Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 382: Joe Wong

Episode Date: May 3, 2020

Joe Wong, musician and composer from The Midnight Gospel, joins the DTFH! Listen to Joe's podcast, The Trap Set. And check out Joe's tour with Nite Creatures later this year. The Midnight Gospel is out now on Netflix! Starring Duncan Trussell, co-created by Pendleton Ward, and with compositions by Joe Wong! This episode is brought to you by: Purple - Visit Purple.com/Duncan and use promo code DUNCAN for $150 Off any mattress order of $1500 or more! StoryWorth - Visit StoryWorth.com/Duncan to get $10 off your first purchase!

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If you're new to this podcast and you're coming here from Midnight Gospel, I want to welcome you not just from my heart and from all of my past lives hearts and all of my future lives hearts, but I want to welcome you on behalf of my family. And like any true family, we welcome our new friends with a song. Storyworth is an online service that helps your loved ones share stories through thought-provoking questions about their memories and personal thoughts. It's the gift of spending time together wherever you live. It's very cool.

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some crows milk logos, or some of the many other incredible designs that are located at the Dugga Trussell shop, then we have got what you need. Just go to DuggaTrussell.com and click on the shop. One of the coolest things about working on Midnight Gospel was getting to work with all the people that wanted to work with Pendleton because Pendleton drew to him some of the most brilliant artists that I've ever had the pleasure of meeting in my life. And the fact that I actually got to collaborate with him was mind blowing. Today's guest is one of those artists.

He's got a fantastic podcast called The Trap Set, which is interviews, great interviews with musicians. And then he let me be on it, which is pretty awesome because he's a fantastic interviewer. But he's also done music for some TV shows you've probably heard of like Russian doll or the Midnight Gospel. He and I became friends over the course of the production and I just want to introduce you to him in case you aren't familiar with him or his work. I highly recommend checking out his podcast, The Trap Set.

And now everybody, please welcome to the Dugga Trussell Family Hour podcast, Joe Wong. Joe, welcome to the DTFH. I've been looking forward to this conversation for some days now. How are you holding up during the pandemic? My day-to-day life isn't much different than it is sans pandemic. There's an extra layer of existential dread, but it's not that thick. And I usually live with the fair amount of existential dread anyway. How, if you had to define existential dread, how would you define it?

Well, it's kind of a catch-all for certain things that depression will tell me. I always think about this conversation I had with my mom when I was about six years old. And I was thinking about the notion of dying and becoming nothing in all of your memories going away and stuff like that, which is a heavy thing to think about when you're six. And I just started crying and I went and asked my mom what happens when you die. And she said, nobody knows. And so my family was atheistic, agnostic, but we still, I believed in Santa Claus at the time.

And so I looked to him for immortality for Christmas. Like I asked for immortality for myself and my family. But I got a Nintendo, which is kind of even better. I mean, I guess from one perspective, definitely. So for you, existential dread has its roots in the contemplation of mortality? I think so. I think that's, it's larger than that, but that's where it started. So that moment for a kid has, it seems like that moment is such a powerful moment that

it's understood by all the movies that make entertainment for kids. Like I was having a conversation with someone a week ago about this, how any Pixar movie, any Disney movie, it almost, there's always. Bambi's mom dies. Yeah, yeah, that sort of, that's like the, it seems like for a kid, you don't, you do cross paths with your own sense that, oh shit, I'm going to die. But even worse, my parents are going to die. Do you know what I'm saying?

Like it was worse to realize, to think of your parents dying than to think of yourself dying, at least for me. Right. And I would imagine now it's the reverse. Now you're worried about keeping your kid alive. Well, yeah, yeah, or I'm worried, now I'm worried, exactly. Or I'm worried about me dying, not because I, I'm so much terrified of dying, but because I want my child to be protected and to have a dad for as long as possible.

