Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 376: Mr. Bill

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

Mr. Bill, sonic alchemist and genius musician, joins the DTFH! This episode is brought to you by: Feals - Visit feals.com/duncan and get 50% off and FREE shipping on your first order.

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It is ID Trussell, and you are listening to the Dugga Trussell Family Hour podcast. Today we have a sonic alchemist with us. Mr. Bill is a genius who creates music that reminds me of what it sounds like when I'm trying to fall asleep when I've taken too much LSD. I don't know if you've experienced that before. If you haven't, just imagine the sound of a million elven ping pong balls being launched in to a black hole by a t-shirt gun made of the crucifix that Christ was crucified on, and that will give you some idea of what that sound is like.

Mr. Bill comes very, very close to replicating that sound but in a more musical way, and he's been kind enough to allow me to play an unreleased track on my podcast. So here it is. Mr. Bill is a genius who creates music that reminds me of what it sounds like when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep. Mr. Bill is a genius who creates music that reminds me of what it sounds like when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep. Mr. Bill is a genius who creates music that reminds me of what it sounds like when I'm trying

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when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep when I'm trying to fall asleep that is generating a sound that seems to be, I don't know, like it has its own life or something like that, feels like a form of communion and almost a form of channeling in the sense that sometimes sounds start coming out of there that I didn't mean to make, that I couldn't have made if I tried in a million years. Well, here's the thing about sound design is a lot of people are like that with it. So pretty much what I would classify what you do on the modular synthesis from what I've heard just like at the end of the Freddie podcast

and sometimes in the intro of your podcast is it sound design. And generally, that's kind of my process for sound design too. It's like, you almost don't want to know what you're doing. All as you want and need for it to be is engaging, right? Like you just really need it to be fun for you and you really need it to be just interesting to the point where you can like really go in on it and get lost in it because that's what's going to really yield the best results is you wanting to do it. It's kind of like like a martial art or something, right? It's like you really need to want to fucking do it for 10 years straight to be a master at it or 20 years or 30. How long it takes to get good at martial arts? Yeah.

But yeah, so for sound design, I almost prefer when I don't know what's happening anyway. Like I kind of like to go in there and be like, all right, I'm going to forget everything that I learned at university about mixing and mastering and the traditional way that you should process a signal. And instead, I'm going to put 40 compresses on it and I'm going to put 40 delays and I'm going to put like 50 fucking flanges. And just like, you know, like I'll do this in the digital realm just to be like, what will happen? When will my computer die from doing this? And eventually some bullshit sound will come out the other side where you're just like, what have I done? Yeah. And I won't know why that works or how that like, you know, the amount of backtracing you'd have to do

through that many processes to eventually figure out like, why that's happening. You know, if you put a really intense processing chain on like that, like a hundred devices that are all doing one thing again and again and again, like a very recursive or iterative process. And then you go to the start, like the synthesizer that's running into that chain. You just change it a tiny bit. The resulting factor on the other end is massive. And I won't understand why that fucking happens. I'll know how I got there.

But yeah, I think in that sense, like sound design should be that way. I think then trying to validate your sound design into a musical context. That's when you might want to read a manual about which, you know, I don't know. I don't I don't foresee that happening. Not out of lack of ambition, but just more sort of like, I don't I don't like it's a it's a kind of anything you say about music. I'm starting to realize just sounds like hyper cheesy in this. But to me, it's like a it's a meditation that is absolutely. I mean, I think like anything that engages you that heavily is meditative, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And and there's, you know, in, you know, the Ram Dass talks about the Pooja table. That's one of that's one of the ways people pray is you have this thing called you ever heard of a Pooja table? No, so all of this side of things is very much like I'm a noob. Oh, cool. Okay, cool. So a Pooja table, you could say is like a Euro rack, but for gods and gurus and teachers.

What does it look like? It looks like an altar with a deity on it, candles. It's kind of like a shrine. A shrine. Okay. Images of beings that like inspire you. It doesn't have to be like mystical beings either. Just like, you know, if you could be musicians that it inspired you or people in your family that you love.

And then maybe on the Pooja table, you also have a people that you're having trouble with. Like people like your enemies, you could put up there as well. Not because you're wanting to curse them, but because sitting in front of them in a meditative state, you're trying to generate compassion for them. And then there's sometimes musical elements to a Pooja table, like a bell that you ring, maybe a harmonium that you sing. Kirtan too. And what's interesting in this form of meditation is that there's a supernatural sort of interactivity that begins to happen where whether it be your own projection that you're seeing on the deity, which is a nice materialist way to reduce it to a non woo woo level and just say, here we have a particular type of movie screen upon which the parts of my psyche that are attuned to mystical symbol sets can shine. And then within that is the possibility to have like a profoundly beautiful experience just by seeing your own light being reflected in from a deity.

But from another perspective, it's a telephone line to really reduce it to idiot terms that you're talking to divinity through. And there's an interactivity that happens either way. I don't give a fuck. It's a wonderful experience. And I get the same sense if I'm making music on these things sometimes where it's like, I feel like this is a two way conversation happening between me and chaos. And sometimes it doesn't seem like chaos that's talking back. And that's when it gets specifically trippy. So I understand exactly what you're talking about.

And I would say that's almost something specific to modular synthesis kind of. I mean, there is a little bit of that in a DAW. I think when you like, you know, deep into the editing and deep into like synthesizing something with, you know, serum or like some some VST. But I specifically think like I was texting. Oh, wait, sorry. Pause digital audio workstation. People might not know of VST virtual instrument. Yeah.

Like basically modular synth inside a computer. Yeah. So with a modular synthesizer, I often feel like because it's all voltages and because it's, you know, it is electricity that you're changing and any sound difference that you're having that that exists there is because of some change in voltage or some alteration to to a physical component that you're making there. So it is, I don't know, it feels a little bit closer and a bit more like you are having a conversation with a living instrument. Same with when you're actually playing an instrument, like when you're playing a guitar or when you're playing, there is some like form of actual physical resonance there or something. When you're in a DAW, like Ableton or Logic or GarageBand or, you know, whatever the fuck people would use for whatever they're writing with, it's, I know, it's a little bit more cold and sterile. I feel like it's not that so much of that conversation going on. That's yeah.

That's how I feel too. It's so much so very different that you to me like that's when I really find myself experiencing these dark bargains with my own desire to like collect sounds, which is that, you know, you're having a pure moment with your synthesizers. And then by turning on the on Ableton because you want to like grab whatever the loop is that you've created. It's like kind of like being on a romantic date and pulling your phone out. I mean, like, can we take a picture together? You know what I mean? And it seems like the synthesizers don't respond well to that lack of attention. You know, it almost feels like they're like, fuck off, really?

Do you have to put, you got to record everything? Can't we just have a night just you and me without you uploading some shit? You know what I mean? Like there's a sense of like, again, all projection. To me, you know, you could you call it whatever you want. Some people are like, do I call it God or source or if you really want to reduce it, just call it project. You're seeing your own reflection in the universe. And since you're alive, it appears to be alive in the way that you are, whatever.

The point is, to me, these are mystical instruments that are relatively brand new to the planet. And I mean, think how long is it? How long has stringed instruments been here? Yeah, quite a while. As long as there's been hair and sticks, you know, and how long have like obviously percussive instruments? Even longer than stringed instruments, I think. Rocks? You don't even have fucking hair.

Just a rock, just rocks and you got a hands and you got it. First the rock or hair? Well, it's the one of the ultimate questions. But these things, they're brand new, man. And they can emulate strings. They can emulate rocks. They can emulate whatever you want them to emulate. You can conform to that.

But what I'm saying is, I don't think we fully understand what the fuck these things are. They've only been around since as long as electricity in some form. I mean, you could argue that like Tesla coil is a synthesizer, I guess. Well, yeah. I think, yeah, we understand what they are. I mean, it is just voltages and all you can do in a modular synthesizer is you can only do three things. Well, voltage can only do three things. It can either go up or it can go down or it can stay the same.

Right. And literally all of these modules are just ways to vary the voltage in different ways. Sure. Like it'll send it out either like by quantized steps or it'll send it out like with nice enveloped curves, which you can speed up or slow down or inverse or anything like that. Or you could take the voltage, which is actual physical audio, record it and speed it up and slow it down in a sampler or something like this. You know, a bunch of stuff you can do with it. But I mean, that's from a technical aspect.

I think what you're talking about is more from like the emotional standpoint of what it is, right? Well, it's like, OK, prior to the existence of LSD, right? Oh, by the way. Yes. Oh, no, fascinating. But my birthday is actually on Bicycle Day. Guess when my birthday is? Bicycle Day.

The day. Well, yours is 419. Yeah. Mine is 420. Oh, sick, dude. How fucking cool is that? Dude, that's so sick. Match made in heaven.

That's so cool, man. Yeah. Well, there you go. So that famous day for those of you who have missed me yapping about it probably by now in the course of this podcast, 7000 hours talking about Bicycle Day. That was, they called Bicycle Day because that's the day Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD 25 intentionally ingested LSD and he took a lot. Did he intentionally or did he accidentally get it on him and then took a bike ride? Story that I've heard is he got a little bit on his hand at one point and had like a, I think he took kind of a micro dose and had like a really interesting experience.

And then he decided to dose himself and that's Bicycle Day. And he dosed himself based on other, I guess, drugs at the time. He didn't understand what functioned in the microgram. Wow. So he probably got real high. He took so much acid and I think it's, there's a record on how much he took and let's not forget. This is like, not just acid created by the discoverer of LSD, but this is like, this is the baby. This is a baby to the world.

LSD had just been discovered. I mean, it's possibility it existed forever. And I guess some people say that when they talk about the psychoactive components that the Greeks were taking in the, what is it? The Eleusinian Mysteries and the, it was called, I can't remember. There's some sense that maybe, or in India, they talk about this stuff called Soma. You know, who knows, but this, whatever this incarnation of a psychedelic was, it's like a Jesus in the manger. Right. Jesus in the manger after Jesus got dipped in acid.

Right. That's bicycle debt. Cause when I'm riding on my bike on acid, I can refer to a million different sources when I think I'm going crazy. Right. He didn't have that. He didn't know he was going to come down. But what he did have, and this must be fucking insane, is to have taken a thing that he, like imagine you invented acid and then you took a huge fucking dose of acid. Yeah.

And then you're like, wow, I fucking invented this. Like that'll be pretty crazy. Oh my God. Well, I mean, yeah. It's almost like when you're bringing it back to music, like if I create some like really insanely highly edited piece of music that just, when I listen to it, literally makes me feel almost confused because it's like sensory overload of edits, which is what I like my music to do for me. And then I get kind of like high on something and then I listen back to it. I'll often go like, fuck, like I made that somehow. And I'll be like really impressed with like, it'll take me a lot of time and I'll sit back and I'll be kind of proud of it.

Yeah. I'll have these like specific feelings that kind of extend pride. There is pride to it, but it's also these other feelings. And I can only imagine like with acid or something. It must be like that times a million. Well, right. I mean, you're like, you're the opposite of the person who invented the nuclear bomb. I mean, you, this thing that you made in your laboratory escaped into society.

It is now warping society. And I would say mostly beneficial ways. Absolutely. And it's all based on your instinct because that like supposedly when they were studying it at Sandow's laboratories, because I think they thought it was doing something for like childbirth, uterine contractions. They were looking for something to help with childbirth. And like he apparently at pharmaceutical companies, when you're doing these studies of drugs that you're testing, once you're done testing a drug, you just, if it's shelfed, it can just stay shelfed infinitely.

You know, and he had this weird impulse to pull it back down and like work with it. Wow. So acid was on the shelves. Yeah. And again, anybody out there who can correct my telling of the story of the birth of LSD, please, I will love your corrections because it's a foggy memory. He's got a great book called My Problem Child about LSD. But when I'm saying modular synthesizers are like LSD or like brand new to the world and we're not quite sure what they do.

Yeah, we do know what they do. It's not like there's like elves in there fucking with crystal balls, farting in microphones or whatever. We know what they do. But in the same way that I don't think we've seen quite the impact that LSD has had on society because it's not done yet. We're not done. No. LSD isn't finished with us.

