up. Okay, well then now I'm grabbing the guitar and doing some things, but to circle it back around, yeah, authenticity is something that I'm always trying to get out of people. With David, it's easy because it's there. So now I just need to highlight it with some of the people. You kind of have to fish it out of them. You kind have to get them out of their shell a little bit.

(00:33:06):

Some of the new, I mean, if a band comes in, they've never really been to a studio before and they're just really in their shell and they're nervous because whatever, this and that, and they're trying to do it right, and a lot of it comes from a good place, but you have to, it's that you got to sing like no one's watching. You have to write for yourself first and foremost, and that just gives something that's interesting. If you're writing for other people, you're guessing what they want. Oh, this is I think what you want to hear. And it's that Thomas, what's the Thomas Edison thing, or no, Henry Ford, if I asked people what they want, yeah, they would've said faster horses. Exactly. I mean, cater to yourself first and foremost. Write for yourself. I mean, you'll be way more fundamentally happy that way. Anyhow. Maybe that's another thing David and I just click on because I'm not interested in doing anything really besides the things that I enjoy. People talk about guilty pleasures. I don't believe in that at all. I'm not guilty about shit. There's no guilt. I like what I like,

Speaker 3 (00:34:02):

Right? I said, someone said something the other day like Creed was a guilty pleasure. I love Creed. I don't give a fuck with these. What is guilty about it, Brett?

Speaker 2 (00:34:10):

Shame still bangs.

Speaker 3 (00:34:11):

Right, exactly. Okay. Let me say, I like my own prison and shit, the album, but what would I care?

Speaker 2 (00:34:17):

Right.

Speaker 3 (00:34:18):

I am always not guilty for who we don't ever admit guilt in where I'm from, you fucking cooks.

Speaker 1 (00:34:30):

Do you think that this could be one of the reasons that, I mean, besides underlying mental illnesses, but do you think that this is one of the reasons that super successful people will throw themselves off a bridge or kill themselves because they think they're in it for all these external rewards? They think that that's going to fill the void, and then they get those rewards and they don't matter. They don't mean shit. And then it's like, where do I go from here?

Speaker 2 (00:35:01):

Yeah. It's something that I read about. I don't know what state it was based in, but they said something along the lines of Once you make 50,000 or 70,000 a year,

Speaker 3 (00:35:10):

I think it was 70.

Speaker 2 (00:35:11):

Yeah. I mean, from my point of view, I've made way less than that, and I've been about as happy as I am today. It hasn't really changed my happiness since I was teenager, since I can really remember being happy and into things has been even keel, and you have good days and bad days, anybody things come along, things out of your control or things you do that you wish you had done something else, et cetera, et cetera. But my overall temperament, yeah, it hasn't really changed success. Sure. Oh, you're doing recordings for a living. Yeah, it's great. I enjoy it. I am spending my eight hours a day in a way that I find fulfilling and it's entertaining to me. I find it challenging. It's good. I enjoy it, but my general overall happiness is it way more than when I worked at Target. Yeah, the bills are paid.

(00:35:56):

I have a little bit less stress. You know what I mean? I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff as much as I used to. But your overall, just deep down satisfaction? No. No, because again, I've been catering to myself as long as I can remember, and maybe it's just a symptom of just, again, solitude, wanting to be alone. It's just like I just want to be by myself. So as far back as I can remember, I was entertaining myself, drawing, doing whatever, minding my own business, doing my own thing, and finding satisfaction there as opposed to in other people. I have many great friends, but at the end of the day, they're not you and they have their own motivations and they'll let you down and they'll do other things, but if you can really find satisfaction from within, to me, it's the most constant thing and consistent thing that you can rely on. You can rely on yourself.

Speaker 3 (00:36:45):

Yeah. Do

Speaker 2 (00:36:46):

You think that

Speaker 1 (00:36:46):

People are afraid to do that of the inherent risk? Oh, sure. You might have to give up some external rewards if you really, really follow that.

Speaker 2 (00:36:55):

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I don't have many close friends. David's one of my closest friends. I don't hang around with much people at all.

Speaker 3 (00:37:03):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:37:04):

I'd rather be alone. Like my wife Sarah, she's my best friend, and 99.99% of the time, if I'm hanging out with somebody, it's with her. This is before the pandemic, so everything going on right now suits me just fine. It's one of those things, it's a quality over quantity thing. I find the person that I want to spend time with and that's it. I don't need to spend time with other people. I don't hang out with family and friends occasionally, but I'm way more happy and satisfied. I've got an hourglass,

Speaker 1 (00:37:33):

I call it the hourglass effect whenever I have to be around friends and family. The moment I get into that situation, it just, the hourglass starts going, there's this period where it's like Done. I got to get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 3 (00:37:47):

I feel

Speaker 2 (00:37:47):

That, yeah,

Speaker 1 (00:37:48):

I'm very

Speaker 3 (00:37:48):

Much like that glass has already flipped and I act like I flipped it, but I didn't. So it's already done and I don't go. I think it's a couple things though. On your last question, I don't really know about other people and their problems because I always, when you asked the question, I was thinking, well, no, not me. I don't care what anyone thinks, and I'm suicidal every hour of the day, but I think that's probably a mental health problem, but I think a lot of people get so obsessed with this game that we are talking about, and I think someone not so well-grounded is chasing these external, we'll call it the hedonic treadmill. That's what it's called. It's these externalities and interesting introspection on this type of thinking is like the actor Jim Carrey, he talks about this shit a lot. He's a very enlightened dude, actually.

(00:38:33):

It's this hedonic treadmill, and I think some of these people do throw themselves off buildings when they realize, I waited in line for the show all this time, and when I got in the show, it was not such a good show. When you get it self-obsessed with this game, I think weak people do it, but someone again, that's not so grounded, you think this game is life. You get so obsessed with these externalities that you believe they're real, and when you accomplish 300 things and make 400 million and you're da, da, da da, and you have a breakdown, like I said, I really don't know. Maybe someone has problems, but one of those problems could be the illness that you get to believing that all of this is a real thing. You were supposed to get X, Y, and Z at the end of the race when you got to the end of the race, you were given X, Y, and Z, and your heart doesn't fill up though, and it's still the same, and you just kind of put X, Y, and Z on the table, and you still lay down next to the old lady.

(00:39:39):

You hate wake up to the life that you can't stand, don't like to look into the mirror and go do the thing that really doesn't reward you because youre reward and all your value was placed in something unimaginable.

Speaker 2 (00:39:53):

I think it's an awareness thing.

Speaker 3 (00:39:54):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:39:54):

Yeah. I think it's an awareness thing because if you're not aware and you're not really paying attention, like, oh, I want to be again the rock star. I want to be a rock star. Well, if you're not really aware and you're not really paying attention, everything about that's going to shock you. You know what I mean? There's so many other steps and so many other things about it that just never occurred to you

Speaker 3 (00:40:12):

Because ignorant to every aspect. You're saying you want to be something, you have no idea what it is.

Speaker 2 (00:40:18):

You just want the rewards. When people tell you, oh, yeah, it'd be great to be your own boss, and just like, yeah, you want your ego whacked off basically. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, it'd be great to be your own boss and work from home. It's just like, yeah, you want to do taxes. You know what I mean? You want answer to every single thing that comes through. It's another reason I don't have manager or assistant. I'm just a control freak, and I know that, again, it'll get done if I do it. I'd rather have a more lean operating machine than a bunch of employees that, again, it could be just the introvert thing and the loner hermit thing, but I just, yeah, if the studio gets bigger than a one man operation, then I'd rather just do something else. But yeah, like what David was saying, yeah, you're unsatisfied because you're chasing after something you haven't defined, and then once you get it, it's different, completely different than your bullshit imagination of what you thought it was. So it's wholly unsatisfying and yeah, I think that's a huge problem for a lot of people when they're chasing their dream, whatever their business or whatever success they're chasing after,

Speaker 1 (00:41:17):

Well, nothing ends up being what you thought it would be.

Speaker 3 (00:41:20):

I was going to say, I never tell people to not chase it because sometimes when you find it, you find what you really want and you realize that was a stepping stone. So I never tell people, this isn't what you really want. When they tell me what they really want, it doesn't sound anything like this, but I never say, I don't recommend this, that, or the other thing, because sometimes getting what you want is only the beginning. It's the start or it's a stepping stone, or I got everything I wanted and I realized that thing that I was after, which I didn't define, so I didn't really ever even know if I did have it to begin with, wasn't the end. It still actually wasn't anything to do with the direction I really needed to be heading. It's almost like getting to your destination and realizing you had the wrong map.

Speaker 1 (00:42:10):

Do you know what you're after now?

Speaker 3 (00:42:11):

Nothing.

Speaker 1 (00:42:12):

Did it take a while to get to that?

Speaker 3 (00:42:14):

Two answers? They're polar opposites. When I was young, I was so hopeless that I never dreamed that anything was possible because no one that I've ever known has any success, period. And by success I mean something as simple as graduating high school, but as I grew older, I cared less and less about the world and anything that I guess could be given or taken away from me and the place that I come from, a lot of people die every day. It's almost as if this world that we keep talking about, it really doesn't mean anything to me. Like an 11 month old kid just got shot outside, 13 people dead in 10 days. I always say this shit, and people are like, roll their eyes. But when you live in this world, anything that we're talking about is a funny joke that is just like, oh, yeah, maybe I'll think about that in humor myself and be entertained on the weekends with my friends that people care about this, but where I come from, nobody cares about that.

(00:43:12):

That's the last thing that anyone gives a fuck about. But from the intellectual side and the intelligent answer to give you, as I grew older and learned more things and had more experiences and read more books and tried to do more thinking and really meditate on the idea of what you asked, no, I find out that it made perfect sense, not for the reasons that I had that life was so cheap and I'm sitting here and maybe a bullet will come through the house and today and that's not going to be a big deal, and no one really cares, and Diane's not a big deal, so I'm not really after anything because I never really was, and the things that I like doing now are the things that we've talked about, but I realize I'm unimportant and the things that I like doing, I doing them for myself so much that I couldn't care if I ever do 'em again.

(00:44:07):

If no, I just don't care. It's, I think desiring, I have goals and we always talk about ideas and future things because normal, but as far as desiring an outcome or an effect or a result, I don't think we ever, when we sit down to make a song, we have goals as far as what is the character of this, what's the spirit? What we usually, what I'm trying to do is do something a little bit new, which is why you might have witnessed us commit career suicide about 18 times, but it's because no one cares. We're just trying to do new things. And sometimes people perceive those things as really bad or really distasteful or a really bad business decision or a really bad social move or a really bad idea. But I'm just curious in kind of chasing this thing, and we always come up with what do we want to do with this song or so creation, I got this spirit, I got this vibration, I got this, whatever.