So the, now there's a whole other reason to try to survive that prior to having a kid was most certainly never like a constant reason. You know, you would stay alive because that's just what you do. You're like, oh, I'm going to live. And maybe you'd come up with like reasons for it. And I always had good reasons for it, except for the times when I was suicidal, you know, but mostly there was, now it's like, yeah, I'm afraid of death for my, because I don't want to die because my, it's going to suck for my kid.

You know, and that, that's an interesting thing. Where are you right now when you think about your own mortality or your own extinction? Do you, are you, are you freaked out about it still? No, no, I think actually it's kind of lucky that I grew up the way that I grew up and that my parents gave me honest answers because it, it was something that I parsed through a lot in my early life. And now as I'm approaching middle age, I feel at peace with it. I mean, especially after seeing people that I love die, like when I was in the room,

when my dad died, it really took death off of a pedestal and he was certainly ready to go. He'd been suffering for a long time and, you know, it felt like a, maybe I told you this before, but it felt kind of like a birth in a sense. I mean, it didn't feel like this giant tragedy. It felt like a release. The tragedy was that he had to live as long as he did in pain. Um, but, uh, it, it took death off of a pedestal for me. It seems like that is the, one of the mystical things that happens when you are with someone

who's dying is that it, it relieves you of whatever the projection you had been putting on top of that question mark. And that, right, what you were saying before, when you're a kid, you're so scared of your parents dying and then when you actually are with them and they die, I mean, obviously it's a multi-layered emotional cake and, um, there's, there is heartbreak there, but it also gives you, it's, it's not as bad as what you imagined it to be as a child, at least not, not in my experience. I think that aspect of it causes so much guilt for people because when it happens

and you're confronted not with what you imagine would be this level of heartbreak and this level of annihilation that was so great, it was going to destroy you forever. And you're just, you know, you're in a car driving away from where they died and you're broken hearted, you're grieving, but it's nothing that you imagined. And something in that softness of the experience, I can remember, I struggled with that. Like, how dare I feel okay right now? It's only been a few days, I think I'm okay. What am I, an animal? And then the grief. Yes, you are.

And that's what your parents would have hoped is that they'd prepared you for that moment so that you would have the strength to function throughout that heartbreak, that it wouldn't be so debilitating that your life would be derailed. Everything's becoming so technologically advanced that we're on the precipice of the invention of a time machine, but what about mattresses? Where is our futuristic mattress, the one we dreamed of when we were a child? It's here, friends, and it's a purple mattress. The secret to purple is the purple grid. It's a patented comfort technology that instantly adapts to your body's natural shape and sleep

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to describe other than it's incredibly comfortable and you got to try one. They are bad ass and experience the next evolution of sleep. Go to purple.com slash Duncan and use promo code Duncan. For a limited time, you'll get $150 off any purple mattress order of $1,500 or more. That's purple.com slash Duncan promo code Duncan for $150 off any mattress order of $1,500 or more. Terms apply. But it does get derailed. Wouldn't you say that your life was derailed after your father passed to some degree? No. My life was a little bit derailed after he got sick, but not after he passed away. Maybe that's a special case. It's unique in the sense that he was sick for almost

10 years and was a shadow of himself for most of that time and wasn't happy. It made it easier to say goodbye because he was ready to say goodbye too. Do you remember the day he told you he'd been diagnosed and what was the diagnosis? Well, he didn't have to tell me anything because it was actually April 22, 2010. He had a stroke and it affected the basal ganglia region of his brain, which controls lots of your motor functions. Essentially, he never regained use of the left side of his body. Then as a follow-up from the stroke and then essentially losing everything in his life and not recovering, then he had dementia that was caused by the physical stroke, but also by just being institutionalized and he had to live in a nursing home. It was terrible.

Nursing homes are generally not great places to live. That was 10 years of your life. Yeah. What happened when he first got sick? I took over his life. He had owned a business and a building and I had to get rid of all that stuff because he didn't have any health insurance at the time, unfortunately. He was about to go on to... He was going to become eligible for Medicare and he had pre-existing conditions. This is before Obamacare went into effect. His monthly payments were really prohibitively expensive and he just was risking it for a few months and he was going to go on Medicare. He didn't make it to the window where I could have activated Medicare early or gotten retroactive payments from them. He essentially lost everything.