It's still working through us. And similarly, I think this level of technology is connected to the singularity in AI. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I kind of do. We don't quite know where it's going. But I think we are currently seeing like a pretty huge shift in like what people like to listen to, right? So when I first started writing electronic music, which was maybe 12 to 15 years ago, like somewhere in that range, all my friends were in metal bands, which is what I was doing pre-electronic music was metal bands.

Cool. And I would write like these wacky sort of like breakcore chiptune type beats and I would show them to my friends and be like, ah, like pretty cool. And they'd be like, dude, this is just like stupid Mario music. You know, but it's like that stupid Mario music is now like people's preferred shit to listen to like in the form of house and electro and dubstep and like all that kind of it's evolving a lot. So I think we are sort of seeing the power of electronic music now at least. Like it's creating a fucking giant cultural movement.

Yeah. Like in the same way that I think, you know, jam bands did back in the day. It's like, you know, like I just told you, my friend Ben Gandra White Knight just sold three nights at Red Rocks. That's right. It's insane. It's insane. That's like great, grateful dead level shit. Yeah.

Right. And to me, even when I've gone to like the most cheesy festivals and seen like mainstream DJs, you know, people that are just sort of like, I don't know. You gave me a new term that I've never heard before, bottle service clubs. Okay. You know, even when I, even then, I there, I've just noticed like a particular energy that when the, they've tuned the human in the right way is so specific to electronic music and so specifically alien, which is why I would, it's like, if I, we find out tippers and alien, that's going to be the least surprising thing to me.

It's like, yeah, I get it. That makes sense that what's coming out of him is, is like alien. And what is an alien? An alien is something that's fresh to the earth. Yeah. Something that's like foreign to our understanding. Yeah. It's like land to deer.

Right. And electronic music just landed here. That's a good point. Yeah. It's a fucking alien. It is an alien. I mean, the, like the question is where to come from and what does it want? Like, you know, that's, what does technology want with us?

You know, it's an alien that flew out of our minds, collectively assembled itself has produced these nodes of existence, like altars, technological altars that look like our computers, look like our synthesizers, look like our phones, look like our watches. We engage with it in a religious way. We sit in front of it and go into a deep trance, regardless, even if you're watching golden girls on YouTube, you're tranced out. And then, and then within that situation, an evolution is happening, not just of the technology, but of the tech of us who are being affected by this bizarre symbiosis. So when I look at synthesizers, I do see a, well, a sprout of the form of some fucking crazy thing that is currently growing out of us right now. And I love, that's why I love it. So in like this sense, maybe synthesizer is similar to like maybe the very early stages of black and white TV or something like that.

Yeah, man. Yeah. Exactly. Or maybe you could say they're similar to like the radio. Okay. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah. So yeah, in that sense, yeah, I can understand what you're saying.

You know, we pick, we create a technology that picks up radio frequencies. And at first, the first radio, it must, what would have sounded like static. Just static from what? So here's the thing though. Like, I kind of see where you're going with this. You're saying like, it'll evolve, it'll evolve, it'll sound like way cooler and stuff like that. But without upgrading out is music can only sound so good anyway. Because like our hearing range, well, our hearing range is only limited to a band of about 20,000 Hertz.

And that's if you have really fucking good hearing. If you have normal hearing like you or I probably have, it stops at about 16,000 Hertz or 17,000 Hertz. Lower if you have hearing damage, a little higher if you're a baby. And then the lower end of the spectrum we can hear down to is like maybe 20 Hertz and you really don't even hear that at that point. You just feel it. So that's our range that we're limited to out of that range. We like to split it up into these very particular sets of notes like a chromatic scale. Yeah.

And then out of that scale, the that, you know, once we break them down in that way, we only like to use seven at a time scales. Yeah. We use seven notes that we use as a scale. Unless you're like, you know, you generally won't use all of them. You probably use like five of those and then, you know, you only like to set those up in certain rhythms and stuff. It's all pretty limited to what we like and time signatures as well. We only like, you know, four, four and stuff. And apparently the one theory I've heard about that, like the reason we like four, four music and stuff is because of walking.

You know, like it, it feels natural to us to get like one, two, one, two, one, two. No way. And a lot of this sort of stuff that makes me think that we are kind of hitting the wall a little bit because we're limited, not because the music's limited. I mean, fuck, we could produce a sound system that easily produces up to 100,000 Hertz, but we're not going to hear it. It's not going to matter to us. Right. So like at that point, it might matter to like a ferret or something like that. But like, yeah.

Well, I mean, that's the next step. That's all I'm trying to say is eventually we are going to be able to start making music for ferrets. That's the final phase of technology. Well, I think we're, I think we're in that, that position already. We have technology to, to make stuff that very far exceeds a, our physical limitations of what we can hear slash feel and be obviously like we have DAWs that are very capable of making stuff that we find to be incomprehensibly musical, aka just cacophonies or noise. Right. Which is like I was saying, we only like very specific sets of things in music anyway.

Sure. Yeah. And the grammar that our current grammar for hearing music and making music seems to be even more limited than our alphabet. I mean, yeah, exactly. Like what, what do we got? 27 letters. Is that how many are in the alphabet? 26, 27.

Something like that. Yeah. Like, I think they might have added a few, but regardless, we've got like, and that, that, that becomes sort of the binary or the pixels of language. But then we also only have like so many emotions that we need to create words for anyway. And there's only so many objects in the world that we need to name. And then you can just create combinations of the words. Well, we could, that the emotional thing is hilarious because it's like, you know, we're subjective creatures. You have no idea your view with the thing you're calling anger might be my, who knows, it might be my sadness.

You know, we don't fucking know. For sure. We can kind of, you know, we can tune in with each other and decide, okay, I'm angry and you kind of know what that is sort of. But that's the problem is that, yeah, the language we use for our, our nuanced emotional states is so fucking limited that we're down to what we got angry, sad, happy, hungry. Confused. I don't know if that's a emotion. Confused. That confuses me.

You know, like there's like so many when like there's, for example, there's no word that I'm aware of for like that wobbly, weird in between feeling. You get right when the mushrooms start kicking it. You know what I mean? There's no word for that. Coming up. Coming up. Yeah. But it needs its own like, oh, that's a, um, Thimble Twitter.

Oh, you're. But does it need that if we already know what coming up means kind of like if I say, oh, I'm coming up. I mean, that explains it enough, right? Or do you think, do you think the resolution needs to be deeper? Well, I mean, I think, yeah, I think that's kind of the funny. That's, yeah, I know what you mean. Like do we, yeah, come on. What are you?

What are you going to write a new fucking language for people like to trip? That's exactly what someone who's one took over the line would want to do. What, you know what I'm saying is like some, I love what you're saying because it's an invitation for the listener, the perceiver to expand so that that which is being sort of output, we could pick up. This is where you run into like transhumanism. The neural lace, people who are programmed or like implanting shit in their hands. Like biohacking. Yeah, biohacking, which is that's kind of what you're saying is like that there is a whole new level of music that we haven't evolved to hear yet. And they're meaning there's a possibility that we could.

And then if we can, we have no idea what that's going to be like. And certainly modular synthesizers and electronic music is one step in that direction. Well, what I've seen happening lately is like rather than, I mean, we are expanding musically, we're making better sound systems, producers are getting better at sound design. Everything is like, at this point, like you go to see a really high, high quality produced like bass music show or dubstep show. It's pretty fucking amazing. But partially what I think makes it amazing is this combination of the other senses that, you know, people bring in these like million dollar, like 60, 60 story high fucking LED walls and like huge lasers that look crazy than anything. And they'll combine these like insane audio experiences with these incredible visual experiences too. And like these combination of all the senses.

I think we're like really trying to tap out like a sensory overload experience. That's it. Yeah, that's it. And that that's that's where this weird reflection or version of this type of yoga called back to yoga comes in, which is like at the yoga hot one. What? No, that's Bikram yoga sounds like it though, which is actually Hatha yoga. But in a hot room. But back to yoga is the yoga of devotion or the yoga of love.

And so they'll that's a hard Krishna temple and or any temple that's that's a back to temple is designed to engage all the senses. So there's incense burning. There's flower petals. There's visual representations of the gods. And there's delicious food. And there's some mental. There's some kind of like philosophy behind it that you can infinitely think about. And then there's singing that's happening in bells.

And the idea is that you the idea is to grab the entirety of your being and like allow it to be pulled into a God magnet basically. In that being pulled in, which I just heard on Christian radio is called convection. In that being pulled into whatever the transcendent reality is, you begin to naturally let go of the shit that is like fucking up your life. Like instead of quitting drinking, suddenly you stop wanting to drink. It's not like you're like it's a huge the renunciation is the same kind of renunciation that you know. If I went up to you, I was like, man, congratulations on quitting. What toys did you play with in your kid? I'm probably just the normal shit like trucks and stuff.

Yeah, congratulations. You're not addicted to trucks anymore. Right. You kicked it. You'd be like, I don't. I just don't want to fuck with them anymore. When I was young, if you took my truck, I'd be like, fucking give me that back. Yeah, give me that back.

Where's my fucking truck? What the fuck? Right. So that's the concept behind it is it's like a higher taste. It gives you a taste of something that's so similarly with elect with these shows that you go to all of your senses are being fully engaged, man. And then you're taking some form of psychoactive chemical. Quite often people are tripping balls at these things. And then within that, they're having these like experiences that are spectacularly transcendent.

But the problem is you have to be, you know, deep into the shit to even have the audacity to call it a temple experience. Right. You know, I feel like a lot of these kids are there and they're making contact with God, having real divine experiences, true data transmissions and downloads that are coming from the. Some total of all the various connections that are going on in that place. And then they like feel like they're going nuts or something. It's like, well, I just wanted to have fun tonight. You know, I just want to have a good time. And I'm getting some, this reminds me of a certain thing that I wanted to ask you.

Do you mind if I ask you now before you finish? Please. Okay, cool. I wanted to ask you what you think the more powerful thing is in art out of, I mean, I guess there's like many things, but like I constantly have been coming back to this thought. Over the last few months. And it's the last since I knew I was coming on this podcast. I was like, I could ask Duncan that. So there's like two kinds of artists.

I find there's people who are more in like, I would say I'm more in this camp of just trying to make something like really technically apt and like something that's kind of like, you know, very engaging for me to make and very impressive to me. And like, you know, it shows that I like have a good understanding of like all this stuff. And, you know, that kind of art, which to you in the stand up comedy world might be just, you know, these way more like technical ideas that, you know, weave in and out of like these very crazy concepts and stuff like that. And then there's this other kind of art, which is like people are just making it to play on the dance floor. They're just making it to be like big and powerful. Yeah, a lot of people engage with it because it's easy to understand. But in the stand up comedy world that might be like similar to a dick joke. Right.

So, so I guess my question to you is like, is it more powerful if more people interact with the art? Or is it more powerful if the art is like more maybe legit for lack of a better word? Right. Not that either is like illegitimate. Like they're both legit. And I love all shit. But like, I don't know, like I constantly think about it. I'm like, is it more power?

Like are these dubstep people who are making stuff that I think is quite simple and like maybe not super impressive to me, but it seems to be fucking impressive to all these other people. But it's other people who also don't have like a hugely technically apt understanding of electronic music and the background that I have. Yeah. For like, you know, I might have the more professional opinion or something like that. But if it gets lost on most people, does that like make make it lose its power? Or does that? That's such a, you know, I think it's an unanswerable question in the sense that it's like anyone who's making anything. Thinks about that.

And some, you know, some comics that I know you have had like massive mainstream success in my earlier days when I was like really insecure, but that was manifesting as a kind of like cuntiness masquerading as some kind of sophistication in my judgment of other people's comedy. Right. Kind of that. No, but I did. And it was bad. And I, but it was really what I was, I was, I was unhappy with what I was creating. And I wasn't working hard enough. And so you see someone putting something out and it's very easy to be like, oh boy, come on, really?

That's the most. And it's like, stop. Right. None of your business. Right. You don't know if that, you don't know anything about that. That's making people laugh. That person's enjoying their job.