(00:45:11):

But we never are like, we joke, of course, because I am the biggest star in the universe ui, and this guy that records me is just some hack who likes ICP and lives in Canada. But that's an odd combination. But the truth is we don't sit and say, this is the one, we don't roll up my sleeve. We do it jokingly. I don't want to say that we sit and we sit and say this. I imagine Josh is grinning because he's thinking that is exactly what we do, but it's joking. We don't have a desired bolstering. Yeah, we're just feeling ourselves. It's not real.

Speaker 2 (00:45:53):

It's funny when you bring that up though, but sometimes I think because we're always joking around about this kind of stuff, it reminds me of just calling your shots in some ways, and I think the act of doing it, of calling your shots can actually make your shots come to fruition. What do you mean by calling your shots?

Speaker 3 (00:46:12):

I'm an eight ball corner pocket type shit.

Speaker 2 (00:46:15):

Ah,

Speaker 3 (00:46:15):

Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:46:16):

Right. So calling your shot now, because you've called it and you've manifested it into, you verbalize it, it's out there. The audio waves are bouncing off the wall. So now you're thinking about it in a different way. And I remember it was when I was writing for Suicide King, I think we were going for breakfast somewhere. I'm just, I'm feeling it. I'm calling. I feel the wave coming. I didn't feel the wave coming. It is bullshit. I'm just saying it. I'm just to bolster myself. Exactly. So I feel the wave coming

Speaker 3 (00:46:44):

And then

Speaker 2 (00:46:44):

I'll get charged. Then you talk, right? And then I get charged. I'm like, oh, wait a second. Maybe it is coming. And then you sit down and then next thing I know I got 30 new songs that they all just pop out because you started the momentum, right? Even though I guess a bit of fake it till you make it in a short term kind of thing, but just verbalizing, like they say when you read aloud for example, you absorb things differently. So maybe it's somewhere in there, a modern jackass it, but maybe there's something in there, some scientific explanation for calling your shot. Like Babe Ruth point out to the stand and just knock one out there. And you think had he not called the shot, would he actually done it? I mean, he's Babe Ruth, but still it's one of those things.

Speaker 3 (00:47:24):

Yeah, I think we do that a lot and it's like an iron sharpens iron thing too, because he'll play me a piece, I got this piece of music da, it's the most whatever, and I say, motherfucker, I already got it done, and I just say, press record bitch. And then I walk in. I don't fucking have it done. I haven't even listened to it all the way through. I always say jokingly, but I'm dead ass serious. When you say, what's the song time? Three minutes and 30 seconds. Yeah, that's how long it took me to write and record it. It's true because I am making it up, but it happens to be really good

Speaker 2 (00:47:58):

To me. To me, me, I think too, I may as well roll with it. Yeah, when you're feeling it though. When you really are feeling it, and like I said, it doesn't matter, some of the best stuff I've ever recorded from really anybody happens in the moment when you're really feeling it. The words will come in the ideas and stuff, but there's an intangibility about that. You can't calculate it. You have to just instinctually go for it. And you have to build at those instincts. Can't just, the joke we always make is you can't just jump on the pummel horse and be, I'm feeling, here we go, I'm going to try something new, jumping pummel horse and get the gold medal

Speaker 3 (00:48:29):

Chop. You have to have chops. That's not going to happen. Chop. But you to, we have chops. I know I have chop chops. Chop, you know, have chops, and that's already been understood and chops are like the last of our worries. What we're trying to do is create or vibration or some type of spirit in the area, in the room that we can capture and ride, and it's not a will. I understand that I'm a visitor and it's very temporary. Most days I sit down to write every single day, most days for five hours, probably 300 minutes, and most of those 300 are just garbage. And I never even show, mostly because I don't want Josh digging them out of the trash and salvage them and reselling them because they're actual genius. Because

Speaker 2 (00:49:11):

They are, oh, you get all my garbage.

Speaker 3 (00:49:13):

Yeah, you, I send you all my trash. No, you're misinterpreting that it is trash when you send it to me, but have you ever heard of polishing a turd? I told you I'm the philosoph, this philosopher stone at the very first sentence of the conversation, I can actually turn simple stones to gold and your creations are

Speaker 2 (00:49:31):

Stoned. I'm Dumbledore.

Speaker 3 (00:49:32):

Yeah, right. Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:49:34):

But it's one of those things, yeah, the writing, like we were saying is just some days what I've enjoyed is sometimes David will come over and we'll, half the day, I mean half of what an eight hour day, seven hour day, six hour day, half the day is writing lyrics and writing music, and then half is recording. So we'll bust out a song in a day, and I really like writing fast and instinctually because it's overthinking things a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of times it just ends up just sounding forced and contrived. But if all of a sudden you catch something, you say something like, well, that gives me a idea. I'm going to go grab a guitar, do something in it, and it just quickly shit it out. Don't overthink it, and then it just has that vibe. What was that? Suicide machines. That wasn't one that we wrote. You know what I mean? In the day, it just kind of popped it out. It feels good, and it feels like of a moment and of a vibe, and it's not sprawled out. It literally is written not much longer than it took the song to listen through it.

Speaker 3 (00:50:33):

Yeah, I believe that. Yeah. It just feels alive. Believe in that. We were saying earlier, there are a bunch of pontifications and stupid ideas floating around, but there is such thing as maybe beginner little rules or checks or ticks or whatever. I do believe that speed and essence and that type of thing, and maybe I don't want to call it speed, let's call it the opposite of paralysis analysis. Intuition. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:51:01):

Maybe

Speaker 3 (00:51:01):

Not

Speaker 2 (00:51:02):

Intuition. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (00:51:03):

Instinct. Instinct I guess would be the way to frame it. I do not believe in taking time. I take time to get better at writing. I don't take time to write.

Speaker 2 (00:51:15):

Yeah, exactly. You are

Speaker 3 (00:51:16):

Working on a song for two weeks. You're a fucking clown and an amateur, and you shouldn't be in anyone's presence, and you definitely shouldn't be considered a professional. You just go home.

Speaker 1 (00:51:24):

How long did it take to write Kill Em all? Out of curiosity?

Speaker 3 (00:51:27):

Do you want the truth? About maybe six minutes or five? Probably five. Awesome. They suck. It was stupid in my opinion, but I accepted it as a challenge. We submitted the record. The record was done as far as I knew, but I had a friend at the label, and this is the only reason I would entertain this, and he was a jackass. He's still my friend. I talked to him the other day, but he said something, he was missing the mark, but he worked at a record label. He completely compromised. That's like telling a politician to ask him what he thinks about your record. He says, I really think this shit gets under my skin only as a request, not actual the question itself, not the actual request. He's like, I think it needs a heavier song on there. It needs one more because the record's so weird.

(00:52:15):

It's all over the place, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I don't care what anyone says because they're just record label people, but it's way easier for my spirit to just accept his challenge. Especially I was in a bed because I just got actually shot that week and I felt bad because I got shot a couple times in the hip and the side and the leg, and I was laying in bed, but I didn't want to tell him that I just got blasted because I thought it might fuck up contract. I was just thinking crazy. You know what I'm saying? And this is the,

Speaker 1 (00:52:50):

I mean, it might have, you never know. You never know. You know how labels are. Yeah. Like

Speaker 3 (00:52:55):

Warner Brothers and all this other shit. So I got my legs blown off and I'm sitting here thinking, this dude just called me. This is a fucking Testa. Will. You know what I mean? I'm sitting here. I'm so low in life at this point. This is maybe one of the lowest points I've ever been. I'm laying in the street at three in the morning with no streetlights. You know what I mean? Just wondering if this is a little game I play, maybe a car's going to come around this bend right here cooking and I'm not going to see it and it's not going to see me because it's pitch black. So this is my state. I'm trying to set the mood for you because you asked about Kill 'em all. So Kill 'em all is not a three minute song. It's a way of life.

(00:53:36):

So this is what's going on. And this guy, this square, new Yorker asked me someone who will never see eye to eye with asked me about this song, and I got it's blown off leg. I'm laying in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night. So I take it as a challenge to write something heavy. So I'm thinking, I'm going to do the stupidest thing I can think of. I'm going to write this, I'm going to jot this down real quick, and I'm actually going to give him what he wants. It's not considered a treasure to me at all. I consider most things that I touch treasures, and that's not feeling myself at all. I spent time on it. That's a piece of my life. So I said, I'm going to make the shittiest versus in choruses, they're going to be so linear that you could literally lay them on top of each other and the syllabi will be exactly the same because it's just so dumb and cookie cutter, linear, no spirit, no essence, like fatter on the heart.

(00:54:34):

It has a soul, kill 'em all. Doesn't have a fucking soul. It's just straight. It's super staccato, just linear, monotone, very not dynamic. Anyway, I'm like, I'm going to call it kill 'em all because fucking Metallica. Well, first off, it's what I want to do. I hope everyone dies by midnight. Second off. It's a Metallica ripoff, so that's cool. That's what they want. These fucking jokers want this song. You know what I mean? I'm going to just call it that because that's what these people that have never seen a dead person in their life want. It's entertainment. You know what I mean? What do they call it? Bread and circuses for these clowns. You know what I mean? I'm not only that am I going to do that, I'm going to make the song the same cadence to the chorus of our very first song, which was called Midwest Monsters, and that's why it took six minutes.

(00:55:30):

I didn't write any of it. I made up all of it, and I'm like, the chorus is going to be so dumb. It's going to be kill 'em all. Kill 'em all, kill 'em all. And the only time I spent on the song was the bridge, which is the time I spend most of the times on the song, which is usually three minutes, getting the articulation, something new, some type of new type vibration on the bridge is where I really stretch, try to stretch out, try to spread my wings and stuff. But the point was I took it as a challenge from this square and it ended up working. I

Speaker 1 (00:56:09):

Don't know why. So sounds like a personal joke that it worked.

Speaker 3 (00:56:15):

It was funny, but once again, I felt like I owed him the favor because I got my leg blew off and I wasn't telling him. So I was like, well, I fucking need to buy myself some time. I am in a crack house. You know what I'm saying? With no floor. You can see down into the basement I'm bleeding and I'm like, this square calls my cell phone and he wants me to make a heavy song. And I felt like saying, bitch, do you even know what heavy it is? Do you want to see a tendon? You know what I mean? I could just snap you a photo of this tendon that's hanging out. Yeah. So my brain was, that's what part of me wanted to say, but the other part was like, I think it's happening for a reason. I think you just need to try it and by yourself some time for maybe this fucking hole will close up by the time he tries to, I was just trying to buy some time.

Speaker 2 (00:57:06):

It's interesting hearing you kind of just talk about that process because it makes me think about, you're saying that it's, oh, yeah, it's really simple and really stupid. Yeah, granted it is, but I think in this particular is that the context and then the content being the circumstances, so in the circumstances of someone that just, let's say I works at h and r Block does their thing, has family, three kids, when they write something they find generic, it's going to be something else. Now you just being shot, you're in a, who knows lead poisoning, whatever the fuck's going on.

Speaker 3 (00:57:44):

I had poisoned. Yeah. My brain was actually, my memories were being eaten live. There are months of my life, I don't have memories. Right?