I had to sell everything off and run his life. At first, we tried to keep the business open for about a year because we were hoping that he would recover and that he would be able to go back to running it. What was the business? It was a restaurant. Of course, it was a nightmare. People were stealing and I couldn't be there to run it. I was trusting certain people to run it on the day-to-day level but I would go in and check in and the numbers weren't adding up. I knew that was happening and I knew there was nothing I could do about it so I tried not to let it cause me too much anxiety but it was mostly about, okay, can I keep this place floating until my dad can come back or until we know that he won't be able to come back. Then when it was

obvious that he wasn't going to recover, I had to be the one to tell him, hey, look, we're selling everything that you own and getting rid of this business and firing everybody and all that. That was really hard. Those kind of things, seeing him stripped of his dignity and his life's work and all that kind of stuff, that was more painful than the actual death. Wow, yeah. Yeah. I didn't get that. My dad, he had COPD and he faded so fast that it wasn't quite so terrible for him in the sense that he did get to hold on to some a little bit of dignity. My wife says that he points out that he passed away literally the day after she went to the store to get adult diapers for him because we thought he

might have to start wearing it and he just didn't want to stay. He's like, forget it. I'm not going to do that. He just dropped his body but you had to go through. That was smart. Well, yeah, there were lots of adult diapers involved and my dad was completely at the mercy of the people at the nursing home and I have a lot of empathy for people that work in nursing homes because it's a hard job and the people that are actually changing the diapers and wiping butts are not getting paid commensurate to the value that they're contributing and as a result, there's lots of turnover and there were some people that were not very good people that my dad had to rely on to

change his to wipe his butt and change his diapers and sometimes my dad would call me and say, they're letting me sit in my own feces because they don't want to change me today. And then I would have to call the office and it was terrible and then there would sometimes be times when I would leave and I was living out here in LA and then I would go back and his nails hadn't been cut in months, things like that. It was just a complete stripping of his dignity. Wow. This has, how did you simultaneously? Keep it together. How did you keep your career and your art? How did you maintain anything knowing all this was happening? Well, the first two years that he was sick, I took on

a lot of the responsibility because I'm the oldest kid and I also think it was selfishly a way for me to prove how I felt to him after being somewhat disconnected from him for the years prior to him having a stroke and it was kind of a way to reconnect and show him my love. And so there was a lot of stuff that had to happen in those first two years. Like I said, the first year we kept the business floating and then I had to settle some lawsuits that had been ongoing when he got sick and there was just a lot of logistical stuff to take care of getting him onto insurance, Medicaid, finding a nursing home that wasn't terrible to get him placed into and that required us talking to some of his old business connections who were on

the board of a particular nursing home and sneaking him in as a Medicaid patient. Basically, all those kind of things and that two years was really hard and pretty traumatic and simultaneously I had an album come out with a band during that time and was touring in Japan and Europe and that was the first around that time I scored the first TV show I scored and another movie. So there was a lot going on and I was just not sleeping very much and you know how sometimes they say that taking care of somebody who's sick can be a self-abusive behavior or it can be a way of diminishing oneself because it's almost like an addictive behavior in the sense that everybody you know heaps praise on you for being such a good person for taking care of this person

and it's a noble pursuit but then on the other hand you can easily use it as a place to hide and throw your own life away in a similar way to how people abuse substances. Well I think I got about I think I kind of started approaching the cliff of you know it becoming bad for me to do it and so after two years of kind of taking the reins it was I was lucky because my siblings many of whom were still in school at the time or out of state were in a position to really help and I'm the oldest of five kids so they were a lot of help and after that you know some of them started getting real jobs while I was still working as a musician making very little money and they were able to contribute in financial ways too so that's basically what happened and it brought us all