And so there you go. That being said, if you lay eyes on a thing like that and out of a kind of weird greed or a sense of like, that's what you're supposed to do to be successful. You begin to go against your instincts and start making stuff based on an assessment of a thing that is getting success. Well, at that point, you know, you have crossed over into the land of factory work, I would say. You start developing like this hypothetical audience in your mind and stuff like that. That's it, man. The hypothetical audience begins to inform your artistic decisions. And when that hypothetical, it's more like instead of in the audience, it's not even made of real people.

It's made of simulated bankers, I guess. You were like putting a mon of value on your art that's based on how much money it might make based on the popularity of shit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to me, it's like, well, if you're going to do that, just like get into screen printing or something, you know, like why even bother? It's like, it doesn't make sense to me if that's your intent. It's any making money at any art form at all is an incredibly risky endeavor. And, you know, it's like, it's almost like they shouldn't share the same space sometimes, right? Like it's almost like I've thought about this a lot of times. Like maybe I should get a job just so my art doesn't have to share the same space as business.

You know what I mean? Like just to kind of compartmentalize it too. And that like, you know, you know, aim to make my art like a more pure experience or whatever. Yeah. I mean, you know, I have thought those very same thoughts. And what I've come to realize is like you can quarantine yourself mentally, you know, from that audience. And also the audience is allowed to exist because we live in a capitalist society and people need money to eat and have rent and stuff. And so there's no shame in taking a look at your intent when it comes to creation and recognizing that there is a there's a if there's a pie there and at least some slice of that intention pie.

Isn't you being able to feed your baby, pay your rent and put clothes on your body and be able to go to the doctor? Then what the fuck are you? Where you photosynthetic, you need to make it a slice of your pie. Because I think a lot of artists get lost in this insane conceptualization of the process where that slice of the pie seems abhorrent to them. But really what ends up happening is they just are, you know, I just know. And all the show I'm saying is from my own personal struggles and experience. I'm not calling anybody out at all. This is me I'm talking shit about is like most of the time, if I'm doing anything that isn't making stuff and publishing this stuff.

If I'm like getting lost in wondering if I'm too commercial or not commercial enough. It 100% means I'm not having the relationship with the art. Right. I'm not experiencing the convection or whatever you want to call it that sense of like that to you is like way more important than than the art being successful. I think that the more I think that is this that is the success of the art. That's I would agree. And I literally was just having this conversation with my buddy who I was writing music with the last few days. But it seems like a lot of people like I do a lot of collaborations right like I would say hundreds and hundreds of collaborations.

And it seems like one of the conversations I get into a lot with a lot of artists every fucking 20 minutes. It's another conversation about like how is this going to be perceived by people basically. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, again, listen, we're social animals. Right, right. You know, you think about in the morning, most of us get up and they put on clothes and the reason we're putting on a certain amount of style clothing more probably has something to do with the fact that other people are going to look at us.

It's actually funny you say that. I never think about that really. Well, I mean, I think about it more with my art than I do with my clothing. Listen, when you walk outside, there's a reason you're wearing clothes, man. You know, you don't want people to see a naked. It's a good point. Also, it's illegal. It's just deep in us.

You know, we've been putting on clothes our whole lives. Right, right, right. But like, I don't know the that all of those impulses I think I think like when you're when your mind is when you are lucky enough to have gotten the call and you're either in the valley, the shadow of death, which is completely the drought lands where nothing's coming to you. And you feel like your whole life has been for nothing. And it's like agony. This is the story of fucking Moses in the desert. Like all the stories are just about to me or you could easily take any, any, any, like biblical story or any story about a hero in the wilderness and turn it. That is what it's like when you're not making stuff that you want to make.

Right. Where is the father? Why have you forsaken me? Where are you? Where is my inspiration? Why is it not coming now? And why is this stuff coming out of me? Horrific.

Even just to be in that level of agony is grace, if you ask me, because it means that you are so passionate about whatever it is that you're making, that it's torturing you. Right. How lucky are you? So many people aren't tortured in that way. They've never had the guts to even sit down and start making a goddamn thing at all. Anyway, all of the sum total of the various mental machinations that go into producing any kind of art are really beautiful. And I think it's important for an artist to pat themselves in the back from time to time because they're failing. Because they're fucking running 80 compressors on their goddamn thing and they spent three days on some shit.

At the end of it just sounds rancid. Nothing like what they wanted. It's like you spent three fucking days because you cared about it that much. That's holy fail. That's dying on the battlefield, if you ask me. It's heroic. It's like a very Steven Press filled way of looking at it. That's right.

The War of Art. A great book on this shit, man. But yeah, so, you know, I know this. One of my teachers, Ragu, calls it bean counting. It's like when you're doing bean counting, too much. You're not making stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's like taking away from the important thing, which is just being engaged in a creative activity because that's like super fucking healthy for you or something.

Yes. So I'm curious, have you ever written a dick joke then? Are you fucking kidding? Can you tell me one? A dick joke? No, I'm not going to say it. No, listen, I have, there have been times where I've gone on stage. Oh God, you know, I have a wife and a kid and I just don't do that kind of stand up.

Okay. I'm not going to talk about my wife and my kid and there's comics out there who do such an incredible job of talking about that. For like either complaining about it or just the hilarious reality or whatever it is. For me, it's not my ball of X. Right. But I remember like it when I, when I, I took this break from stand up and all of a sudden I was like on stage trying to do some joke wife jokes. And it wasn't because I thought people would like them. But I know I didn't, I wasn't really interested in talking about my marriage on stage.

But I'm out there doing it. And like they can just, an audience is like, you don't want to be talking about this. Right. And I think the opposite is also true. If you're doing something you really want to be doing on stage, you exert zeal and people can feel that too, right? That, you just answered the question you asked me originally. Right, right, right. That is it.

Like within the passion for creation will be the quality that is going to draw people to it. Right. I would say. I would say that's like the reason why someone like Joe Rogan is so big, right? It's like, you can just tell, or at least, I mean, I haven't listened to his podcast in a while, but at least when it was like blowing up like five or 10 years ago, I have a long it was. You could just tell he was like super passionate about talking to people. Yeah. And I feel like everyone was like, well, look at this guy.

He's just telling, he's just talking about his life and he's fucking stoked about it. Yeah. Yeah, man. I mean, that's, you look, this is, this is why. If we begin to hierarchize jobs based on money, didn't, it's essentially like one of the more demonic things you can do to your assessment of reality. Right. Because we're talking about a tert, probably tertiary, synthetic symbol called money, which is some kind of representation of power units. So maybe the entire problem actually is not any of this.

It's just capitalism. Well, I mean, I think in the same way that like our ears aren't quite ready for the type of music that like ferrets here. Similarly, it's okay to say like maybe capitalism isn't quite nuanced enough at this point in our philosophical evolution as a species to encapsulate. The sum total of human experience in a way that fairly rewards people for their efforts. Right. I mean, I think that's without like, I mean, that doesn't make me a communist, a socialist or anything. But I think if you look at capitalism as it is, and if you look at any fucking system as it is and think it can't be perfected, then you're an idiot. Right.

You know, of course it could be perfected. You know, and like right now, the way we quantify things based on supply and demand, I mean, surely there's other quantification mechanisms that are equally as valid, but are not being counted right now. Right. Like, how about the guys mop and shit and vomit up in elementary school? Yeah, that kind of seems harder than making music. Yeah. To me. Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, obviously, you know, some, some person who's doing that may find making music harder than mopping shit up or something. Well, I mean, there's, there's a whole, I would guess continuum of janitors out there from a mystical janitor to a miserable janitor and maybe mystical janitors are miserable and miserable janitors are mystical. Similarly, you know, teachers, you know, are not selling out Red Rocks. A teacher is not going to go home and say, well, I sold out three nights at a massive outdoor amphitheater where I'm getting a cut of the door because my brain and collaboration with somebody else produced a specific sound people like and I could reproduce it. But I don't actually think anything like I've started to like question a lot why things get big even. And I think like the actual music is a small portion of it compared to like the management, the agency you're on, the branding you have, like the kind of investment you've done on your live show where people have come again and again and had had a certain experience. Like it's a lot of correct moves that need to be made, I think beyond just the music writing.

Oh, fuck. Yeah. Yeah. When he started giving me like the background data on the amount of puppeteering that goes on and any famous persons. Yeah, it's a lot. And it completely flies in the face of the movie and the fairy tale of it all, which is like somebody hears you and then the next thing you know, you're like that shitty fucking movie. God, it was so dumb about that like country singer. Did you see that movie?

It was a big hit. This country singer goes to, it's got Lady Gaga on it. Okay. No, I haven't seen that. Okay. The essence of the thing is a country singer goes to a drag show meets Lady Gaga. They're sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store. She sings.

Oh my God. What a beautiful voice. And you wrote those lyrics cut to she's on stage in front of one of his sold out shows cut to now she's a famous performer selling out her own shows. This should have happened in like the first 18 minutes of the movie. There's no conversation with the assistant. There's no conversation with the publicist or the business manager. None of that. It's all just like she's making music and performing and that's her beer or drinking or whatever.

That's the life. And that is such abject crap. Yeah. And the proof to realize that most of your most performers that you love are like kind of like weirdly like politicians that have a whole team behind them that are like. Absolutely. The whole thing at some point, at least in the music industry, I'm not so sure about stand up industry or anything like that. But it becomes more of like a, like a marketing brand type thing. And it's just kind of like at the end of the day, it's a thing that people can identify with.

And, you know, someone's going to a base nectar show or something or because they're a basehead and they want to, you know, they identify as a basehead and like they're going to hang out with their base family. And like, you know, you know, maybe they were a confused kid in the Midwest who found the base community when they were a weird kid in high school and were like, Holy fuck, like I can associate with this. Yeah. You know, like, you know, a kid is going to go to the excision show at school, they draw an X on their table and they go to the excision show and throw an X up and like, you know, so it becomes like this identity thing. Do you know Lauren? Not personally, no. I met him. I was lucky enough to have dinner with him.

Awesome. And I had a lot, you know, I was nervous because I like, I like his music and I was nervous because I was afraid he was going to be an asshole. Okay, nice. No, for no reason. We've been texting for a long time. He's the sweetest person in text. But you know what I mean? What happens if someone who's making art that you love comes to you and you catch a whiff of like, oh no, oh no, no.

No, but you know, but what I realized was like, oh fuck. And it's almost even more terrifying when you realize, oh my God, you're like this charismatic, magnetic, generous person who also has this massive following. And then you realize, oh, in another era, you would be called a priest. Right, right, right. But in this era, we call you a DJ. And you would, in another era, you would be having like, I guess you would be like a traveling preacher or something doing tent revivals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this era, you're doing base shows.

Yeah. You know, and you have a family. That's your congregation. Now, if he, if I said this to him, I think he would be like, shut up. No. Because I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to, I would, it's a reductive, silly, archaic way to look at it. You know what I mean? Somewhere within that massive endeavor, a business model has to form.

Right. And within that, you know, somebody's got to print the Bibles. Yeah, yeah. Somebody's got to put something on the front of the Bibles. Somebody's got to make the, you know, organ that the organist plays on. I actually know the guy who does all of his mastering and that guy's job also was to like make a bunch of edits for his set. So I guess he, in this sense, maybe the Bible maker. Yeah, right.

All these people behind the scenes of a church, somebody's got to make those fucking communion wafers. If you're eating, taking communion wafers, there's someone cooking those things up in some factory somewhere. Someone's got to package them, print the little cross on the package. You know, every, the ink in your, whatever they call it, they pass out at church with your program. That came from some, that was a printer somewhere and some ink that had to be made in a factory and all that stuff forms to create this sacred environment that you can have a transcendent experience. But yeah, man, I think if you don't realize that, then that's your, you know, I remember, like, we want there to be, we want it to be. Magical in every way. Like, and it just, it just isn't.