Speaker 2 (00:57:52):

I remember you telling me about,

Speaker 3 (00:57:53):

I actually had lead poisoning and my memories were being eaten. I'll never have 'em again. I have black spots on my brain that there's nothing working. It doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (00:58:06):

So in that particular state, writing something generic from that particular point of view, it is going to be completely in one hand, completely wild now. So there's that, and then on top of it, that was the first song we did after the pepper spray. So okay, there's a two factor, what do you call it? Removal from the generic context, let's say, of reusing cadences, et cetera, et cetera. Sure. That's the context, but the content within that, you know what I mean? You could yell, kill 'em all, kill 'em all a hundred times. Just like we know a million rap songs. It's just like the same line over and over, but it just slaps because it just has that vibe. So I think there's part of that, and it's funny. Yeah, and it comes from, well, the idea of sparked by someone at the label, but then it's a challenge. There's that. So yeah, it comes from a lot of different interesting places from conception to the writing to the circumstances around it. To the recording part of it too.

Speaker 3 (00:59:04):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:59:05):

What's the pepper spray?

Speaker 3 (00:59:06):

Oh, to get the performance, I just got pepper sprayed to hell. I just took my clothes off, you know what I'm saying? Stood in the bathroom, opened my eyes as wide as I could, and they just sprayed me to an oblivion, which really wasn't unusual. I got pepper sprayed at the Capitol a couple of weeks ago and I was well prepared, so I just crawled into the booth after the dowsing and if it wore off, they'd open up the door and spray me a few little more hits and then put the headphones on, and we tracked it with very little breathing, and that's why it sounds so aggressive, like stupid fucking.

Speaker 2 (00:59:45):

Yeah, that really sucks the air out of the room. Even me being like 20 feet away from the vocal booth, I was just like, man, it's just like gets in your throat. Pepper

Speaker 3 (00:59:55):

Spray is no joke. No, it's not really a joke, but I guess to me it is. But I just kind of was looking for something. That's how we tracked the album anyway, went on to kill 'em all. Next song, maybe Best Night of My Life, something like that. Tracked the vocals there. Next song tracked the vocals there. The pepper spray spray is still hitting, but we must've ran through five or six tracks in one take.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):

Yeah, I think it was about six, if I remember. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):

Yeah. We were just trying to catch the, I guess the essence. I don't really think this is really any of, it's really me. I'm kind of just thinking I'm the vehicle and that's how it turns out. So I'm not even possessive over these types of things, like kill 'em all as a song or whatever it may be.

Speaker 1 (01:00:44):

Are you just kind of channeling it?

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):

Yeah, it's just a thing that I'm doing with my friends. Yeah, they're pepper spraying me and shit, but yeah, sometimes me and Josh, what I prefer is basically what he said. He prefers to sit and we might have a very above average breakfast and sit back and have some coffees and set the tone. This is really a treat to me type of thing. I eat three foods and at the same time, at the same place, the same thing every day. So we're together, we go somewhere that is just 300 steps above what I'm used to, and we get to having these choice, maybe little coffee drinks or something, and then we start to have a conversation about something that's stimulating, which I don't get from day to day. And then these things happen. I guess your mind changes and you start to, new things kind of creep in, and that's why, yeah, it's just a vehicle that day. We weren't having fine good food and fine coffees in the conversations that day was we were trying to make this album. I remember when we made Heavy Lies, the Crown, it recorded it in the vocals, and it was not the same, but it was something else.

(01:02:04):

There are songs that I, they need something you don't show up. Yeah, maybe I got something for you today. Maybe we're going to record some vocals. That shit doesn't happen. You have to be, if you're some type of spiritual medium, you have to be open and you have no, say. For example, the Eyes on the first record, I couldn't sing that. I didn't even sing that. That was me singing something for my girlfriend at the time that we used the recording of Right, Josh. I couldn't go back and do the thing. What it was, the song?

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):

Oh, yeah. We used the demo. We used a lot of demo vocals in the first album because it's a moment in time. Fat around the Heart was like a one taker, right? That was the first thing I recorded. You came in and you're like, oh, yeah, what do you got for this? Just you, wait, so you went through and banged it out in one take, start to finish, and I ended up using, and you had to cut out

Speaker 3 (01:03:09):

A lot of the stuff because in between parts I'm talking shit. I'm like, yeah, you motherfucking gather around the fucking speakers right now. I got this. Shit's coming. Fucking you guys ain't shit. You know what I'm saying? You thought you could, sometimes Gene will be talking his little shit, whatever, like, yo, yeah, you want to challenge the goat, you motherfucker put your ear up to the speaker right now, bitch. You know what I'm saying? I'm saying this during the track, during the take, because I'm trying to, right, right,

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):

Right. So a lot of that gets edited out.

Speaker 3 (01:03:36):

Yeah, I don't know why, but it's just finding the vibration, I guess, of the song. Sometimes you find a bad one, sometimes you find one, sometimes you do something and you look back like, oh, I really don't like that song. I really couldn't care less though. I'm just one person. It's

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):

A lesson. I mean, even the worst stuff we've come up with, I think is, it's still all right. It's not terrible, but at the worst case scenario, it's the greatest thing you've ever heard. No, worst case scenario, the worst, worst case scenario. It's a learning experience to be like, it's kind seeing video of yourself from a few years ago, and you see the way you walk or you see the way you care yourself. You see the way you're interacting with somebody and you're like, oh, okay, so I've changed since then. I see. You can kind of put yourself back in that mental space and you're like, oh, maybe I was onto something here, but I didn't hit the mark. Or maybe it's just like, oh yeah, you were on some bullshit and you thought, no, nope, not that again. So it's a good learning.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):

Exactly. Fighting. I fight and I watch my fights back on tape, how I think I look and how I look. Are there two, three different things and that is good for you. You can always tell the person that has never looked in the mirror, they have never read what they've wrote to say. The platitude, the stupid thing. You deal with someone who's never actually squared off with themself, and I don't like to be that person, which is why I try to do my most introspection and most of my deep diving as often as I can, which is why we even created Vid, the whole other project, which everyone, no one would really do this. This is not, we're a small independent group. It would be looked at as strange or completely counterintuitive. It's not going to help the brand, which was most things that we do, but it was a self exploration type of journey where we were, to me, I was at the end of my pitiful rope to, but we had to change gears and we wanted to explore more, and I was really not feeling the idea of doing 12 songs every two years.

(01:05:57):

I didn't want to do a song a month. I considered myself pro. So I got with Josh and we're like, well, I like to do this rap project where, and we never once had the conversation where ever, whereas, what do you think people are going to think of this? I didn't give

Speaker 1 (01:06:15):

A fuck.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):

I made a shitty SoundCloud and just started posting songs. There wasn't ever a consideration, but to me it was the journey and it was that type of thing that you can't necessarily really fake creating this music and putting it out, and I try my hardest at all of it or whatever, but it was an exercise to look at different,

Speaker 2 (01:06:40):

Well, I think it's,

Speaker 3 (01:06:42):

Yeah, I'm trying to put it together, but you might have to,

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):

It's a whole different skillset. I mean, they're related, of course, but it's like cooking. Let's see if you're learning, I dunno, some Cantonese cuisine or something, or Thai and you do Spanish or something, you're cooking still, right? There's carryover. There's a lot of the skills, there's a lot of carryover, a lot of your tools will work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this is a very different skillset, the king stuff and the vid stuff. And for me personally, I enjoy the differences there as well. Sonically, there's just a whole different, I don't want to say game of chase, but finding things that inspire me that like, oh, this is an idea. Oh, okay. What are they doing with this? And just phonetically phrasing and stuff and production ideas and things and how to put together a track that's exciting to listen to and it's different, but there's also lessons to be learned there that you can take and apply back. And it's one of the reasons I do like working with a lot of genres. I've always liked the king projects because they are so varied. You mean most bands that I'll work with? It's very much one kind of narrow sound, like a,

Speaker 1 (01:07:54):

Does that bore you?

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):

Maybe it's just my mentality, but I'll try to pry me like, Hey, let's do some lighter songs. Let's do some heavier songs. Let's do something that, a question I ask when I pose this to a lot of bands and they're resistant. There's a lot of things I say, maybe I mentioned this in the podcast last time, but I always talked to bands about painting on the moon. You're on the moon. This is where your record's happening. You're making me a painting. I'm down here on earth looking up at it, and I'm saying all your strokes in the same spot, and then what about this one? This one's way over here. You move 50 feet to you. That's crazy. To me, here on earth it looks the same. So you got to make big moves to be heard or to be perceived as different. So that's something I work on, and if I can't, and if the band is just very determined or stubborn or they're just not in a place, or maybe I'm missing, maybe that nailing that sound 10 times in a row on a record is what they get set.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):

What if they're just not good at anything else?

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):

Well, yeah, it could be that. It could be that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):

I think anyone can be good at exploration and you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):

Sure.

Speaker 3 (01:08:54):

You're just an explorer.

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):

Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those things, if I can't make ground there, then it's just, well, sure, maybe I can do something in the mix or something around that. I'll get my little jollies off somewheres else. Then if it's not creatively, then creatively here, then maybe it's creatively in the mix or something else, but I'm always, maybe I'm just a glass half full kind of a guy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):

So you find a way to not let yourself get bored, which is awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:09:20):

No, I'm always trying to get involved in different genres of music and different ideas and different things just because it's what I want to do. It's exciting. That's why I like doing the video thing for the nail, the mix.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):

I don't want to, that's great, by the

Speaker 2 (01:09:33):

Way. Thanks. Yeah. I don't want to do a normal boring, to me, doing the typical commercial thing, I don't want to do anything I don't want to do, so I have to make this something that I want to do if it's funny, if it's serious, if it's whatever, creative and just out insane, as long as I'm enjoying doing it. You know what I mean? It's like that saying, when people talk about certain people that say, oh, you're selling your body doing this thing, doing your OnlyFans, like what are you doing for eight hours at Home Depot? You're doing the same thing. You're training eight hours for cash, so what are you doing with your time? For me, it's like just make it fun. Enjoy what you're doing. You know what I mean? Done. I've worked jobs before that I just absolutely hated. I still try to do my best at 'em because you're already there.