closer together as a family I was always off doing my own thing and it brought me closer together with my siblings that's amazing sometimes and even my mom who was divorced from my dad helped out a lot she's a nurse and she even helped out quite a bit oh wow that's beautiful thank god you're that's some grace there it doesn't happen that way all the time a lot of a lot of the times there when a parent is dying siblings can get into a pretty severe drama with each other that's amazing that y'all banded together and helped him in that last decade I just you know I I'm just trying to picture you I just have to say we've only been talking for about 10 minutes now and you've already gotten to this yeah we started here yeah but you got I mean because I think in a in a one of the

fantasies of being a musician or being an artist and certainly being a successful artist you know there's this somehow the the reality of life gets somehow left out of the I don't know the at least the pretty pictures that I had in my head of what what it would be like to have a career go after a thing somehow I left out that yeah but your pursuit for your own like success or your pursuit to evolve some craft or art or whatever you you you're gonna get hit by the reality of life that your parents are gonna get old and that you're gonna have to deal with whatever that looks like I never really thought about that and then when it started happening you know like when my mom got cancer I can I just remember like that suddenly realizing that our our society or was sort of set up to

create an idea that I guess the our society is set up where the priorities are all scrambled you know like in and that were there was this I realized I was suddenly in this strange battle between I mean what do I do do I go do I do I have my dad come live with me do I go live with my mom while she's sick do I give everything up like what you're saying do I give it all up to go tend to my parents and isn't that the right thing to do isn't there something satanic about going after being a stand-up comic or being you know doing that when like your parents are sick you know and I felt so how did you answer that question for yourself well I didn't have to answer my father would never have allowed me to uh my father I mean even as he was dying he was you know

like you can't let he was basically saying you can't let this you can't let this stop what you're doing my mom too they they both were they both understood the last thing a good parent wants is for their death to be a hindrance not like you know trying to make you a guilt tripway but I would never want to think that my dying messed up my kid's life other than like you know bringing him the implicit sadness that goes along with it and but Duncan you took the experience of your mom's death and turned it into art in a literal way and shared it with the whole world and you make a living off of it now yeah so it's kind of like a win-win right well yeah I mean you see yeah but god I had that that ten years you're talking about man I have a really vibe with

you relating to that but I didn't have ten it wasn't ten years it was more like five for me but that shadow that gets cast over your life like any anyone who has a someone who's dying and their family knows about that shadow it's like you could be in the middle of the best day of your life you could be in the middle of like some whatever some great thing but there's always that shadow that right sense of like ah man are they are they trimming his nails what's her tumor count going to be when I talk to her tomorrow is is it spread throughout her body how close are we is this just going to go on forever and ever that shadow how many people in the world right now have that shadow over their lives and you want to be enlightened

with that shadow and you want to be like oh I'm going to turn this into art but for me it was just like I just felt like every day I was like getting kicked in the shins a little bit you know it's like a profound yet subtle ache that stays with you do you did you yeah that's I totally relate to that and that's why I say it was almost like a weight was lifted from all of us when my dad died because he wasn't suffering anymore and we weren't suffering by proxy you know because it hurts to know that someone you love so much has been reduced to a shadow of who they used to be and that they're living in a compromised way and that they're vulnerable to the whims of whoever happens to be on you know diaper duty that day yeah that is the reality that we're in

in the Bhagavad Gita as Krishna is talking about all the qualities of like the of God or whatever it's a really I think it's chapter seven or something in the Bhagavad Gita it's like God describing God's self and you know like he's saying things like I'm the taste in water I am the heat in fire I'm the intelligence of the intelligent and then one of the things he says is uh of subduers I am time and it's so incredible that's like the ultimate subduer that's the that's the ultimate uh I don't want to say domesticator but it doesn't matter who you are or how powerful you think you may be you're eventually someone's gonna have if you make it far enough the odds are pretty good that someone on diaper duty is gonna have a moment where he's like man I don't feel like