And I think if I, you know, with Lauren, it's like, one of the worries is like, am I, is it going to be just someone who got sucked into the updraft of this in like success and somewhere in there. Stop, like turned into a real estate agent or something. Yeah. And then you like meet this like grounded, sweet person like, well, you didn't get, you didn't get you. Well, I don't know. Here's my theory on that. I think a lot of people who get that big, they get that big because they're easy to work with and they get that big because people are able to identify and connect with them. And I feel like the asshole big rock star DJ thing has kind of gotten bred out a little bit.

It's, there's so many fucking deep, just more electronic music producers than people on the planet at this point. So it's like, it's, I feel like it's, well, maybe, you know, I'm, I spent a lot of time around these kind of people because it's my, what I've based my life around. So maybe my viewpoint there is a little skewed. Maybe you might think similar about comedians, right? You're like, fuck, there's so many comedians. But I feel like for that reason, I don't know, the way I look at it is if I'm not easy to work with, or Lauren's not easy to work with fucking your management, your agency or find someone else to work with. They don't give a shit, you know, to some degree. You know what, that to me, I think that is a really beautiful.

It's awesome. Positive way to look at it. Cause it's like, yeah, the mythology of like the successful dickhead is like, you know, usually at the very worst, you're going to run into someone who's probably massively sleep deprived, you know, Right, exactly. Or like, he's like gotten on a drug tear or something like that. But most of, you know, the, I think that there's a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that I love, which is you have a right to your action. You do not have a right to the fruits of your action. So it's an invitation to stay in the moment of becoming and as much as possible, leave the rest in the hands of God.

And then trust that if you do experience an acceleration because of the stuff you're making, that's happening. That's a good thing. Cause a lot, I think a lot of artists are secretly terrified of the success. Like the, the, the, you know, they're, they're like hot air balloon. They're like people who want to be, go up in a hot air balloon and they build this incredibly beautiful hot air balloon. And they tether it to the ground and maybe they get a little bit of lift off. But like they, when, when, when they start like pulling the sandbags out and they get to a certain level, they fuck themselves over because they don't want to get too high. It is, I mean, kind of scary.

Once you start touring a lot, like I've gotten to the point of doing, you know, 50 shows a year, 60 shows a year at points. And like last year, I think I did that many. And yeah, it does get to a point where you're like, fuck, do I really want this to go any further? Like what is the end game here? The end game is just me being at home less and maybe making some more money, but still being sleep deprived. Yeah. And you know, when you start to think about like the quality of life and stuff like that, you're like, maybe it'd be fucking better to just become an online educator or something and just stay at home and do that. Yeah.

I mean, this, to me, this is kind of the work. It's really important to listen to, to just, you have to like all the great mythologies involving like people summoned by God generally involve the person being summoned by God at first being like, fuck, no, I'm not going to do that. That's too hard. That's too much work. Again, I use the word God as a term of convenience. I could call it the force of inspiration or the progenitive creative impulse and a human being or whatever. But when that thing's calling out to you and is inviting you into a uncomfortable situation, it's like definitely the right reaction. Do that.

I was like, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't know about that. It feels nauseating. There's a, I just went skiing up in Jacksonville. I don't ski that much. I suck at ski, but I love ski. And one of the things they say is only look six feet ahead of you, because if you look down the mountain, you're going to end up in the, you're going to think you're going to have the parking lot.

Look six feet ahead. You know, because otherwise that fucking mountain is scary as shit. That's a good point. Yeah. That's a good way to look at it too. And that's kind of, I think, yeah, a lot, how I kind of try to attack my career as well as sort of just like, all right, what am I doing today? Right. Music.

All right, let's just do that. Yeah. Think about that. Yeah. And I'm like, what am I doing today? This is the podcast. Let's just think about that. Yeah.

The troubles of the day are sufficient under the day. And that's, that to me is the, as long as I'm there, I'm fine. Like, man, I got this show coming out on Netflix. It's the first show I ever made. Thank you so much. It's a show or a stand up special. It's an animated series. Wow.

And, uh, Curious about that. I'll show you some of it. But when, this is the first time I've ever had anything at that level that's coming into the world. Netflix, they press a button or I don't know if it's a button. I've pictured it as some kind of weird mystical button. They just, you know, at some point, someone hits enter. And this thing that you've worked on for years instantly gets transmitted to a lot of people around the entire planet except for a few countries.

Right. And what, um, why not a few countries like North Korea, obviously. Yeah. North Korea, China. Okay. Makes sense. Syria. Okay.

I guess. Just swine have it. Yeah. Yeah. They, they, uh, yeah, they won't have it. It's like, whatever you have, we don't want to fuck up. Right. Well, yeah.

It's, you know, like some countries are, they, I think if something's transmitting to them, you have to censor your content too much where it becomes like. Just not the content anymore, basically. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It becomes like really like, it becomes really, and it's interesting making a thing for a global thing, you know, because it's like, you're, but, uh, the feeling, if I let my mind go too far to the, every day after the thing comes out. Like maybe you've, at the inception process, when you're making, you're thinking about the release. Yeah.

Yeah. If you're thinking, yeah, it's like, Well, this goes back to what we're talking about earlier about like, you know, me being in these collaborative processes a lot. And I'm sure these collaborators do this without me there too. Is like when we're making the song, thinking about already how people are going to perceive it and thinking about like, you know, all these other things. It's like they're looking too far down the mountain, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

But it's not in that sense scary. It's just kind of like, why are you looking down there? Well, because it's results, you know, you want to like, you want to like, you want to, you want results, you want to, who doesn't want to be loved? Who wouldn't want to be embraced? Who wouldn't want the feeling of like something they made being, you know, you, you, if you, come on, secretly every single one of us wants to be carried around on the show. There's people cheering our name at least once in our lives. That'd be awesome. I've thought a few times.

I'm kind of, I think like, I'm not like a strong enough artist to just make shit in a vacuum, never show it to anybody and just make it for the love of making it. But I'm also not so into the other side of that, that I need to make stuff that just people love and that I don't love at all. Like there's a balance there, right? Yeah. Somewhere in the middle is nice. Well, yeah. And I think that like, you know, the intent. Like this is one of my meditate, my medic, this David Nickton who teaches meditation.

He's always talking about intention and how important intent is, you know. So when you're sitting down to meditate, if there's some intention there and like in some forms of Buddhism, the intention is wild, which is, is that you want to in some way or another help in the suffering of all sentient beings in the universe. So it's a wild intent. And that's hard to wrap your head around. You know, but just having that even that rough sketch of that intent when you're making a thing, even if it sounds so lofty. But I just interviewed this meditation teacher named Sharon Salzburg and she has written a book on social action and social change. And one of the chapters is on creativity, being a form of causing change in society. And, you know, I think a lot of really genius artists who choose to vacuum seal themselves up in a room and not share their music with people, not because they're secretly afraid, but because they just don't want to.

I think that's a kind of selfishness. I think that's actually a weird form of, of like, I don't know, I don't know how healthy that is. I've always looked at that kind of stuff as like, kind of amazing. Like it might be selfish, but I've always looked at it and been like, that's like, I can't do that. I used to think that. It's kind of, yeah, it looks impressive to me. Yeah, it looks impressive until you really think about it a little bit. But to me, to me, it's like, okay, take like anyone who made any great goddamn thing that we love today.

Well, it's because they put it out, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I think it'd been like, well, I'm just going to keep this light bulb to myself. I mean, eventually it would have been, there would have been the whole world would be lit up by, you know, electric lights. But if someone would have figured it out, but man, what a, what a shitty thing. And also, I think people have such limited concepts of what medicine is. It's like, you know, you think medicine is just stuff you eat. It's just like a pill or something.

Yeah. Like, you know, the world needs your medicine and, you know, I'm a fucking hippie. So if someone's so inspired that they're making beautiful stuff, to me, that is, you've become luck fortunate enough to make contact with angelic forces that are asking you to help the world via the transmission you're getting. Right. If you're sitting and just sealing up your fucking, whatever your particular alchemical laboratory may be, turning lead into gold, just because you're excited about watching that transformation, that's fine and everything. But I think there's something to be said for, you know, passing the flame, sharing the fire, giving the vaccines out. And because Jesus Christ, man, I don't know what my life would be like if Daniel Johnston had been like, I'm just going to keep this to myself. I'm not going to hand these tapes out.

I don't know what my life would be like. Right. You know, Looping back to creation and showing your creations to people and stuff like that. I often also have this thought of, if you can make something that you enjoy, plus other people enjoy, that's kind of like the perfect middle ground, right? And one feeling I get when I listen to a lot of comedians podcasts is it's kind of that, right? It's like, because you guys are like professional talkers, it seems like. Yeah.

And you've figured out like this platform where you can talk and like, it's what you're best at doing. You enjoy doing it, hopefully. And fucking tons of people like it and then buy tickets to your shows. It seems fucking perfect. Yeah. I mean, it is. Yeah. It's perfect.

It's so mighty, man. If I get lost thinking about making my podcast for other than this conversation that we're having right now, oh my God, I'm doomed. I mean, then what am I, what am I going to do? Like all of a sudden what's going to happen? Do I only have on celebrities or something? Or like, you know what I mean? Then, then it's, then it's a big mess. Like, you know, I, this is when I realized like, oh man, you got to like, you got to look out because there's warning signs.

Like, I just had Ashley Matthews on who is this adult film actress named Riley Reid. That's her. I know Riley Reid, yeah. Yeah. She's brilliant, mystical, brilliant person. And, but as I was thinking like, oh, I should invite her on. There was a moment like, well, do you really want to like, is that, are you really going to have, you know, isn't that a little gaudy or something that what are you doing? Like, are you, and all my, that's my being counting mind.

I was thinking like, what about your spiritual audience? You like spiritual stuff. What if you offend them? And that, and then I realized like, oh, you definitely have to ask her on the show because if there's that part of your mind that's fighting you because of like the fake audience in your head, you have to teach it like a bad doggy. No, no, no, no, no, no. We don't listen to your barking. We do what our instincts tell us to do. You know, so to me, though, I love being able to support myself with a podcast and I am in heaven because I get to, if this wasn't part of it, this mutual collaboration that we're having right now, then fuck that job.

Right. You know, that's shit. Because this is the kind of, now my head's whirling with ideas just because of the, not because of you or because of me, but because of our connection right now in this moment. That to me is like the precious, it's the, that's it. The thing I love about podcasts and I just started my own one, like I'm on episode 24. What's it called? It's called the Mr. Bill podcast. Perfect.

And I pretty much just talked to my musician friends about stuff like this. Like, you know, how do you feel about making music? And like the one thing I really like about it is it's like you give yourself just an hour with someone else or an hour and a half. I have long to just lock shit off and just talk. And it's something that we don't do enough. And the reason why I think people like it, like, I mean, you're a stand up comedian. So I assume some people like your podcast because they like you stand up comedy. I'm not really known so much for being a talk.

I mean, I do have like online tutorials and shit like that. So people know me a little bit from there. But I think the reason why people seem to like it is because it's almost like something to be in awe of because we people don't do it so much anymore. So it's like people looking like, wow, what is this? A fucking conversation. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I love doing these is because it's so seems special now that it's so rare.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, that is your phones are off. You're having a chat. And the stuff that ends up happening within that is like, you just don't know what questions you're going to answer for yourself. It's like, we need to collaborate. Collaboration is that's what we're in. We're in the entire planet as a collaborative experience between matter of various types. And that collaboration has produced this thing we call human beingness and that it's collaboration.

It's all about collaboration and mixing it up. And that's yeah. And the more that we do that with each other, the better things get. It's really, you know, to me, when I am with a person and I go into my phone or they go into their phone, even if we're just watching a show together. Yeah, you feel it. It like definitely puts a big like divider in the situation and like fucks it up. Yeah, it does. It does.

And that, you know, just like that moment of like sitting with somebody and like feeling the connection, you know, in a podcast where the connections being expressed through this like fun game of like linguistic tennis that we're playing right now. Non competitive linguistic tennis. Yeah, but the the if you look like underneath the app and there's an energetic there's a sense of something the same with stand up. And isn't that the same with DJing when you're you can feel. I mean, and like I was just going to I just had this idea as you're like you're explaining this. It's kind of like when somebody pulls their phone out. It's like when the sound system goes out when you're playing fucking sucks and you can just feel the energy man. It's like it's all good.