(01:10:16):

You know what I mean? I'm making sandwiches of Quiznos. If I can't kill it at this, you know what I mean? Who the hell am I to think that I'm going to do something that I'm going to enjoy later on and be decent enough to be hired above somebody else? So if you're going to work and flip a burger somewhere, you might as well be good at it. If you think you're better than it. If you don't, then you might as well be good at it too. At least it can be the best thing that as high as you get,

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):

And maybe it'll lead to your next thing too.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):

I like that

Speaker 3 (01:10:44):

Attitude. I kind of think about it in a similar way too.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):

If you're already in a situation, it's kind of on you if you're going to have a bad time with it, that's kind of on you. All we have are experiences. I

Speaker 2 (01:10:59):

Think maybe that's another reason that we connect maybe just that attitude, and it's one of those things, I just had these realizations the last few years that growing up, maybe I did have a lot less than I kind of realized just talking to other people like, man, didn't have that. I didn't have this. I never focused on it. I just enjoyed myself and my parents always made sure that that wasn't the focus. It was never that excuse we talked about. Rather, oh, if I only had this, then we can have that. My parents never, ever complained about money. Mean, yeah, we were frugal, but it's just one of those things. Then I think with David's upbringing, also making the best of your situation. People say it all the time, but I mean really, you know what I mean? It makes me think of, you watch some of these clips on the news or something of these kids in some war torn country, and there's demolished buildings, but they're playing with stones in the street and you can hear bombs going off the background because again, you can only, I think your brain is only capable of emergency, only set 'em out, and then the rest is just, you're just living your life and trying to make the best of it. So yeah, I think that's as much as this guy's depressive and suicidal, but I think that's something we do connect on.

Speaker 1 (01:12:10):

Do you think that that's an autopilot or does it take effort?

Speaker 3 (01:12:14):

I would say it definitely takes effort.

Speaker 2 (01:12:15):

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:16):

No, absolutely it does. For me,

Speaker 3 (01:12:18):

I would say I would cut it in half because I would ask what you mean as far as when he was talking about growing up as a kid, he didn't realize it until later that he didn't have so much, and you don't as you're a kid. But the reason why I would say that it's a bit nuanced is I believe you probably only realized that because your parents were good, they didn't put the emphasis there, and that was nothing that had nothing to do with you. It was part of the nurture.

Speaker 2 (01:12:48):

Yeah. Yeah. That's one of those things. I remember we had a conversation, we were talking about different privileges that people, it's a topic of conversation. I think that there's a subtlety there that people don't think about, and that's something that I feel like, yeah, that's something that I can't imagine growing up in home where the parents are oh, complaining of, oh, I can't do this and I can't do that, and they blame other people or they're caddy about stuff, and that's something, you know what I mean? My dad is the hardest working person I know, just constantly doing something constantly. I lived in two different houses that he built, wired, did plumbing, and he's colorblind. You know what I mean? Can you imagine wiring a house being completely colorblind? No excuses. I didn't even realize he was colorblind. Maybe it was in passing when I was a kid, but again, one of those things, it's not complaining about these things, but working with what you have and making the best of the situation. So I picked up on that. I picked up on his work ethic and my mom's emotional side and stuff like that. So I feel like I lucked out with some pretty good parents in a pretty decent upbringing. Whereas with David, it's kind of maybe the exact opposite,

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):

Kind of the exact opposite. It's D kind luck. I'm lucky to be alive today, and to me, that's the best thing I have. That's the biggest take home because I sure most days wish I had a different brain or a different set of experiences, but this

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):

Is what I got. So we're talking about awareness a lot. You did say that the only way to get awareness is through experience. Do you think that it has to be bad experiences or just experience period?

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):

I don't think there's such thing as a bad or good experience.

Speaker 2 (01:14:31):

The awareness thing, I think it might come from a lack of stimuli, and that's something I think I'm realizing now as I realize, oh, there's many years in my formative childhood years where like I said, we didn't have much, so it was on me to entertain myself. So you're kind of put into a situation where you have to be aware or you know what I mean? Also, you just go nuts. You know what I mean? You'll be bored to tears. You don't have a ton of toys, you don't have a lot of opportunity to do different things. You're living out in the sticks. You can't just get on your bike and drive into town. So the awareness came from just coping with your, and I think David comes, but from a very different angle. You know what I mean? Your awareness comes out of sensor survival, you know what I mean? And stuff like that. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:15:18):

Situational awareness is what they call it in the military.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):

Exactly. So I think it's something that we have in common, but it comes from a very different, maybe some ways similar, but in a lot of ways, different backgrounds, so we kind of meet in the middle somewhere, and I think there's a novelty and it's something that when we get together, we learn. We'll have conversation and we'll disagree in a lot of stuff, but I enjoy that. I don't like living in an echo chamber. I like to, I mean, I don't care. Again, great ideas can come from stupid people and it's hard to really take it sometimes and the opposite's true too, but like I said, I like to have the dialogue that we have is always interesting, and like I said, there's a lot we have in common, but a lot that's also very different.

Speaker 1 (01:16:03):

I don't know if it's modern. I don't think it's modern. I think it's just part of the human experience, but that need to live in an echo chamber

Speaker 2 (01:16:10):

Validation. You

Speaker 1 (01:16:11):

Think that's what it is?

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):

Yeah, it's validation.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):

If you say echo chamber, I say I would say validation, but if you change the term, I would say other things. Well, what would you change the term to? Well, we talk about always path of least resistance.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):

Oh, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:16:27):

Satisficing, which is the external type of the hedonic treadmill we were already talking about. I would say foregoing responsibility. To me, that's not an echo chamber department, and it's also not a path of police resistance. I think also the victim victimization or victimhood is a sick disease that also doesn't belong in the echo chamber. I think all these things happen at once. I think everyone is guilty to some degree. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):

Oh yeah, absolutely. I

Speaker 3 (01:16:57):

Don't think when people go out and start talking, they hope that everyone nods and agrees because for example, conspiracy theorists, right, which I

Speaker 1 (01:17:07):

Hate. I'm already laughing.

Speaker 3 (01:17:08):

Yes, there you go. Boom. You see, I did it, but I hate the word first off because my argument is everything that is believed today used to be called laughed at and called conspiracy. You know what I mean? You know how people today are like Project Mockingbird, but Mockingbird was a conspiracy 30 years ago, but since we have the great

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):

Us being ground was a conspiracy.

Speaker 3 (01:17:29):

Exactly. We have the great foresight today. We just arrogantly walk around like a bunch of fucking idiots acting like we know what goes on because science just declared it true, but anyway,

Speaker 2 (01:17:41):

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Speaker 3 (01:17:42):

Exactly. This isn't necessarily an echo chamber. This is more of a signaling outward type of thing where a conspiracy theorist, I was thinking about this a few months ago. Aside from lending themself to all the algorithmic black holes that make their frail brain end up in that place, I don't really want to talk about the cause because it doesn't matter when a conspiracy theorist talks to you. This comes back to awareness and this to me, it's a definition of the echo chamber, but not a definition of the Venn diagram falls in echo chamber. It falls in victim hood. It falls in path of leaves resistance and foregoing responsibility, which are four big ones. To me. What they do is have you ever noticed a conspiracy theorist never asks you anything. They only say, I'm hit to this exclusive. What? I love the term privileged information via my Android phone. I just found out something that no one knows. I got an Android. I'm going crazy. I got this privileged information. Have you ever noticed when a conspiracy, the government's trying to cover it up as you just Google it,

Speaker 2 (01:18:51):

It was the first result off Google and the government's trying to cover it up. Google the

Speaker 3 (01:18:56):

Worst company. They say, check out this, and they never, when you have a conversation with someone now, like we are talking, I'll say something probably too long-winded, too verbose. Then you say a little short sentence and then random says something that's probably a little bit more sensible than me, and then we are taking turns. We're thinking about it. Oh, what was that? And he said that it's an exchange. When a conspiracy theorist says something to you, it's nothing but a posture. He's not trying to, for example, if you call me and you say, Hey, I noticed that you eat pretty well, one of your very few achievements, do you think you could help me with some nutrition? And I say, yeah, this is what I think we should do. You asked me for something. We had a conversation. I got this.

(01:19:42):

If I ask you, I ask random everything. We were talking before this because I had to make sure I knew how to use zoom or microphone or whatever because I'm so stupid when it comes to pretty much anything that you have to do with a wire, so everything, but that's not in your two hands anyway, the point is it's not an exchange and it's not a conversation. What they want to demonstrate is, I know something you don't know. Just so you know, I'm not willing to hear what you have to say back. I'm not willing to listen to what you might think, even if you have contrary information that's actually true, that provable, whatever it might be, it doesn't matter. What they want to do is they want to posture. They want to let you know, Hey, yeah, you might have a job and a car and the kids and the success and all this other shit, but guess what? I know so I know something you don't buddy, and that to me is echo chamber number one. They're what I call their information streets one way. They're only receiving stimuli. They're not willing. Again, remember when we were talking about, I said I watch videos of my fights. They're not willing to enter into the ring and really compete with ideas, maybe wrestle around with thought experiments and introspection and other types of alternate ideas. They're trying to use a

Speaker 2 (01:20:58):

Cheat code.

Speaker 3 (01:20:58):

Exactly. Their information is only one way. I read this and that's what it is, and now instead of me being like, again, you might ask for nutrition advice, I might ask you for technical advice, things like that. I don't do that. I go tell you something. Yeah. Just so you know, rah. You know what I mean? I just told you what the fuck. I can't confirm at all, and then I'm just onto the next thing. There you go. I blessed you. There's your piece of information,

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):

Time for the next conspiracy theory.

Speaker 3 (01:21:30):

Exactly, and it does all those things though, the echo chamber, you can be alone with your cell phone getting all your information. You forego responsibility because of this victimhood, this world that is just, you are the biggest victim of circumstance and yeah, I would lift my finger to go scratch my ass, but the fucking Bill Gates is trying to fucking goddamn give us this goddamn key. You know what I mean? I can't wipe my own ass and I won't get out of my mom's basement because someone blew up the T Twin Towers and it is like, listen, man, if all these things are true, it really still don't matter.

Speaker 1 (01:22:08):

Some of them are true and it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 (01:22:10):

Exactly. I always say, okay, consider it's true or whatever. Me and you still sit here and have this conversation even in your universe, so what is coming out the other end,

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):

Right? It's like the flat earth thing. How would your life be Any, well, let's say it is true. Okay, so then who benefits?

Speaker 3 (01:22:30):

Then we just screaming at each other's faces until we, when people tell me this shit first off, I'm like, well, I don't really care if all these things were true. I still wouldn't care because I don't care when everyone dies. It doesn't matter to me. You to bring the political things to my doorstep and I'm like, oh, if someone else died, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:22:49):

It's not going to make you any better or worse. A guitar

Speaker 3 (01:22:51):

Great.

Speaker 1 (01:22:52):

I remember when Snowden came out with all that info about spying and everybody flipped out. Conspiracy theorists basically got validated and it turned everything up to 11 basically with the You're getting tracked. Nonsense. It's not nonsense. It's actually happening, but what I was wondering the whole time is first of all, is this a surprise and second of all, why do you care so out of your hands? Why do you care so much? Why is this so important to you?

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):

I mean, we all give up that stuff voluntarily. Yeah, we have for years.