Like people are vibing the or or when you mix the wrong tune that that can fuck shit up too. Like, you know, I'm playing a techno set tomorrow night and that's a super fucking specific style of DJing where if you play the wrong tune, like it fucks shit up a lot and you can definitely feel the vibe changes. And yeah, no, I agree. There's like an energy there that that can be, you know, changed. And yeah, it's nice to stop for a while and have conversations to like experience this sort of energy and yeah, and it's and it's also like you said non competitive and also not so detrimental if you fuck it up, you know, like you're in a mid performance of some sort. That's any other kind of performance, not a conversation like a recorded conversation, you know, like DJing or something. It almost feels more detrimental if you screw that up or if you don't stand up comedy and you like deliver wrong or, you know, it might feel a little worse than if you just say the wrong thing in a podcast. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.

Speaking of which, I'm really, this might be maybe not so interesting to your fans or not so interesting to you because you might talk about it a lot. But I'm really interested in your process for writing stand up because a few times in my life, I've, you know, just be sitting around and I'll have this like thought or some thought and this happens like maybe once a month where I'll just have some thought and I'll be like, wow, that's like some fucked dystopian world where society does this. Why the fuck did I think of that? And then I think about it. I'm like, if I was a stand up comedian, I'd probably be able to deliver that in a way that's funny where the punchline is this crazy dystopian world where people do this now. And I'm just curious, like, is that sort of your process for writing as well? Like you just come up with a thought and then it's like, bam, I need to just figure out the rest of that thought now or do you sort of sit down and go, I'm going to write stand up comedy and then start from scratch and like build and like. Man, it's a mix. It's a mix. Like sometimes you're just hanging out with your friends and you'll, if you're especially hanging out with comics, you might say, you know, I just be telling a story and I'm thinking and then one of your friends like, oh, that's a joke.

You got to write that down. That's a joke. And they're, oh shit, that's a joke. And so you write it down. Sometimes you might, what I do is I try as much as possible to journal. So I try as much as possible just to write anything. I don't give a fuck what it is. It's awful. You know, God forbid anybody should read any of my journals because they're like, you're going to want, who knows what you're going to think. Well, this could be some of the art that needs to get out there. You know, you're being selfish, don't you? Oh, no, no, no. My journals aren't fucking art. There's something called discernment. I mean, we've got to be able to distinguish our, you know, our shit from our gold or we're going to be in a really stinky world. It's important to have discernment. You know, but I do think that you also need to simultaneously have respect for the process, whatever it may be. And you know, and also have the humility to know that you don't understand why you're doing certain things that you're doing.

So, you know, take yourself out of the picture there. It's like, I don't know what my large intestine is doing right now. Like I have some, like, I could guess, you know, what my stomach is doing, what my kidneys are doing, my bladder, my heart, but I'm not going to go in there and like have a, you know, tell my heart like, listen, we need to like do this differently because I think it's going to be better for our circulate. I'm going to let my heart do what it does, right? So similarly, like with an artist or someone's making anything or a parent or anybody, there's shit you do habitually that you're like, what is that? You don't know. If it's not killing you, it's not self-destructive, but it's just something you're doing. You don't know. You don't know what that, for your psyche, that might be a kidney or something, you know, and so I like to write. And then through that process of writing, I can at least become a little more patient and trusting of free flow of thoughts that are being directed into at least some kind of understandable form,

even if it's just a boring, obvious assessment of what it's like to drive in traffic. Some drivel about love or some nonsense about working out or some fucking caffeinated, rambling bullshit about, what is a stranger? Some just embarrassing nonsense. You know what I mean? I don't know what that is. I know I don't, when I read it, when I go back to an old journal, I'm like, what the fuck is this shit? What are you in like a freshman in college philosophy? Are you just crap? Like, who do you think you are? Camus? Or look at how imitative this bullshit is. You're not fucking Nietzsche. Are you trying to be Ram Dassi or whatever? My point is, that's just a judgmental part of my mind, but one thing I do know is like, well, I needed to do that. I did it. And sometimes in there, I'll find the very seed of a thing that turns into a joke in its earliest form,

just some little piece of a sentence that later turns into a joke, and maybe I needed to spit it out like that. That's what I do for writing jokes. Then after you get a joke down, like an approximation of a joke, you say it on stage for the first time. There's no real other way to know if it's going to work or if it's going to be interesting. And you can't just tell it to a friend or something and be like, because that doesn't work unless it's a room of people, right? Yeah, you can't say. It's like you making music and then playing it on your phone to someone. Is this good? Right. You know, if you like this, is this good, right? They might be like, yeah, that sounds pretty cool. But until you're looking at it out of the ocean of people at your shows undulating to the sound that you're producing,

you don't understand what it is, and even then you might not understand what it is. Similarly, you can get in front of a room of people and think you've caught a unicorn that you're going to display some glorious, high level, powerful joke and be met with crickets. And you're like, oh, fuck. Oh, my God. Why didn't that not work? And then you can kind of like, then within that, there's lots of questions you can ask yourself. For me, what happens is I get too like, if I'm not careful, my volume goes up too high. And especially if I'm scared or freaked out about a joke, I might be like, It's just too harsh. The audience is like, what are you doing to us? Why are you yelling at us?

You don't have to read that. So for me, and my friend who's a comic was explaining to me about the spirit of playfulness. Once you lose that, you're fucked as a comic, you know? So like, you know, I have to be conscious of like, intent when I'm up there and not lose track. And anyway, the point is, there's all these reasons the joke doesn't work. And quite often it's the energy behind the joke or some mechanical problem with the joke, which is a lot of the times just that you aren't explaining it well enough. What you're even, you're making all these assumptions that the audience understands you or your life or whatever. And you haven't, or it's too long. That's the death of a joke.

Because you have some thing that's funny for eight seconds that you've expanded into two minutes. So I have felt like a few ways that I write music. One way is like, I'll think of a melody or I'll think of a sound or I'll think of like a rhythm or something like that. And then I'll go and be like, right, put it in Ableton, see how it goes. You'll think of it. Sometimes. And then that's one way I write music. The other way I think I write music is I don't have a musical idea, but I want to get something done that day. So I'll sit down and my way to do this is I just generate stimulus somehow.

So I actually, this is another thought that I have sometimes or often is I actually don't think creativity exists. I don't think like I ever generate creativity. I think I'm completely reactive. Like I will only ever come up with an idea if I'm stimulated with another idea. So it's like, I probably wouldn't have had this thought that I'm explaining to you right now. Unless you just said the thing that you said, you know, or like people have been saying this shit for a long time. You know, the artist who writes a song about a rose, it's like, well, then was he creative or did the rose give him an idea? So the second way that I write music is I have like stimulus generating techniques.

And usually these are kind of like melody generating techniques where I'll create like some complicated rack of MIDI processes and arpeggiators and stuff. And I'll just like, bam, input a MIDI note and I'll just like, like output some melody or something. And then I'll be like, oh, interesting. That gives me an idea for a harmony now. And then from there, like the process will react and like it creates this like snowballing effect. Is there like anything you ever do for writing stand up like that where you're like, I just want to write stand up today. But you don't have like any particular idea or you don't have like, is there. Yeah, sure.

Okay. How does that look? That's writing in a journal for me. It's like I'm sitting in a writing and it's like, I'm not creating some awful rule that what I'm writing has to be funny. Yeah, okay. And then somewhere in there, I might find a place that I'm like, that there's a thing that I'm interested in because, you know, you won't, if you're going to tell a joke, you need to be interested in the content of the joke. Of course. You need to exert that zeal if you're going to tell it to people.

Yeah. Like it's got to be something. It sounds so obvious. If you're talking about something on stage, make sure it's something you want to be talking about. Because if you don't want to be talking about it, what are you going to draw from? You talk about things you know, and or at least things that you're fascinated by or excited about. Like even if your joke sucks, at least people are going to see that you are like excited about the content. Sometimes you can see comics, you've gotten caught in a trap.

I certainly got caught in that trap, which is that you sort of create a set and your life changes. And the material that you wrote jokes about is no longer interesting to you anymore. But you're up there repeating the same jokes. Well, it's a lot of work to rewrite them all, isn't it? So it's almost like some sunk cost fallacy type thing where you don't want to invest more time because you just invested it all. You don't want to fail in front of strangers. Well, yeah. And you know, many jokes, you need the canvas of failure to like the way you understand the structure of a joke.

And any comic you see who is like repeating the set that they've been doing over and over again. And again, I feel completely okay to talk about this because I'm not talking shit about someone else. I'm saying, I have done this. You're up there, you're a fucking robot. You're repeating these jokes that work. Because you either, A, indulgingly want to feel an entire room of people laughing because they think you're a genius. Or B, because you just haven't been writing. Or maybe you're having an issue like creating some more stuff that you think is good.

But you forget that all those jokes you're telling up there that are good started off not so good. And the reason they got good was because you'll let yourself be up there with new jokes. And to do that requires, unfortunately, a lot of different things. Number one, the willingness to kind of fail. Number two, the ability to take risks. And number three, you need a place where you can workshop jokes. So is there no way as a comic then to get new material without just like basically fucking up in front of people constantly? Like is that just a thing you have to accept you're going to have to do for the rest of your career?

Well, the way you fuck up becomes less obvious. Okay. You know, better at like sort of getting out of the train wreck. Yeah. Okay. And also those old fucking jokes, they can be like glorious, glorious go-tos. If you're like, you know, your new material is really tanking or something, you know, you can like it like pull those out. That's even a controversial move.

Some people like don't, don't pull them out. Die. Die up there. Die in front of them and feel it. Like go right. You know, I don't know. There's so many schools of thought on it, but... It seems like from the audience perspective, it's probably a better thing to pull them out so you can like, you know, at the end of the day, like the audience, you want the audience to have like a good experience, right?

Like rather than just tanking, tanking, tanking. Exactly. Well, that's, that's also the other funny thing is you need to like, when you have a new joke, you're always going to want to open on it. So like you've got this new joke that you're really excited about. And so sometimes you'll open on a new joke. It's like, don't, you can't do that because it's a, it's a gamble and the, that could create a chain reaction that goes through the entire set. So you don't want to open on a new joke. And the main, all of it, that's one of the things I love about Rogan is like his number one priority when, when he was taking us on the road and when he takes any comics on the road, he teaches you stuff.

And the main thing is like, remember, these people pay for babysitters. This isn't about you. You know what I mean? They're here to have a good time. They're on a date. They got whoever came with him to think you were good enough to buy tickets to. You can't, you can't get sloppy and lazy up there. That's on the road.

But then if you're at a comedy club, you shouldn't be sloppy and lazy. You have to have the intent, man. It's like, number one, respect the fucking audience. There's comics who are like, I hate the crowd. It's like, shut up. Stop that. The whole fucking reason you came to Louisville, Kentucky is because of that crowd. Yeah, man.

Yeah. I don't wonder. That's like dark to me. For me, it's like they can feel if you love what you're doing and they can feel if you at least have some sense of respect for the fact that they're sitting in front of you while you have a microphone in front of your face. And they can also feel when you're like to, when you don't and all that stuff. By the way, thank you for interviewing me. I really, I really like the questions you're asking. Yeah.

I'm super interested. Specifically, the stand up shit is like, it's always, I always just think about it and I don't know any like successful comics, right? Like I'm not in that scene. Yeah. So I'm just always like, how the fuck does it work? Because I mean, like, I know exactly how electronic music works. But I don't. And let me ask you this.

This is something that I'm really curious about, man. Sure. When you're up there in front of people who are dancing to your music and you're looking out at what's happening, how in that moment are you and how much are you thinking about the next song, how you're going to get into it? Like the technical elements. So I quite often don't get to look out that off that much. And the reason why is because in like a one hour set, I'll play like almost 60 tunes. So it's like I'm mixing a new one every minute. So if I don't have my set completely, like if I have my set completely preplanned, that might give me 20 seconds after a mix or something to look out for a second and then be like trying to mix the next tune.

But if I don't have my set very preplanned, which is like generally these days I'll have like sort of 50% preplanned, 50% a little winging it. And if I, so 50% of the time it's like as soon as I've finished mixing, I have to be looking for another tune. Because like if I'm not, then it's like valuable time that I might be selecting the, you know, I can really only have a listen in my headphones to probably like four or five options before I have to just make a decision. What are you using? Just CDJs. Wow. I was doing like a full live set at some point, which was like with a drummer and like a whole visual wall and like everything was synced and like I was playing instruments and like I was doing some kind of something more like that. And then I was using a laptop for a while and I had all my stems broken up and I was like had a controller and I was like doing all this.

But then I was like, all of these other options kind of were like taking me away from what I really wanted to be doing, which was just writing tunes. Because what I would have to be doing right is like writing tunes in the studio, but then two weeks or three weeks or a month before I go on the road. I would have to be thinking about how I'm going to play them all and then that would be when the stemming process would start because it takes fucking forever to stem shit out. Can you tell people what a stem is? A stem is one wave file of audio that is a component of a song. Like for instance, for one song, my stems might look like, you know, let's say Michael's song. I would have like stem one drums, stem two bass, stem two, three synths, stem four vocals, like, you know, it'd be a bunch of stuff. And then I'd be able to cut those stems up under controllers and be able to like trigger them in certain ways and like be able to affect certain, you know, just affect my drums and leave everything else alone and like sort of remix shit a little bit on the fly kind of stuff.

But that process alone, just getting it from the tune, finished tune process to the playable state would take like per tune a day. So if I wanted to play 30 new tunes, that's like a month of time, just fucking doing that. So I was like, fuck, and it was that part was like very stressful. And then when I'd go play the show, it's like, nobody really understands how much work went into that. So like, they're not that impressed by it anyway. Whereas if I just play tunes and I play 60 tunes in an hour and 30 of them are like unreleased or something that they've never heard. But they can tell it's a Mr. Bill tune or a weird edit that I made of something that's popular at the time, but also very quirky in my own way and stuff. Then they're just as impressed.

And for me, it's way less work. And then I get to do what I love up until the day of the show, which is right beats. That's beautiful. That's great. That to me is one of the true epiphanies that can happen in an artist's career. Right. You kind of like figure out what it is that you actually want out of life. Yes. And you realize you don't have to suffer for this in the way that you're like torturing yourself.

Because some artists, they're like lashing their backs with this agonizing, ridiculous process that completely is taking them away from what you're talking about. The moment your artist is taking away from your art, well, that's a bizarre situation to find yourself in where you're caught up in that shit. I can't even imagine how terrifying that must be to be in front of a room full of people with an infinite number of stems that you are somehow going to play live, bringing shit in and out. So many things can go wrong. So many things can go wrong. For sure. I mean, you're always, this is the thing with electronic music. And to some degree stand up to is you're always at the whim of technology, which is kind of a bit scary because you're like, if this computer just fucking dies, I'm fucked. It's not like I have a backup plan.

You need a trumpet up there. Right. Something. You need a trumpet you pull out when the power, because with stand up, the mic doesn't work. You just start, you can start screaming. Right. Anything. There's a million things you could do physically.

You could do. You can react to it in the moment. Exactly. And it's not like, I mean, Or at least, you know, you're a, you're a talker. You have like, I'd never talk on the mic when I play, which is something a lot of DJs do. So if something goes wrong, I very rarely get on the mic and go, Hey, sorry, the sound system just went out or something. Because I'm like, you know, I'm pretty soft spoken person, never really yell and you kind of have to yell in that situation.

Otherwise, it's, you know, if you talk in a soft spoken voice on the microphone at a fucking dance club, it doesn't work. You're fucked. Yeah. People are like, Oh, that's weird. Here's a question. Cause like honestly, yeah, I mean it, man. I was so, I'm all the questions you asked me. I'm like, there's a lot to think about, but I've got all these questions I wanted to ask you.

So do you have a little bit of more time? Dude, absolutely. I'm going to do this for however long. Okay. So, and forgive me some, if some of these seem like cheesy questions. Yeah, no problem. Do you remember when people started saying, put your fucking hands up? Yeah, that was kind of before I was playing shows.

I think it started with that Fetilla Grand Tune. Didn't it? Put your hands up for Detroit. I don't know. Put your hands up. I don't know. I think, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't do that shit.

What's your opinion on that? My opinion on it is, if DJ go put your fucking hands up, what are you thinking? I mean, it kind of works for some genres in some moments in time, but it might be the same as you looking at someone who's telling certain shit that, you know, they don't really want to be telling or something, you know, like some, for some people, I can tell that they don't really want to be doing it. And they're doing it because they think it's the thing that needs to be done. And they're doing it because they saw someone else do it who's popular or something like that. But for some other people, they're just at their core, very hypey people. And I have friends like that.

You hang around them and you just like, dude, you've got no fucking chill button. And like, it's, you can just tell that they genuinely want to do that. Right. You know, they're having some, some people do it and it looks a little awkward, but it sort of works. Other people do it and it looks completely comfortable. And you're just like, that's just what you fucking do. Who you are. Yeah, exactly.

That's who you are. And I think it emanated probably from somebody like that, who's just that suit or who they are. Yeah. And I think it works so well for maybe that person or something that it just became a thing. I always say not the thing is, man, I'm like 45. I got a one year old. I don't have a lot of shows anymore, but I always felt mildly resentful. Well, it's kind of weird.

Don't tell me to put my hands up. Right. And there's also like the rhetorical question thing like, how are you doing tonight? Whatever city name. Yeah. Yeah. There's got to be something. There's got to be innovations regarding like what goddamn appendages you want me to elevate

other than like commanding me to do it. Like, here's some kind of digital cop up there. Come on. Give us a break. We're dancing. We're dancing enough for you. Yeah. Well, there's some funny shit too.

Like I got friends who sort of take the piss out of that stuff and they'll like get on stage and right before the drop, instead of going like one, two, three, four, they'll go like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and then drop like some odd number. That's cool. Or like my buddy, Squanto, he'll always get on the mic and be like, don't make some noise for no fucking reason. Yeah. It's a little sardonic there, but let's talk about the drop.

Okay. The drop. So well, that's, I mean, the chorus. Right. Yeah. That's what it was before that it was a drop. I never realized that until just now. Yeah.

The drop is the chorus. Yeah. Exactly. Let's talk about the drop. I really, cause to me, like whenever I am like deciding, all right, for once I'm going to make an actual song that has a drop. Right. And then it's a lot of work.

It's okay. Yeah. So it is hard. It is. It is hard. Yeah. I mean, like it's, it's very easy to listen to a drop and be like, it's just wobble. Like some simple shit.

Yeah. And when you actually look into it and start doing it, you realize it's like a fucking engineering feat that that drop works and sounds so flawless. Cause it's like everything is just perfectly engineered to sit like that and sound that big and perfect. And yes, musically, it's simple use a lot of the time, but it's simple because that's a part of the fucking engineering feat. Like you can't have a lot of stuff in a drop and still make it sound that big and that

clean. But for all intents and purposes, it's the punchline of a joke, isn't it? And why the punchline of a joke is funny is because of the setup. So also the buildup is very fucking important for the drop. When you are making music, do you ever just think of the drop and then reverse engineer buildup? Well, almost every time it's kind of like I make the drop and then I validate what I do with a buildup because otherwise it's not important, right?

It's like it might work in a set because you can just play the buildup of the tune before it and then just play the drop of that new thing you made. And then yes, it's validated by whatever was playing before it, but as its own thing, it doesn't stand as a full electronic tune. Yeah, yeah, I get it. It's like it's the what is it? That's like act. It's like act three or it's the in a movie.

It's the the the crescendo, the climax, but the less tension and release to the buildups tension, the drop is always like the big release portion. Do you ever fuck up the drop in the sense that you create so much tension, people lose interest in the drop like a joke that's too long? Yeah, actually, I have one tune in my set. That's actually just something that I found on SoundCloud that some kid made and it's literally he took like every buildup from every big trap and dubstep tune from 2019 and just stapled them all together.

It's like a three minute like epic buildup and I play it in the middle of my set sometimes and it's like the one time in my set where I can like chill for a bit because it's just a long joke, basically. And a lot of the time, like people are just like the fucking like confused and I kind of like it because it's like a meme sort of. And and then at the end there's like a giant drop, but after all those buildups, it almost feels like the drop is not that not that doesn't feel like it resolves so well and feels so good.

It's just too much. Like it's like because like the it's it's sort of like the in and if you're if you're telling a joke, the distance, but the amount of time before your punchline, you could call that a withdrawal from the bank. Right. Exactly. And then the punchline here invests, putting all the money back in. Hopefully some more.

Exactly. Yeah. And then you can make your net. If you need to make a longer withdrawal, you can because the audience is starting to trust it's going to be funny. You have them engaged and yeah, yeah, exactly. You can do that shit further into the set. And it's the same with like running music.

It's like you don't want to start a fucking set with that three minute buildup meme. Like that's going to know people will just leave. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. But tell me, OK, so when you're figuring out what you're going to play, do you so is it kind of like you have warm up songs where it's just like a kind of like getting people ready for like what's coming? You know what I mean?

Do you start off kind of soft? So I kind of always I have a few different views on this, I guess. One is that I'll try and just start with something new that I made because I'm stoked about it, you know, sort of like you were saying with jokes, you just want to start with something new, test it out, straight away sort of thing. Sometimes I'll do that. Other times I'll start with just like ambience or something like that to just let people know that the DJ has changed from the one before.

Right. You know, because other times, like otherwise, if you just the last DJ was playing some real heavy shit and then you're just like, bam, big, heavy shit, because I don't get on the mic and be like, hey, I missed a bill and I'm about to play music. So I have to like let them know in some way that the DJ has actually changed and that I'm starting. So that usually happens musically. Sometimes ambience can do that, right?

Because people like, oh, this is kind of doesn't sound like coherent with what was just happening. And other times I'll just start with something that has like a nice big long intro into like a really giant drop or something like, you know, some big epic intro type deal. I mean, there's a few ways to do it, but that's kind of like the three that I'll go to usually something new or something big and epic that I just know works or something.

Man, you got to do a song where you what you just with what you just said, like you could do an intro with like just. I'll just take this portion from the podcast and just put it in. Yeah, just like play this in the beginning of a show and just like the code it with like chords over it. So it sounds like all robotic voice. Yeah, that's it. Yeah.

I mean, that's cool. That's such a, it's such a wild form of performance. Now, OK, so how much. When you see like how much do you do you feel compelled? Like you see DJs and they, they throw their hands up and they do that thing during the drop where they're like, does that happen to you? Do you ever, do you get taken with your own music in the same way that the crowd is being taken with it and find yourself sort of pulled out of what

you're doing to like dance for a second with them? Oh yeah, for sure. If the DJ I'm watching is engaging enough, definitely. It's almost like I've heard, I think it was Joe talked about stand up being just like a form of mass hypnosis. I feel like DJing can be like that, too. If the person performing is, you know, engaging enough and the music they're playing is engaging enough, you know, and they're doing because

sometimes the DJs that can be boring, if somebody like sticks on some shit for too long and they're too much, just like a flat brim hat. DJ who's looking down and like it's kind of like instead of the equivalent of a flat brim just looking down, like not paying attention to the audience thing might be a chair guy, right? Yeah. Someone who just like sits on a stool the whole time or something. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, there's I'm trying to think of the version of that in comedy and that's a tough one. But yeah, the disconnected DJs. I mean, it's kind of like when you see a DJ like that, you feel like you're just like watching somebody do like factory work or something. You're like, you know what I mean? It's like a dude, like you don't want it to seem just like a job where you're like printing songs out that are flying into people's ears.

You want to play stuff that you think is engaging and you want to be busy enough up there that you're feeling engaged the whole time, too. Cause another problem with DJing and electronic music is a big part of the job is a being a good librarian, like organizing a music collection in a fucking easy so you can find anything you want in the moment at any time. And the second part of it is, is being a good waiter, like knowing when the right time to do something is, you know, right? How do you know that?