Speaker 3 (01:23:28):

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Don't get me wrong. I'm a constitutionalist. I believe. I love the country. It's the best place in the world. I think this is the best everything. I don't agree, obviously, with all the politics and all the bullshit that whatever might be going on at any given year, month, week, or whatever, Al this Huxley said in Brave New World, he commented on George Orwell when he talks about Big Brother doing exactly what they're doing today. Huxley said, Orwell is a little bit different. They're not going to take things from you. You're going to voluntarily hand them over to me today. That's all these terms of services, these agreements, this click

(01:24:07):

To subscribe, all that voluntarily giving it away, so how stupid do you look? You know what I mean? As you sit there and say it. Yeah. How is this a surprise? Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with any of it. I don't believe any of these companies are worth a fuck. I hope bad things happen to all the Googles and the Facebooks and the things of the world because in my opinion, they're not real companies. Their product is information they steal, so that's not necessarily a product. They make it. You believe that the product is this thing that you need to use, but to me, again, that's people's fault, not theirs. They call that finessing. It's called finessing. That's when you finesse someone that's Zuckerberg finessed. You think you need to stay connected to family members you didn't know there was already, or the zoom call we're on.

(01:24:58):

What's the difference between the green circle that says Skype and the blue square that says Zoom? It's nothing. It's stupid. It's all bullshit. In two years, there will be no such thing as a Zoom and everyone will be recalling novelty, retromania ideas about how when they got through COVID, through Zoom and it'll be a new company that everyone's pushing because of nobody knows why and there's an invisible hand dropping something in front of you and you can't really quite put it together, but is any of that surprising when you realize it? No, but it kind of doesn't. I don't have a surprising emotion button. It doesn't really matter though. There are things you don't seem inherently reasonable,

Speaker 1 (01:25:40):

I guess. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):

It's like when something happens and people kind of explain it away, it kind of doesn't matter. I guess the surprise factor, what does it matter how surprised someone may be? I guess I would ask you what you mean more.

Speaker 1 (01:25:57):

Okay, good question. What I mean is these things that are happening around us that are obvious, why do people act like they're a novelty when they're clearly not? How do people not realize, like you're saying, you give this stuff away. You've been doing it voluntarily forever. Now when someone comes out and says that, that's what's happening, everybody acts like it's this giant revelation and they're surprised, and that is kind of perplexing to me. I guess that part is surprising to me.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):

Is it awareness? Are we coming back full circle again? Yeah,

(01:26:36):

Probably so because you are posting, you're posting pictures and tagging yourself at this restaurant. You're leaving the Yelp view, you're posting your location on the Instagram, you're using the GPS to get around town. You're constantly sending out and receiving data that is location specific or that what? I mean, I've always found it, if I want to go hit some houses, I'd be checking people's grams. Oh, oh, cool. You're in Cancun. I know where to go. I know where you live. It's just one of those things, but beyond the security as far as privacy and that kind of a thing, oh, yeah, yeah. We give it up, but the people that are surprised by it, again, to me comes back to awareness. It's like you do all these things and you don't think about 'em.

Speaker 3 (01:27:19):

I think the truth was that most people, they don't care. A lot of the people that

(01:27:24):

Were surprised were I guess in that demographic that, for example, we watched the narrative spin on Snowden, right? Snowden was the biggest trader in the world five years ago, six, seven years ago. It might've been more, I can't remember, but they were the biggest trader in the world. He was doing this, that and the other thing, and he had to be hunt down. The same was true with Julian Assange. One side of the country thought he was a complete hero until he released Hillary's emails. Then he was a Russian shill. Snowden was the biggest traitor in the world until freedom of information X, Y, and Z. Fast forward five years, and now he's an American hero that people think it's pretty agreeable that he gets a pardon or whatever. This was like mainstream media angles each year at it was a bit more of a twisted narrative.

(01:28:26):

To me, that doesn't represent the majority. I think 99% of people, which again is why I don't think we're talking about them. I think these things that we're talking about, it's us three on the line. There's not 3 million people on the line. I think a lot of people feel this way. I don't think most people feel this way though, and I think the way that it goes is when you talk about the surprise factor, it reminds me of putting a frog in hot water and it jumps out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly boil it, it stays and it boils to death. It's a process of that little by little. It's why people don't want things like gun control and things like that is because you see the steps. You know what happens when you have certain things, slippery slopes. They have ideologies built around this stuff, right?

Speaker 2 (01:29:15):

This

Speaker 3 (01:29:16):

Stuff would've been surprising 30 years ago, and the idea that it's not surprising now should be worrisome because we're being boiled. We are the frog in the water. That's just slowly being boiled and people are saying, well, I don't see nothing wrong with that. One day at a time, everyone, eight out of 10 people are saying, well, I don't see nothing wrong. Yeah. With anything, any politicized piece of information that's completely compromised that's floating around out there, there's a completely reasonable person that'll sit there and go, I don't see anything wrong with that. And then before you know it, you're at Auschwitz and you don't know how you ended up there, but there's hundreds of books about it from people that will tell you flat out, this is how you ended up here. You volunteered this one day at a time for X amount of years, and now you have a completely worthless, pointless, indifferent, complacent victim of circumstance who's just going to end up however the world's going to end up.

Speaker 1 (01:30:19):

Do you think then the people who act the most surprised are just a vocal minority?

Speaker 3 (01:30:24):

Yes, for sure. I think everything is the minority.

Speaker 2 (01:30:27):

Yeah. That's mostly I think of what goes around the news, right? When you hear, you always hear the extreme is what makes the headlines. It's not the boring middle, right, the boring middle, exactly. I've thought about this and I had a bit of a realization recently about and why that is. Why is it that everything today is very extreme in terms of something, piece of information comes out? Are you on this side or on that side? And I think it's one of those things where I think about the information I'm exposed to today versus being a kid in the eighties, especially a kid in the eighties living in Canada and especially in the country, and especially not having cable, et cetera. My slice of media on a given day, my slice of information and that kind of stuff is very narrow. You know what I mean?

(01:31:13):

I would have to, Hey, dad, can you drive me into town? Can we go to the library? If I want to look up something, that's literally what would have to happen today. I'm looking to my right, I have an iPad. I'm sitting from a computer. I have another screen left. To me, I have just in this room alone, I have more access to information than the entire town I grew up in, probably the entire province for that matter, so I'm exposed to so much more information to both absorb and react to. So as a kid, there's more room for subtlety, right? Because only I have the same amount of brain, the same capacity to read and react, but now it's literally thousands and thousands of times more so it becomes binary. It becomes yes or no. It becomes yes, extreme love this thing, yes, no extreme hate this thing, and you see that across the board for a lot of issues that are a lot more nuanced than the vocal minority. Love to paint it one way or the other, and it is easier to process. People want the easy solution. Again, if you talk about the victimhood thing and when it's a difficult gradient thing to look at. Yeah, people don't like that. I mean, you don't like to have a gray area when it comes to certain things and some critical things too.

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):

It's ray Kurtz wells, the singularity as far as compounding information goes, and then when you throw in very unnatural devices like something like a media agenda or something like a narrative spinning and things like that, you just mix the pot very, it's not really in a good way.

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):

Sure. Do you think it's just too much info for what humans have evolved to?

Speaker 3 (01:32:48):

I shouldn't even know you. We shouldn't have this conversation. Why do I know you? I don't even know where you live. None of this shit should be happening, and it's not a big deal that we seem to be having a good conversation by any stretch of our own imagination, but Ray Kurzwell, again, the singularity, when you start compounding this type of stuff, everything

Speaker 2 (01:33:08):

Is compounded when

Speaker 3 (01:33:09):

You start compounding and weaponizing information. That's why I just become turned off.

Speaker 2 (01:33:15):

You're kind of exposed to the problems of 8 billion people, right? Like IL was saying. Is it too much information? Well, I mean, it's more than what we've ever known, right? At what point, and very quickly

Speaker 1 (01:33:28):

Too,

Speaker 2 (01:33:28):

At what point was the penguin spending too much time in the water, right? It's clearly a bird, but it can't fly. It's terrible on the land. At what point did the penguin, oh, we're spending too much time in the water. Well, I mean, we're adaptive. We can adapt to this information, but I think it's very strenuous, I think on society to change this quickly. Anytime there's a massive change, and to go from my lifetime of a small sliver of three or four channels would come in clear in the rabbit ears. That's about it. The house, we had maybe a handful of books other than the Bible, maybe a couple other little things. So that's the information, and that's the information that my parents were exposed to and their grandparents and literally billions of years before them in the last 30 years or so. It's just compounded as such an extreme degree, people don't really appreciate the amount of emotional information we're exposed to. You see all these heartbreaking stories that go on, so you become desensitized to it when you kind of shouldn't in some ways because you do want change, but it gets drummed up for political reasons, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we're really bombarded with information, but also socially, emotionally, and all these other things, and it puts you in a situation where you have to say yes or no. Here's this person. Are they a good person or a bad person? Okay, well cancel 'em, and all their art goes in the trash too.

(01:34:55):

I don't have the answers for that kind of stuff, but I think the answer I do have is to think about it more and to really be critical and not just so on off switch to really consider the gradients and consider less, you know what I mean? Try to limit the amount of things, and we were talking about too, what actually does affect you? Does this thing actually affect you? Does it not? Everything's related, and it's a difficult thing. It's a very difficult thing to really even give any advice on because just contemplating it can be overwhelming if you really try to give yourself the gravity of what has happened in the last 30 years in terms of what you're exposed to in terms of ideas, culture, like I said, emotional stories, political things, information. Yeah, it's crazy. It's really overwhelming.

Speaker 1 (01:35:44):

Is that why you take your annual internet break? Oh,

Speaker 2 (01:35:47):

Yeah. That's part of it, for sure. I'm doing that. I've decided this year I want to do it four times a year. I'm doing one in March doing one in

Speaker 1 (01:35:54):

Good for how long?

Speaker 2 (01:35:54):

Usually weeks at a time. Minimum of two weeks, for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):

This was a month from December to January though, right?

Speaker 2 (01:36:01):

Yeah, I enjoy it. I really kind of dreaded coming back in a lot of ways, but I don't blame you. Here's the thing. It's again, because people say, oh, social media bad. No, there are bad things about it for sure, and there are great things about it. I met my wife online, you know what I mean? We never grew up in the same town. We met when the internet was still just kind of burgeoning in the nineties, so at that point, just by virtue of getting online and chatting, we already had a ton of things in common. You already had to be pretty savvy with a computer, whereas now you get on the phone and click an icon and there you are. But anyhow, yeah. I don't want to say social media is bad because there's a lot of good things about it, but at the same time for me, it's being overexposed to certain things.

(01:36:43):

Not that I really care about it too much to begin with, but I find myself sometimes getting to habits of like, oh, I got to check to see what so-and-so's doing. Oh, I got to check to see what's new in the music, dah, dah, dah, dah, and I found myself before my break, or actually as soon as I started my break, I found myself clicking on Twitter or Instagram or something out of habit. I'm like, no, no, no, no. As soon as I open it, the force of habit, the muscle memory was there. So I move all these icons into a folder and just put that on the last page of my device so that way I'm not even out of muscle memory and I don't use it that much. I'm on social media a few minutes a day. I really don't like spending much time of it at all, but to keep it with business of course and that kind of a thing. But there are good things. I don't want to say it's a bad thing.