Well, it's a linear art form. You just get good at knowing when to do the thing. But and obviously like music structural, right? So it's like generally, you know, you're just not going to play a drop. Like, I'm just going to play it right now. No, right. You're going to play it. There's logic to it, but still it's like, tell me a little bit

about when you started doing this shit. Surely you had some shows where you're like, this is a nightmare. Train wrecked from like 2008 to like 2015. Like a long time before I like figured it out. And that's, I don't think the case for a lot of people, but I think I was such a producer and just like not giving a fuck about the show. I was like, fuck it. Like the show's not important.

The writing of the music is important. And it was really only over like since 2017, I think onwards, where I was like, I'm going to start taking the show thing way more seriously and start thinking a lot more about like how to structure an actual good DJ set and stuff like that. But it was not something that I concentrated on for a long time in my career. What does a train wreck look like in DJing? There's a few ways you can do it.

One is that you just play shit next to each other. That's just not even related. Like the equivalent in stand up comedy might be like, you tell a really funny joke and then you just start doing a monologue and then you just start like singing and then you just start like just, but that could, it could work. You know, stand up comedy. He said, if you like transitioned it right and did it with some sort of like, you know, social, social syntax, that makes sense or something.

But yeah, it's like, that's one way to train record DJ set. Another way is if you don't know how to beat match properly and you just start playing tunes over the top of each other, that are just not in rhythm at all. Yeah. Um, that's like the two main ways I would say. Yeah. That the second way being them, like it's, that's the worst of them all. Right.

Like that's the most embarrassing one. Right. Cause yeah, but it's pretty easy to avoid now cause all CDJs have a sync button on them. So you can just like bam, press it. It just like lines up the beat grids automatically. You don't really have to jog them anymore. I might, I was years ago when I was a dishwasher, I was roommates with a DJ in, uh, Asheville, North Carolina.

And he, that's where Freddie lived for a while. Yeah. Yeah. He just moved back to Detroit. That's right. I didn't know he moved. He did. The, the, I remember being so captivated by what he was doing and he like picked

like two shitty records out of his collection. He's like, you can practice on these and he let me use his turntables and I would sit and try to beat match on his DJ turntables. And I never figured it out. Dude, I can't mix two vinyls together at all. I've never, I've never done a set on. Really? Um, I mean, no, that makes me feel so much better.

I always, like, it's the way I feel about allying with skateboarding. It's like, I can't do it. How do you do it? Yeah. I can't do it, but beat matching and vinyl is so crazy. That's like next level difficult to do for sure. Like that, that style of beat matching is super tough. For me, because of this sync button on the CDJ, I mean, I can jog two tracks

together easily, like pretty easily on CDJ is not on vinyl. That's, it's very different. Um, but like having the sync button, I almost always leave it on anyway, because to me, it's like the feet of DJing is not even like jogging two things together. Like the feet of it is for me writing all the beats, right? And then secondly, playing them in the right order and then mixing them in certain ways and like doing creative stuff with effects and shit like that.

Like that's more, what I find. God, let me tell you, back then we would listen to electronic music on vinyl and like just scratch our heads about who the fuck's making this shit. Like I would sit and be so like fascinated by that idea that there was a person who somewhere was writing and producing this stuff and then getting it out there. These are, this is like, you know, pre pre-internet. So we didn't have the ability to just like look up how people make this stuff. There's some idea.

It's synth computers. Right. But you had to like go ask the guy at the music store and shit. And like, yeah, it's kind of what it was like. Just as I was starting, there was very like YouTube was just sort of kicking off and like there wasn't a whole lot of tutorial stuff out there. I mean, now you can just Google like how to make a fucking school. Google you.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Do you think, do you feel like there's some kind of dilution that's happening by giving away the mystery of making this stuff? I've had this conversation a lot and I mean, I'm sort of of two minds about it. In one sense, I think in a lot in ones, I mean, so in one, I think that giving away the information, if everyone does it, raises the industry as a whole. And that's how it gets to be better in general, right?

Because when I first started, electronic music sucked, and I'm not saying I was the reason why I'm the reason why it's good now. But like, I'm definitely part of the reason why it's good now is not just because of me, but because of a lot of people being willing to share their information, right? And I think that's also partially why the tech industry has boomed so much. Do you know what GitHub is? Yeah, sure. Yeah, you just go there and like fucking tech people have spent a week writing

some fucking library that just does X, Y, Z things and they're just like giving it out for free and give a shit about money that partially I found out the reason why that is is because they don't want to do tech support for it. So if they just give it out for free, they have no reason to to invest any more time into it after that because if it doesn't work and somebody paid $150 for it, they're going to hit the creator up right go and like, can you fix this? Right. So so I think that kind of shit is great for an industry.

And I think the inverse of that, I'm trying to think of like an industry that maybe has been super secretive about information sharing and where that industry might be now. But I can't think of the Illuminati. Well, there you go. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of conspiracies about it. But like, what are they really? What have they really done for us?

Sugar. Sugar. Oh, it's crushing it right now. I think they evolved the sugar industry. But you know, like electronic music now it's in a place that like I couldn't have even imagined when I started doing it and I'm really stoked about like it. It behooves me to for it to be that big, you know, like me as a relatively small artist on the scale of electronic music is still doing fine.

Yeah, man. I think, you know, to me, there's if anything, the rising tide raises all ships kind of thing. Yeah, that's a beautiful saying, rising tide raises all ships. Yeah, that. Yeah, you know, like the the there was, I guess, for a lot of us, there is like an irreplaceable feeling that we're never going to get that if at this point, we'll never get the feeling back of hearing, I don't know,

prodigy right and being like, what? Well, that was sort of like Skrillex, I think, like when he first released shit, a lot of producers and just a lot of people in general, I think we're like, what the fuck? I mean, no, I mean, how did he fucking? How do they make this? Right? No, that's the feeling with Skrillex, too.

Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. That you're right. There was a sense of like, what the fuck? It was like the first of its kind where people, I think, were just like, how the fuck did he make that? I feel that with your music. I don't have time to go and dig up how the fuck you're making those sounds because like you're, you, Richard Devine.

Dude, his nuts. What the fuck? It's like, I don't understand. I don't want to understand. Also, PS, like with some things, it's like, I'm not going to, I don't want to look up the way the magician's doing the tricks necessarily. You know, I do want there to, with Richard Devine, it's like, I want to imagine he's dropped a microphone into some hyperdimensional frog pond.

And they're just playing the sounds of nature three multiverses away. That was the other part of your question, right? It's like, do you think it destroys the mystery? And yes, I do think it destroys the mystery, but I'd also like to think that for some people, it makes it better, right? Like if, if somebody's like, how the fuck was that made? And then they find out how it was made. And they're like, wow, that's actually like pretty fucking impressive

slash a lot of effort that it makes it more impressive to them, you know? Yeah. And I think I've seen it have both effects to people. I've seen some people be reductive assholes to me and be like, well, yeah, it's just this. And it's like, yeah, it is just that, but you didn't fucking figure it out. And then the other thing I've noticed is people being like, holy shit, like how did you figure out how to do that?

Like how does your brain work in that way? And that makes me feel really good, right? Cause it's like, yeah, I feel smart for figuring out a thing. Well, yeah. Cause I mean, it is, I mean, for those of you out there, I haven't sat down with like Ableton or something. I mean, holy shit. I remember when I first met that dog and was like, what the, what the

holy fuck? Cause I used logic before Ableton and logic garageband before logic. And, you know, that, that way of making music or making anything just made sense to me, you know, layering it like premier, it's like people cut video. And then Ableton, you know, these crazy German, I don't know what they probably are aliens. If anyone is in looks like an Excel spreadsheet and it looks like a spreadsheet. Boring.

You see it for the first time. It's the most boring looking display I've ever seen in my life and confusing. If you don't know the tab button, forget it. You're like, what the fuck is this? Like, I'll never make music. Um, but then over the course of like getting like making stuff with it, it has given me a profound respect for what you said regarding the drop or the chorus, which is the, when I'm listening to music now, and I realized how

many different sounds someone has figured out a way to allow to coexist together in the sense that my ear can pick whichever one I want to listen to. And they're all clear. One's not being drowned out by the other. One isn't muddied. There's just this beautiful sample of sound that's perfectly, it's like, I, to this day, I, I can't even imagine how some of the music that's out there right now, I don't know what they're doing that they can make it work.

You know, it's, yeah. It's, it's funny because you listen to a drop, right? And it seems so flawless. And you're just like, it sounds so simple and flawless. And like, it just sounds like three sounds, like a kick and a snare. Yeah. Your brain might. Subitizes like one sound.

And then there's like, you know, a bass sound and then maybe like a big synth lead over the top. But if you look at the session, it's like all of those bases are actually like 15 or 20 channels of MIDI, like hocketing between shit and like having reverb tails automate off the ends of them and shit. And then like the synth sound is like maybe just one sound with fuck loads of automation on it. And then the drums, you've spent like days engineering that kick and snare.

And like, it's really like, like, it is really just an engineering feat to kind of get something of that complexity to work together and sound that seamless. Yeah, man. No one knows that nobody knows. Well, I think, yeah, a lot of people know it, everyone making it knows that. But I think like a lot of people listening don't, don't really think about it. And I mean, why should they?

But like, yeah, I don't think they realize how much, how much actual engineering goes into making something that both, you know, somebody silly, like, well, not silly, but somebody like who doesn't know a lot about electronic music, who has a very basic understanding of like, or even no understanding of the creation process can listen to it and just sort of know that it sounds better than everything else. It's like, or feel that it sounds better than everything else. That level of shit is like, it's just a lot of engineering.

Yeah. I remember my friend telling me the first time he was telling me, he's like, you know, man, that like the kick, just the kick, if you know how much work is going in, it's just that sound. Also, here's the other thing, right? Is like, if you have to explain to somebody why the drop's cool by explaining to them how long you spent on the kick, it's a fucking shitty tune as well, isn't it?

It's a shitty joke if you have to be like, here's why it was a good joke. Yeah, exactly. So in that sense, it's like, it has to be amazingly engineered. Everything has to slot in perfectly. But also, somebody who has no idea has to be able to listen to it and also think it's cool and understand it. Yeah. It's like, if I'm, you know, I was God, he's that incredible mathematician.

He was, oh, damn it. There's this famous math, Feynman, Feynman, I think is his name. He was, I think at Los Alamos. He was one of the people who helped split the atom and make the atomic bomb. Richard Feynman, I think, or something, F-E-Y. And anyway, he wrote this essay on just the ocean, on just what's happening when you're looking at a wave in the ocean, the physics going on. And it's like listening to you talk about, you know, the producing music.

You know, just what you just said, tail reverb tails or whatever. I wouldn't know a fucking reverb tail if I had one on me. But like the, you know, listening that when he's looking at the ocean, he's seeing this like symphony of details. Yeah. Like the math involved in each wave is to him so profoundly beautiful. He's like, I think the essay might have been a thing like, I don't need like to connect to some divine thing.

I'm looking at this like calculation that's happening via, you know, hydrogen and oxygen that the universe is just natural. I don't know how you put it. So you didn't say the universe is doing it. You just, it was like the way described a simple wave. But then, you know, I'm at the beach and I'm looking at waves. I'm like, wow, that's pretty. You know, I don't know why.

I have no reason to think about the extra stuff that goes into it. Right. Like me as a producer, I'll listen to a drop and like I can't help but to break down the components of it and think about it from that perspective because I know a lot about that sort of shit. Maybe like you may look at comedy and think about like potentially the writing process or potentially like just the wording or the delivery or something like I never go to a standup comedy show and go like, oh, well,

that was good delivery because I don't know what the fuck that is. Oh my God. You know, like there's a comic, her name's Whitney Cummings. She's so fucking funny. And like, I don't know where her first off. What's that? I know Whitney Cummings. Oh man.