Speaker 1 (01:37:28):

There are good things, but I feel like with any evolution, there's going to be a dark side to it always. There's nothing in this world that's just, like David said, it's not good or bad. There's going to be things that help you and things that hurt you, and I think that with social media, one of the main things that is hurtful in my opinion is too much shit and making it expected that you care about every single problem in the world

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):

Or that you're available. I mean, that's another thing with social media. Then you start people thinking you're available. Oh, check out this Haiti. I got a mix note for you at 11 at night or at 3:00 AM or at six. You know what I mean? I

Speaker 3 (01:38:09):

Call it

Speaker 2 (01:38:09):

Summing you,

Speaker 3 (01:38:10):

And I always tell someone like, no, you actually can't summon me. You don't have enough mana, and that will goes for anything. My phone doesn't have a ringer. I don't do the social media thing. It can't be summoned, but people want to be able to summon you at will. Sure. That's no good. I don't think it's a misrepresentation as far as you said 8 billion people and the Internet's full of mainly a bunch of junk. I believe that to be true that the world is full of mainly a bunch of junk via human beings. I don't believe it to be a misrepresentation. I do believe it to be over stimulus. I agree. People that say, for example, we make music, people that like your music, they feel entitled to a certain bit of access to you, and I already have, the reputation I have is rude or mean or cold or whatever, and I really don't mind that because it's all true, but I don't feel like I owe anyone anything.

(01:39:09):

I appreciate everyone that likes anything we do, but the truth is, if we're playing a show, and I always say this, a hundred people in the crowd, I hope there's more than that, but sometimes maybe it's a rough day Monday and there's a hundred people in the crowd. I'm probably not going to maybe, I don't know, 99 of those probably more, and you can't sit and act like you will. What if five of those dudes go home and beat their old ladies? What if six people drive home drunk and kill some? You know what I mean? You can't just think this whole room of people is just jiving with you. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:39:44):

You share the one thing in common.

Speaker 3 (01:39:48):

We have one right here right now, and that's it. Yeah, maybe there will be another one, but I'm not looking at the future. I'm not looking to the past. I'm here right now. This is what we're doing. This is all I'm willing to share with you. You know what I mean? And when I leave, I'm going to go to the next thing. If I come back, then it'll be that much better, but I always find that is rewarding, not being constantly accessible on the social media. Most of the time I make my friends use it for me, which people hate because they act like they get access to me, but when they don't get it, they cry. To me, it's more like treasured and interaction is I don't message you or anything or anyone that I actually know or give a fuck about on the Instagram or the whatever. I don't have the Facebook or nothing like that, but I'm not looking for that. That's not what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:40:42):

Maybe that's another one of the reasons I'm drawn to the behind the scenes part of music as opposed to, because I did the band thing for a while and I found it unappealing after a while, I enjoyed it, but what I liked about the behind the scenes stuff is no one cares about you.

Speaker 3 (01:40:57):

Yeah, the trade off wasn't worth it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):

You're right. Some people of course know me for some work, but the general public doesn't know who Rick Rubin is. You know what I mean? They barely know Quincy Jones. You know what I mean? You can be the goat of all time as a producer and you could walk into Meyer and most people wouldn't recognize you, so that part about it I find extremely appealing, the ability to work on art and to collaborate with people that cool people with stuff and disappear where they're not, yeah, I'm on social media, but the thing, I'm not getting hit up by a million people. That's not really about it. Sometimes people will bother me for a few things, and it's maybe funny for a screen grabber sometimes, but it isn't a chore whatsoever. I don't mind answering questions, but it's not constant like with you. I'm sure your inbox on your gram alone is probably some kind of horror show.

Speaker 3 (01:41:50):

It's hell,

Speaker 2 (01:41:51):

There's spillover on my side of things as is, but yeah, that's one of those things where it's different for everybody. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (01:42:00):

Yeah. Some people probably enjoy it, but whatever. Another thing that I was thinking about when you were talking, it was two things. The thing that we were talking about with the we're evolved to do so much X, Y, and Z, and you were talking about your experience at your parents in 30 billion years, the penguin in the water. It reminds me of a female anatomy. This is an Im posturing method, but I thought it was interesting when I learned, I'll say learned, although I guess maybe it'll be disproven in a few years and it'll be a hate speech, but the human beings kind of evolved quicker physically than biologically as far as when a deer, we've talked about this before, or a giraffe or another mammal drops a kid out of its ass, it hits the ground and it starts to walk within minutes. Human beings are, I don't know, years worth more. It's

Speaker 1 (01:43:00):

A lot of work.

Speaker 3 (01:43:00):

It's a lot of investments, a lot of work. It's a lot of downtime, and human beings have evolved quicker than the actual female anatomy. That's the reason why childbirth is so painful is because the hips have not widened. The babies have outperformed the hips essentially, where the female anatomy, the hips have not gotten to the point where they can painlessly dump a kid out, all these other mammals, you know what I mean? Childbirth is still, is that because of our upright walking? That is part of it actually.

Speaker 2 (01:43:32):

That's what I was kind of going to guess. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (01:43:34):

That is even with the soft skull of the child is because it has to be pliable because it's about to be forced out something that's too small, and it's not like that with a lot of mammals. Most mammals shit out kids in their three years beyond

Speaker 2 (01:43:52):

Without six of

Speaker 3 (01:43:53):

'em. Exactly. Multiple ones at a time, and we don't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:43:56):

Exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:43:57):

That's a good scenario to me for technology. A good metaphor as far as, again, Ray Kurzwell singularity, it is compounding and outperforming us. The female hips is like a good metaphor for a biological case, for one end out evolving the other, the hips are still on a slow. They're getting wider and they're doing whatever they may be doing, but this is macro what we're seeing. You know what I mean? Even our a hundred years, it's just nothing. It doesn't mean anything. We're talking about billions of years of evolution.

Speaker 1 (01:44:35):

Do you think that We're seeing that in music and recording too, where the technological advancement went faster than people's artistic advancement, and that's why we have so many people that are the preset types.

Speaker 3 (01:44:51):

I think that's counterculture. You think it's counter, I believe the technological advancement has aided in the assault on the artistic endeavor. If you can chew on that one, I guess I think it does nothing, but it assists you in not being artistic.

Speaker 1 (01:45:05):

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (01:45:07):

I would say that, yeah, all of these things available are a threat.

Speaker 2 (01:45:12):

Yeah. It's interesting because there's a convenience to it, but there's also a mindlessness to it and an unawareness to it. When I did that commercial, for example, I could have just used a filter, right? I could use the VHS filter. No, no, no. I'm going to get out the camera. The actual VHS camera. I'm going to record it to tape just to make it Well, okay, so on one hand, sure. It's authentic then, and you know what I mean, and it just looks like it's from a different era, but beyond that, you're making different decisions because of those things, because you have these, you're thinking about what you're doing differently. It's like if I'm doing stuff to tape, I mean, if I'm recording, I have this solo project I've been working on for a while that's just, I have a million rules. It's all about sitting rules and about no click tracks, no editing, no, no sounds that I can't make in the real world.

Speaker 3 (01:45:58):

The French cinema Maison say,

Speaker 2 (01:46:01):

I was thinking about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Setting myself a bunch of rules, which is kind of the opposite. You think, oh, well, being limitless with digital recording, then it's the buffet again all over again. Right? But I like the rules. I like setting myself up certain do's and don'ts per project. Right? Not on an overall thing an overall recording, then I think that maybe that's not it, but for project to project, I do like to set certain rules to operate within. I dunno, it's a good way to focus and to find something into sometimes limiting yourself in that way. I guess that's also the goal of writing quickly. Maybe that comes from the same place of when you're setting a constraint now with time, it forces you to act instinctually. Maybe that's the same thing. Okay, well you're shooting this in VHS. Well, I don't have a million options. I can't set the wide screen, I can't set the aperture, dah dah, dah. I just have to shoot it. I just said, oh, it looks like shit. Okay. Then throwing in another light on it, okay, this thing ain't working. You know what I mean? Like I said, it's more focused that way.

Speaker 1 (01:47:03):

That's actually why we, you kind of encourage people to try to mix a little bit more quickly. It's not about cutting corners or anything like that. No corner cutting. We're not encouraging that. We're encouraging that. They don't go down these idiotic rabbit holes.

Speaker 2 (01:47:18):

No, no, because everyone sucks. That's the thing you have to realize, and I'm always learning too. The second you stop learning, just shoot yourself. You're done. Always learn. You always have to be available. And this really can apply to anything when it comes to just information about the world. But you suck. We all suck. Anybody listening to this, you suck at mixing too. We all suck. So the thing to do is always learn and working quickly is the way to always improve. You'll never be perfect, but you can always improve. And I think it was the analogy about the, I think it was Adam from Warner Shore was talking about some analogy about building tables where they had, he said there was two groups of people, I dunno, maybe a dozen each. Let's say one group of people. You have a month to build the perfect table, the next group of a dozen people, same timeframe.

(01:48:01):

You have a month, build as many tables as you can at the end of the month. The group with the best quality table was the one that was building a ton of them. Because you are getting experience by putting this together, you're going down a rabbit hole. For what though? You don't have a skillset to really, that's not going to show you anything. You're just looking at EQ curves and you're mixing with your eyeballs. You know what I mean? You're not actually getting anything done. I mean, you might have fun and that's fine, but if you're actually looking to improve your craft, you have to understand that you suck. And me doing this 15 years, I realize that I'm nowhere near where I want to be yet. There's a lot. I like my work and I'm satisfied with a lot of it. But at the same time, just like, no, no, no.

(01:48:44):

There's still a lot that I can improve. Obviously there's a lot of stuff that's never been done in audio. The only things we can think of that have been done in audio, the stuff we've heard. You know what I mean? It's like, what's that? I was listening to some podcast about this black cheerleading team and about how the controversy of them doing this new style and it's like, Hey, you can't be what you can't see. So what do you do in audio when you haven't heard it before? And I'm always trying to think of different things and different ways to get to stuff. Because when someone looks at themselves and they say, oh, I'm stuck. I'm not as good as Andy Wallace. Okay, well, he did that sound, what is that? The ultimate sound? I mean, that's his sound. And that worked for rage and that worked for Nirvana and that kind of a thing.

(01:49:24):

And maybe it's something you use as an inspiration to inform your decision about something else. But I'm always interested in all the sounds that haven't been done, all the combinations. It's like cooking all this fusion stuff or whatever. You know what I mean? Your whole world of culinary art was fine when you didn't know about sushi and all of a sudden you discover sushi and it's a whole different thing. So I'm always trying to just keep my ear and my mind out for just new stuff that way and just kind of be open and receptive to it. And part of that is having to acknowledge the fact that, yeah, you suck. I mean, when I say that, I don't mean that like, oh yeah, I'm awful. But you know what I mean. It's the humbling and opening yourself up to information. Get the ego out of it and be receptive to information and think about it critically and think about your own work critically and that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:50:15):

Well, I mean, you always suck compared to your ideal, right?

Speaker 2 (01:50:18):

Sure. But sometimes I don't know what that is exactly. If I'm working with an artist and I don't know what the ideal is just yet, it could come from

Speaker 1 (01:50:26):

Is this something that you discover

Speaker 2 (01:50:28):

A lot of times? Yeah. It comes through conversation. It comes through. What's your influence? Oh, you like this thing? I was working with some metal band and it became quite clear that the vocalist was in the wrong band. He had cowboy hats on, cowboy boots, that kind of thing. But I mean, I say wrong band, but when I talked to him and talked about his lyrics, he was struggling with stuff. What are your influences? Oh, William Jennings and stuff, and some old country artists. And he was afraid to bring that into metal. Like, no, no, no, you got something good happening here because this doesn't happen that often where someone in the metal band has this kind of influence and style about their band. It's like this is a combination that is interesting. It's something off the beaten path that can give you and the band something unique.

(01:51:13):

Because identity to me, I think I talked about that in the last podcast, is the most important thing you can have as an artist. And to circle it back around to this one, that's one of the reasons why I was just so keen to work with David and the King stuff from way back before we even met, just because it was interesting and it had an identity. It had reason for the sound. And that's something I think I talked about in the last podcast too. What's your reason for hooting and hollering? I mean, it sounds cool, but when there's an actual thought about it, when there are actually interesting things to be angry about, that's why I always rage against the machine. I'm like, man, this guy's talking about some real shit. Like, damn, there's this dude's pissed. And he has every right to be

Speaker 1 (01:51:54):

Real to him no matter what. Exactly. If you agree with him or not, it's real to him. And you can feel that.

Speaker 2 (01:52:00):

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:52:01):

The technology thing I just think is interesting because at the beginning of the conversation, you were talking about preset types as opposed to idea people. Isn't that what you said? Like preset people versus idea people. Setting, setting, setting,

Speaker 3 (01:52:13):

Setting, setting, setting. Okay. Yeah, settings, people. I was repeating it like that. Not to scold you, but because that's what, it's their obsession. Scratch their neck setting, setting, setting. What's the settings, what's the setting?

Speaker 1 (01:52:25):

That's exactly it. And I think that now because of the amount of information that's available out there, people can fake, they can trick themselves into thinking that they're a lot better than they actually are because they know settings and they're getting settings. And so they're constructing this facade of quality that only works in this one particular situation that they're using it in. But then the moment that they have to try something different, it crumbles because it's not an actual skill based on actual ideas. And I think that the only reason we have that situation is because of the technology evolving and because of the ability to get information being so in our faces all the time. Whereas I think in earlier eras, people who were not that skilled wouldn't have been able to, they wouldn't able to get access to I guess actual privileged information and they wouldn't have the opportunity to display, I guess their work or really even get into the conversation because they wouldn't even get taken seriously.

Speaker 3 (01:53:35):

Exactly. I think I like the idea of some type of gladiator ring, like you wouldn't have made it far because your idea would've been challenged quickly because there is only so many avenues that you may express your idea. And if it's in a real conversation and it's 1940, someone's just going to tell you that you're full of shit. It doesn't really happen today. But me and Josh always use the term parroting. A parrot can repeat what it hears, but it doesn't actually talk. It can't talk, it can't have a conversation. It can only repeat what it hears. And I think what you're talking about is it's an unchecked ideology, it's a parrot, it's a parroting. They walk around repeating these platitudes and these stupid sayings and they go their whole life repeating them because they're not challenged. When you take all these facades away and maybe say 50 years ago you couldn't really go around doing anything.

(01:54:38):

Well, first off, you couldn't live in your mom's basement. There was no basements. But if there was a basement, you didn't have anything down there to play with, so you would've to come out into the world and you would have to present your ideas. And it goes back to the idea of watching tape of you fight the belief that you have these skills. They get challenged when someone punches you in the face or when someone's sitting across from you who is also a completely capable, able bodied person who wants you to lose in a competition or whatever. Even an intellectual conversation. You can only repeat a few catch phrases before you're challenged beyond your memorization. I think we talked about the memorization of information versus knowledge or wisdom or whatever it may be. You can only repeat so many phrases. You can't, when you get underneath some pressure, those sentences stop coming and that is the difference to me, that's character or real solid character as opposed to something like reputation, which is just something that people spread.

Speaker 1 (01:55:43):

But fighting for instance takes technique, right? It takes technical knowledge and actual technique, which is why with proper technique, someone who's not huge can kick the shit out of someone who is. What role do you see that kind of intellectual knowledge playing with anything you're trying to get good at?

Speaker 3 (01:56:04):

A pragmatism, I guess would be the closest thing to the truth that I could tell you, I don't watch the things people say. I watch the things people do. So if you tell me, I'm trying so I just can't get this right, I'm da, da, dah, dah, dah, I'm this, that and the other, and I'm making 19 excuses, but I'm watching you and you're sitting here telling me about how hard you're trying, but I haven't ever seen you try and I lived in the fucking next room from you. I would say that it doesn't really matter what you say. I know the truth is you aren't. That if you spend more times playing Call of Duty than you do playing your guitar, you don't really want to be a musician as much as you sit and grovel to me that you do.

(01:56:48):

I got relatives who are fucking humongous that sit and tell me they go to the gym and they also work out, but they for some reason just can't get slim. And it's like the lie detector is your body. When you put less calories in it, unless you have a fucking thyroid problem or something, which you don't, I know you, I'm unrelated to you put less in than you expel. You shrink. That's just how it is. So I would say pragmatism, the real observation of how people act and not assigning any judgments or intentions or anything. I don't like to do the thing where I assume I know what these people's intentions are or justify it or care. I don't do that. But I think you can look at people and if you watch them for long enough, you'll know the truth regardless if it happens to match up to what they say or not.

(01:57:48):

And me and Josh talk about this all the time, in my opinion, stupid rules that more platitudes that don't matter, people that are uninteresting are uninterested, and that's true because the most interesting people I know are the most interested people I know. They're the most curious and you would think, well, you're the most interesting people I know are one of the ones I know, and I know a lot of people, why are you so interested? You should just spend time entertaining. But it doesn't really work that way, and the way that I try to be is just be pragmatic and with myself as well. All these things that I say and put people down and constantly ridicule people. I do it to myself about a hundred times more than I do anyone else, which is why I don't feel bad. I try to be pragmatic when I look at, are you being honest with yourself?

(01:58:35):

Did you leave anything? Did you pull any punches? I guess it's a checks and balances thing. It's a few ideas I'm obsessed with. One is the cognitive biases or the cognitive dissonances and another is theological fallacies, and then there's pragmatism. Am I acting in a way that the world that I explain or the life that I explain want to live or the human that I want to be is in sync with my actions? Most of the time people are not, and I try to be as much as I can and that mainly it doesn't always, the thing about it is when I am succeeding at doing it as much as I know how to and when I'm doing very good, it doesn't at all make for a good social setting, a good interaction, a good friendship, a good relationship, and it's telling because it reveals truth to you. I think there is such thing as wisdom, and I was lucky enough to come across ideas that I think are good stoicism or something like that, like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius or I already mentioned GI Krishnamurti and internalizing these ideas, but being pragmatic in the observation of the world around you and your actions in it, mainly, you should always start with making your own bet as they say.

Speaker 2 (02:00:00):

That's funny. Yeah, I was just thinking about the interesting people and the interested as well. It's just bored and boring.

Speaker 3 (02:00:07):

Exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:00:09):

I want to say this was a little over a year ago by the story that I'm telling here, but I remember having a moment going to Qw to pick up some food and it was a big line, forgot my phone. So what I did for the 10 minutes of waiting is just really taking your surroundings and just, I found myself just ridiculously entertained by just the people, the architecture of the building, the amount of infrastructure it takes to have something like a kedo, like a chain. How do they stock this stuff? What are they doing here? You know what I mean? What are the dimensions of this counter? How's it designed to flow the traffic? Looking at the dining area, by the time I got my food, I'm like, man, I don't want to leave. I'm just sitting here.

(02:00:52):

I'm absorbing this stuff in. And it's something that you don't often afford yourself. You have to make a conscious effort to do. And I find myself, if I'm in public, which I don't typically like to do, but yeah, you have sometimes your device with you and you find yourself staring at some worthless information that really, I mean, it's great for a lot of things, but a lot of times we all, I think, fall victim to just killing time when it is so precious. But if you're able to just sit in a Qdoba queue and entertain yourself for 15 minutes, that to me is a sign I think to me at least of true happiness. It sounds crazy, but I think it is. It's indicative of the ability to just absorb something that most would find mundane and really get a lot of enjoyment. I think really profound enjoyment out of it, more so than scrolling through the gram. That's for sure.

Speaker 3 (02:01:41):

I was going to say to me that is a better time than what the screen has in there.

Speaker 2 (02:01:46):

Sure. Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 3 (02:01:47):

People make stupid arguments. Again, this is what the question that I thought you were asking me when you asked how do you deal with mobilize that type of intellectual pursuit to make it meaningful. I thought you were asking me a different question, and I think society is an animal that has to be kept alive, and it is kept alive by just like money. Our money is a facade. It used to be backed by something that was real, but now it's not, and it's only valuable because we all agree it's valuable. New York City is only a desirable place to live because everyone says that it's desirable. It wasn't desirable in 1981. Why is it now? And I know the reasons why it is, but those rhetorical is kind of just getting to the point of because society rewards or tells you something may be in your best interest or a worthwhile pursuit, you have to consider the source.

(02:02:52):

Is the doctor going to really tell you that you don't need the prescription or is he going to write you one and then go buy the Ferrari? There are a lot of things that the society or your world, or even it comes down to your family, friends, the person that you love the most will tell you prolong that. The last thing these, most of the time, it's just avoiding challenge. One of the four or five things we talked about, most people find peace in you being a certain way because that isn't consistent with them, and it doesn't challenge anything about them. If I come from hell and I have a friend who comes from hell and he just says, yeah, you did all that stuff, you and you know what I mean? Not me though. That gets him off the hook for life. And life is the same way.

(02:03:42):

The things that it rewards are not necessarily good things. They're not inherently good things. They're not inherently productive things. When you have a sick society, it's going to award sickness and no one cares to look at the architecture of the kid. You know what I mean? Because it sounds so crazy. But that really is the practice of applying, I think, pragmatic usefulness. I do the same exact thing even when there is nothing to observe. There are other types of little rituals and things that I do in places or spots where you find yourself kind of sitting in elevators in a waiting room in something where you must be present, but you're not really present. There are a handful of activities that you can assign to those types of situations that really add value. None of them are on your phone.

Speaker 2 (02:04:36):

Yeah, I think I thought of it. I think I watched Grand Budapest again. Was it last night or the night before?

Speaker 3 (02:04:42):

Dude, calm down. You've watched it 40 times, man, you need to watch the Handmade Night. Told you.