She like, you know, like I was watching her. I got lucky. I don't know when she had started working on this material, but I hadn't seen it yet. She's working on new material. But I got to like over the course of like a few weeks, watch the material evolve. In the way she was like precisely evolving it. And yeah, that's what I'm seeing is like, whoa, that's a holy shit. Look at the way that she's like reconfiguring that idea and look at the

way that it's like growing into this like great joke. Very inspirational, you know? And yeah, so I would have seen that. Yeah. No, I would just go to see something like that and walk away from it, either being like, well, that was sick or like, that was okay. Or like, you know, I probably would just think it's sick. I don't think I've ever been to a standup show and being like, that was garbage.

Oh yeah. I think the only time I've ever maybe thought that is like, actually the only time I've ever thought that is when I went to an open mic with my friend who I forced to do stand up because he like has, he's always wanted to, but he always like makes up an excuse to not. So I was like, oh man, you have to like do it. And I like every excuse he came up with like, oh, my car's fucked. I was like, I'll pay for an Uber.

And then he was like, oh, you know, my shirt. And I was like, here's a shirt. Like I was just, and I eventually got him to go. And just because I was there, I think at the open mic thing, knowing that a lot of people it was probably their first time of stuff, maybe I was a little bit more, uh, judgmental of it. Or like, you know, whereas if I go to somebody like the comedy store and watch it there, it's like, I know the barrier of entry to get on the stage is a little

higher, right? So I don't, I just assume that it runs a fucking pro or something. Right. Yeah. That's a good assumption over there. The, the, um, but you also noticed shit like might, like what they do with the mic stand. Yeah.

I noticed stuff like that. Like I was, Seinfeld popped in there. Someone filmed Seinfeld and I was like watching what he does. This weird, like Charlie Chaplin, Kane swing with the fucking mic stand. Like it's very graceful, incredibly precise. The physicality is a mirror of the way he writes jokes. And you're like, you are so good. Like, wow.

Really? Is Seinfeld like super? Fuck yeah. He's not. Listen, by the way, he's good. I love Seinfeld the show. I've never seen him do stand up. Oh my God.

He's like, you know, it's like, yeah, he's one of the great comics. He's, and he's, he's tech. He's like, Well, you said the way he swings the mic stand is a mirror of how he tells jokes. Yeah. In what way? In the sense that he did this weird technical move. Okay.

So again, this might be me putting too much on it. Okay. But I'm sure he probably thinks of this shit. I don't, I think it was very performative because you got to, like, you know, he's old school when you look at interviews with them talking about stand up. He's like old school. He's, uh, you know, it's a performance. The moment you step on stage, you're performing.

It's this professional way of like communicating with an audience, meaning that if you're going to move the mic stand, you're performing. Okay. You know what I mean? So it's performative. And so he does this weird spin with it, reminding me of Charlie Chaplin. Just that is like, okay, did he mean to do it? Was that like, you know, and also if he did mean to do it, Charlie Chaplin, it's

like, uh, you know, um, weird respect to like homage to Charlie or something. But then also if he didn't mean to do it and it's just accidentally happening, he's letting us like project that on him. It's still bad ass. You know what I mean? Like, if you look at the way, I don't know how these do it. I haven't caught up on Dave Chappelle, but if you look at the way he like moves that fucking mic stand in one of his specials, it's like Thor's hammer.

He's like lifting it, slam it, like putting it down in the specific way. It's specific. It's like performative. You know, these are the things you notice when you're a comic. So do you like think about the way you're going to move a mic stand before you go on stage? Fuck no. I'm not, I wish I was like that good.

Right. At that point, I just, I do sometimes, but then I, when I'm up there and I decide to do some intentional mic stand maneuver, I'm like, what's wrong with you? What are you doing? Yeah, it's not you and me. Yeah. That's how I feel about DJing. Like I know some people have like pre-show rituals.

I know some people have like certain, like they'll think about like the shirt they're going to wear and shit like that. I mean, I try not to do any of that shit because it puts too much pressure on me. So like, I'll literally just like be in the crowd of my own show hanging out. And then I'll like walk on stage from there and just fucking plug my USB stick in a DJ for an hour and then leave. Like I try not to put too much pressure on myself because if I do, it starts to feel too much like there's too much attention on me and I'm putting too much

attention on me and all of that sort of shit. And then I always play a worse show. Man, I'll tell you, one of my favorite moments in my experience with musicians was I went to go see Lou Barlow. You know, Lou Barlow is Sebado. He like, oh my God, man. He's like, he's been on the show. You actually in some ways kind of look like him.

But he was one of the, you know, he was in this low five movement. I guess you could say it's like in this like beautiful recently. Oh, well, he still makes incredible music, but he was like, he came out of Boston in the nineties, I guess. And I don't know the history of Sebado, but he, you know, would use it for track and like just like drum machines and guitars and I don't know. I asked him once, actually, I was talking to him about like early Sebado. There's a great album called the freed weed or now it's called the freed man,

I think, but I was asking him about the equities. He's like, you know, a lot of that equipment, it's gone. Like it's decommissioned. Like you, it's broken. It's we couldn't, I couldn't recreate that sound if I wanted to, because so much of the sound was hinging on the old weird equipment that I was using. And it produced this specific low fidelity sound that had this incredible, vulnerable, authentic quality to it.

Because you felt like it was almost voyeuristic listening to, you felt like you were sleeping over at his house, making music with him or something. It was beautiful. It's just a brilliant musician. But when I first came to LA, I heard he was performing in a club and I went to go see and perform and I'm sitting there waiting for him to go up. And I look over and he's just sitting in the crowd. And I was like, are you fucking shitting me?

Like you don't even know how much you mean to me. That you, and the fact that you're sitting out here with us is like, you are God. And then, and then I remember talking to him and telling him. Like, I remember, like we became, like we just became like friends. He started, he like emailed me a CD with a song on it that I couldn't find and like or mailed it to me. And I just remember that is defined for me, the idea of what it is to be an artist or to do shows, which is like, come on.

You can, I sequester myself sometimes, but the reason I do that is because I'm getting ready for the next show. Right. You know what I mean? But like the, the, yeah, that's good. Yeah. That's good that you do that. I think that's really good.

But then that being said, I think with standup, I don't want them to see me until after the show. Yeah. I kind of feel some, sometimes that way, but I don't know why I feel that way. Well, cause it's kind of like the tension. They're excited to see you and you don't want to dilute that tension at all. Yeah. The first time you, cause once they see you, they've seen you for the first time.

They only get to see you for the first time once. I think that's the theory. It's a little performative to not come out until you perform and then after hanging out, but the, the beginning part, I don't know. I mean, Dave, do you, so, so you've never once been tempted to wear a mask, do a suit, do some kind of thing. There's been a time where I've been tempted to start a project where the person DJing wears a mask so I can stay at home.

Oh God, that's so crazy. But I've never thought. Do people do that? Oh, I mean, I'm sure. I don't know. Personally, but I mean, like, if you go see Marshmallow, it's like, you don't know that it's him, right? Like it could be anyone.

I've never thought that. Holy God. Really? That's like a huge topic of conversation in the electronic music community for sure is like, you know, dead mouse could just go fucking send someone out with a mouse head. If he's doing that, he's Jean. It's that genius.

It's clever, right? Like it seems clever. Um, you know, Daft Punk, it's like, how the fuck do you know that they're at all their shows? Oh my fucking God. They could just be in France in their villa making tunes still. I, you know, I, what you just did to me as far as electronic music and mask goes is now it all makes sense.

Right. It's because at that point it becomes like a branding project and a marketing thing. And like the whole thing is literally an identity thing that you can identify with in the, you know, there could be a fucking marshmallow in every city plan show. Like I'm simultaneously. Yeah.

I mean, for all, I know there's been a point in time where on like, you know, the 22nd of May, 2019, he was both doing a residency in Las Vegas and playing a headline showing LA at the same time. I mean, I don't follow his, his shit. Is that true? I don't know. I don't follow him that closely, but I wouldn't, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's been like, if you looked into his project and it was very easy

to find a case where it's like, it's impossible. How did he get from there to there? Let me tell you something. What you just said, you could literally do an entire tour in one night. Yeah. You could do a 50 city tour in one night with 50 different versions of you. But then I wouldn't, if everyone was aware of that, they wouldn't, you know, because then it would be like sending the message that the quality control of

every show would not be the same. But you could also say, I'm going to be at one of them. Yeah, right. Okay. There you go. This is the one for sure. It's actually a good point. Well, you know, I think it should be a law.

We need a new DJ law where DJs are, if you're a mask DJ, you got to take it off at the beginning of the show. Just to show people know it's you. Well, that's the thing is with March, nobody knows who it is even. There's like talk of it being some guy, but like, nobody really knows. That is so trippy. Yeah. So it could be like, that could be, you know, Obama.

Yeah. I mean, I think you see his hands and you can see his hands are white. So it could be Trump. Trump is Marshmallow. That would be it for me. I'll tell you this, that'd be it for me. As far as like me staying sane in this dimension, that's it. For me, I'd check out.

You'd be like, I'm fucking done. I'm done. I'm done. You would see, see the cartoon birds come out of my ear and I would be done. I was just like, bye, bye, bye world. It's a simulation. I'm done. I don't know what this is, but that's it.

That's so cool. Poor Marshmallow though. I mean, he's got to like have some desire inside of him. Well, there was a thing, right? Where there's like some American Ninja Warrior course thing where there was some dude who was clearly like super buff, like doing the handlebars and then like flipping off onto a thing. And then like, you know, he did like this whole American Ninja Warrior course

flawlessly. And I was like, there's no fucking way Marshmallow can sit at the computer making tunes all day and also be fit enough to do that. Okay. And what he has that time. So it's a stand in. I would assume that at least for that thing, it was like some guy who was just a Ninja Warrior, who was just good at doing the course, who put a Marshmallow

head on, I think, but it was like build on YouTube and posted as if like it was Marshmallow doing it, I think. What's stopping some nefarious son of a bitch from announcing like a surprise show by Marshmallow, putting on the costume, selling tickets. And then like, by the time people figure out it wasn't Marshmallow, like that guy's gone already done the show, the fuck he is. I mean, you'd have to probably like market the show for a while. I'm sure his management would get pretty caught on to that.

And plus like, who's to say that if you didn't have his management and marketing company that the show would even do well, you know? Oh yeah. That's right. You can't just like, no one's going to like, I get it. Well, that's like, you know, Marshmallow, who's not Marshmallow, could be playing in LA tonight and I have no idea. You have no idea.

Like we would probably fucking see it if it was his company, because there would be huge billboards everywhere. What a wild thing, man. Thank you for telling me that. Cause now I get to think about it. I don't know that this is true at all. We don't know. We don't even know Marshmallow is human.

Right. Exactly. Could be a fucking Android. Somebody made a DJ Android and sends the thing out just to like do shows. We don't know what Marshmallow is. He could be bees. He could be just a harmonized bees holding a sack of bees that have been trained to be a swarm of bees.

I don't know what he is. Who the fuck knows? But that being said, who the fuck, what's holding our skin up? I mean, besides our skeletons, we could be bees. Wow. That's exact. Listen, man, I think we could talk forever, but I think we're going to, we're going to wrap this one up.

Yeah, of course. And I'm so grateful to you for coming over here. And thank you so much for hanging out with me. I'm Freddie. Thank you so much for this intro, man. This is like been a really glorious conversation. Yeah, man. I really appreciate you having me.

And I really appreciate you being open to like talking about just all the things that I really wanted to talk about with you. Cause they're likewise. Yeah. Cool. How did you say, how could people find you? Mr. Bill's tunes on all social media.

I have the Mr. Bill podcast email me at mrbillstunes at gmail.com. If you want to just contact me directly. Beautiful. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. A tremendous thank you to Mr.

Bill for coming out to do the DTFH and thank you to feels for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH and thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, subscribe, click that subscribe button. It actually really helps. Leave us a nice rating on iTunes. Invite people to join our family. The Duggar Trussell family hour. All right, I'm out of here.

I'll see you all real soon. Until then, Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, J.C. Penny, family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style, dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claybourne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Farrar.

Oh, and thereabouts for kids, super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. J.C. Penny. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, J.C. Penny, family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two.

We do it all in style, dresses, suiting and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claybourne, Worthington, Stafford and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids, super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. J.C. Penny.