Speaker 2 (02:04:48):

It's got to be more told. I've seen that twice. I've seen it twice. But yeah, it was just at the end where he's telling the story. The author's absorbing the story from the guy that worked as the bellhop, and then he's like, you go on for the elevator. No, no, I'm just going to sit for a while. I'm just like, oh, yeah, just sit and smoke a pipe in the lobby. You know what I mean? Nothing, just But absorbing. But absorbing the story. He was just told to then retell it to you, the audience, but within all of that, yeah, it's just that sitting. It's just that sitting in quiet and just exactly, just absorbing the inform. Cool. He information

Speaker 3 (02:05:22):

Just told this story, and he's still

Speaker 2 (02:05:24):

Saying

Speaker 3 (02:05:24):

To me, it is the end of Voltaire's CandE when this hell happens. And he says, so what are we going to do now? And he's like, well, yeah, we're going to do all that, but right now we must just cultivate our garden. And it's like, fuck.

Speaker 1 (02:05:45):

Yeah. Do you think that it's kind of our own fault if we're ever bored?

Speaker 3 (02:05:51):

Yes. Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear. That's what Maynard said, right? Positively. Are you high? We're walking miracles. You know what I mean? We're complete miracles. No, I don't find any lack. No, no. There's nothing uninteresting about that. I think what we call entertainment isn't really entertainment. I think things that put in front of people aren't necessarily worthwhile and not worth. I don't think people are being pushed to their limits. I think some of it's by design. I think some of it's a weapon. I think some of it is foregoing responsibility or laziness. I think the world rewards that type of stuff. I think the world, if it doesn't reward it, it makes a bunch of excuses for that type of stuff, but we can live bored.

Speaker 2 (02:06:38):

Yeah, boredom. It just makes me think about video games. I love video games. I enjoy 'em. I don't play nearly as much as a lot of people I know, but I really, really do enjoy, and I love the interaction aspect. To me, it's scratch that curiosity where an album, you can listen to a million different ways. You can put in these speakers, these headphones listen to your car, and you hear things you never heard before. But in a game, you're truly exploring some piece of art. And that term can be used a little bit loosely in some cases and maybe a little more strongly in others. But to talk about the boredom thing, and I think maybe one of the reasons why video games are the biggest form of entertainment that dwarfs music and movies and books combined, is that it does give you the sense of accomplishments. You can feel accomplished when you finish a book for sure, or when you finish a movie, but not like a game because you're given tasks. And I think there's maybe a fear of commitment. Everybody has this. There's a fear of commitment of finishing a certain task, but a game scratches that itch of accomplishment in such a way, which yeah, it's interesting. Is it good or bad? It's just telling maybe. But it also coincides with technology advancing. But yeah, boredom,

Speaker 3 (02:07:49):

The better video game analogy where I thought you were going, where the combo was. I think what you say is there's two type of gamers, people that play as a recess or recreation from their life, or there are people that are trying to escape their life. Some people are trying to augment their life like, oh,

Speaker 2 (02:08:10):

I'm going to

Speaker 3 (02:08:10):

Play this game for 60 minutes, can be fun and all that other stuff. And I think I'm in that zone because I don't play games, but when I do, it's always at your house and it's always like an assignment, but an assignment. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, it's an assignment.

Speaker 2 (02:08:27):

What was the last assignment I gave you? It was Beginner's Guide. I think it was called Beginner's Guide. That was cool. It's like House of Lee, but video games. So if anyone listening to this wants to play a game, that's something a little different. Try. Yeah. Beginner's guide. I dunno if it's on consoles, but I know it's on pc.

Speaker 3 (02:08:41):

It's a bit strange, but this is going to be shitty because people are going to be like, this guy's really a fucking lame, but I actually like this because you have to consider the scenario. I'm sitting here on his couch. You know what I mean? Best TV in the world, all this other stuff. The sounds going good. I got the headphones on too. He hooked me up with headphones. So I've teleported, I'm not even in the same room or a house. And he left me alone for the duration of the video game, and I sat and played the whole game. And sometimes he says to do these types of things, and I only do it because I trust him. There are probably maybe three people I would play a video game for, and I thought I would come out the other side as s, and maybe I did. But it is a different kind of game. But the analogy that he always uses is some people play games as a break from life. Some people play it to actually live. This is a vicarious guy whose life only matters on this game.

Speaker 2 (02:09:51):

And I think that was something that definitely existed. Obviously long before games with books you can see yourself as the character in movies is escapism that. Even gambling, let's say

Speaker 3 (02:10:04):

Drugs.

Speaker 2 (02:10:04):

Gambling. Yeah, drugs.

Speaker 3 (02:10:05):

There we go. That's the ancient one. Escapism.

Speaker 2 (02:10:09):

Yeah, exactly. And again, I think it circles back around to the skirting of responsibility, the procrastinators crack essentially with video games. Josh, why

Speaker 1 (02:10:22):

Would you give someone an assignment to play a video game? I'm curious about that. What's the context?

Speaker 2 (02:10:29):

The context is just for me, and I think it's something that I knew David would appreciate, it's just a form a narrative. It's kind of witnessing the evolution of a medium, which we don't really see with music. It changes in terms of recording. We get digital, sure, but is the music objectively better or worse? You can make an argument both sides easily, and you can make an easy argument that no one will ever top Beethoven and Mozart, et cetera. But when it comes to video games, we're watching a medium kind of evolve with technology. I mean, it's literally cutting edge. This is why I'm into the VR or these other things because it's interesting to me. Fascinating to see a whole new medium of storytelling and expression kind of open up and blossom right in front of you. So when something like a beginner's guy comes out, I never experienced anything like that in terms of a book or music or movie or anything like that. Maybe someone who read House of Leaves would've seen it coming a little bit further away. But I guess that's true of really any art form. But it's interesting to see it repackaged in an interactive way, and

Speaker 1 (02:11:35):

So should I check out Beginner's Guide?

Speaker 2 (02:11:37):

Sure, yeah. It's something different. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (02:11:39):

Do you know House of Leaves?

Speaker 2 (02:11:41):

No.

Speaker 3 (02:11:42):

It's a really good book, but once again, I think this was a recommendation, just like I told him to watch the Handmaiden a thousand Days in a row. I don't give recommendations or care. If anyone likes or knows about anything that I like or know about, I'm kind of on my own path and I just appreciate things. But sometimes I come across something where I'm like, okay, well I got to let Josh know that I think this is the best movie to be made since Cooper Size Wide Shut. And I would only say this to him because we talk about these types of things, and I think he would recommend The Beginner's Guide to me for maybe the same reasons I've played six video games in my life. I don't, the Rotten Tomatoes, it's like the opposite of that. It's a trusted source. It's a actual unsolicited.

(02:12:33):

I play out of curiosity when he mentions it, when he recommends a movie, I watch it. It just because he has a rapport. It's kind of why I don't like making recommendations for books or movies or things just blindly, everyone should read this book or movie. I don't know these people. I don't fucking know you. I don't know what you should read. I don't know what I should recommend. I don't know what you're going to read. I don't know about your level. I don't know about your curiosity. Don't know what your life to know where you are. Don't know where you want to go. Don't know where you're heading.

Speaker 2 (02:13:02):

Dude, that reminds me of something I went through recently with movies I bought. I've been going on this cake with getting all these 4K remasters of the Kubrick and then all this stuff. So there was a deal on Back to the Future, not the first movie, not like crazy about it, but it was a good deal. It was all three of them. It, it's like, eh, I remember the second one was not as good as the first. I remember really not liking the third one, so whatever. I got all three, I'll watch one a night for the next three days in a row. I ended up really liking them completely. 180 in my opinion, on a lot of movies actually that I bought recently in 4K. And I dunno if it's my setup, I'm seeing more details that, you know what I mean was intended. And I just feel more absorbed into the film than I would've been last time I watched it. But to, I guess the point I'm trying to make is about the recommendation. What place are you in mentally now when I think I recommended him playing Beginner's Guide. Were we in the middle of the La Petite writing? I think it was. Yeah, it was one of those things,

Speaker 3 (02:13:59):

Yeah, I was having a, I don't want to say a hard time. I was having an unusual time, but I was just needed a pivot or something

Speaker 2 (02:14:09):

To spark, just a different angle to look at things from. Right,

Speaker 3 (02:14:12):

Just change the angle a little bit for me type of thing.

Speaker 2 (02:14:15):

Yeah, that was kind of the reason for that.

Speaker 3 (02:14:17):

Yeah, it was for something. I think I've played one game for every record maybe, or no, just like one or two I think. I can't remember, but it was kind of like a pointless assignment because it was a good one, but the idea was kind of just the assignment. It wasn't even an assignment. He just said, I'll sit you down and play this game and any, just

Speaker 1 (02:14:44):

Get your head in a different space.

Speaker 3 (02:14:45):

You want me to tell you what it was? This motherfucker was trying to trick me out of getting a whole day's work, paid for fucking goddamn me playing games. But no, it was any impatient person that would desire results would've thought that who would go be sitting in a studio that's very overpriced and just be like, I'm going to go sit on the couch. I'm going to go sit on the couch and play a video game for this day. It's not like I'm rich, I'm out here. Yeah, that ain't nothing. Even though I do tend to flex a little bit, but that's not the point. The point is it's taking one step back, I guess, to take two forward. That makes any sense on our endless amounts of platitudes and stupid sayings for this convo. You know what I mean though?

Speaker 1 (02:15:31):

Yeah. Yes. So I think on that note, I think this is actually a good place to end it. I want to thank both of you for taking the time.

Speaker 2 (02:15:41):

We hit your platitude threshold and you're tapping out wisely, so

Speaker 3 (02:15:46):

No, I think it's a good length. That's cool. Most people don't like to actually have a talk. They like to get some sound bites, and

Speaker 1 (02:15:54):

I wouldn't be still doing this if I wasn't able to have actual conversations. I'd get so sick of it, even though I mainly talk to producers and musicians. We don't talk about music and recording that much.

Speaker 3 (02:16:12):

Okay,

Speaker 1 (02:16:12):

Yeah. This is way more my speed. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (02:16:15):

This is pretty cool. Again, this would be like a solicitation from Josh that I would just figured was probably a good idea. Luckily, I have someone like him that can just screen these. He can talk to all the bullshit people. You know what I mean? If it's a meaningful conversation, he has to tap me in, he has to tag me in. It's a tag team, and if his conversation's going to have any substance, he of course has to tag my hand. Well,

Speaker 1 (02:16:48):

Thank you. Of course. Thanks for having us.

Speaker 2 (02:16:50):

No problem.

Speaker 1 (02:16:51):

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 AI levy URM audio, and of course, please tag my guests as well. Till next time, happy mixing.

Speaker 2 (02:17:12):

You've been listening to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast. To ask us questions, make

Speaker 1 (02:17:17):

Suggestions and interact, visit URM Academy and press the podcast link today.