changing Duncan's diaper but it's my job you know what I mean it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if you are the most it doesn't matter if you're the most powerful if you're Caesar it doesn't matter if you take over the world it doesn't matter what at some point time just gradually slowly sometimes not so slowly pushes you down under the water there's nothing you can do about it well but having having more resources can make that process more comfortable and more dignified but you're right and I would say that that's probably the reason why the primal reason why people try to accumulate power to begin with right is because of it's all rooted in that fear and it's it's stemming from a desire to want to control our environment right that that fear it's a driving force behind

so many bizarre things that are happening right now I think so many you know every what every three weeks there's a new study that they've done you know they're they're trying to right now they're trying to create functional human immortality uh that you know the there who's they my friends Ray Kurzweil no no that by them I mean people who run companies that if so basically the idea is the study of aging uh is an incredibly lucrative study like if you can figure out a way to reduce or reverse the effects of aging and you can patent that process that technique then that is you're going to you know be a billionaire a beyond billionaire you're going to be so rich if you could if someone discovers a way to reverse the aging process

which they think is possible they don't and so that market pressure which is stemming from not wanting to have to go through what your dad went through or my dad went through because it's like fuck living for a long time if you can't simultaneously reverse the damage that age is caused on our bodies you know other you're just going to turn into some like ancient nasferatu otherwise right you're going to have like long gross waxy fingers and just be like this drooping melted candles like i'm 600 years old be your eyes are marshmallowy and the that you don't just want to extend the lifespan you want to reverse the damage that that time has done on the human body and if you can get yeah and then you can be like a handsome nose ferrattu right

like more like uh you know the dracula that's recently drank blood and and looks like a 25 year old that's right man that's the an rice vampire right exactly yeah and and that that is from what i've read and from people that i've talked to that is entirely in the future of humanity there is no reason that we uh based on where gene editing is going and based on the studies that they're figuring out regarding why we age how we age what the aging process is that they aren't going to discover some way to at the very least slow down the clock a little bit and then it's interesting would you be into that like if you know for i i know i would but would you be into like an injection or some kind of monthly treatment regimen if it would or it's

turn you back into a 20 year old i mean i think i probably would in theory i wouldn't uh because you know now i i want to believe that you know i'm willing to accept that the limitations that nature places on our lives are what give them meaning blah blah blah but you know i can't i can barely stay off instagram for an hour of course i would be use shooting that stuff up too it's like there's there's my lofty ideals and then there's the way that i would actually behave well i mean how much of our lofty ideals are just connected to inaccessibility i mean i know for myself it's it's so much easier to just be like i don't even want immortality give me i have come to terms with my own death and no no please don't give me that inhaler that makes me become 20 again please no

don't give me the inhaler that makes my dick instantly hard when the wind blows no please don't give me that inhaler that makes it so i not just sleep through the night but like can't wake up not because i took some sleeping agent but just because i'm young that's how young people sleep give it to me baby but then also this is what i think you could really talk about is like imagine how good music would become if musicians could live for hundreds and hundreds of years i don't know man i think the fact that they know that death is imminent is what makes music have immediacy to a certain extent oh wow so you think the reason musicians make any kind of good music is because there is some knowledge that they're dealing with that they only have a little bit

of time in this particular realm i think so i mean even like heartbreak songs about you know unrequited love or whatever that those songs only make sense in the context of only having so much time on the planet if you knew you were going to be 20 for another 100 years then who cares you can just find somebody else you know wow i mean this isn't this i think is one of those it's a hypothesis that how could you even test it like i they you know in buddhism they talk about the realm of the gods and i i never have wondered what would the music be like in the realm of the gods like would it suck would you go to the realm of the gods and it's just like lazy shitty music because they're not gonna die or would it be incredibly technical but have no soul

because so much of great art is connected to fear or to this so i'm sort of transcendence rather than stasis it all ties into the idea of art being having its roots in pain you know that it might yeah or or transcending it or i mean even joy having its roots in pain right having something against which to be defined oh wow yeah right right right like you're not gonna get joy if you only have joy it's not joy anymore it's just right it lacks definition yeah okay i got you i got you so like i'm hoping to find out for sure to find out like what would happen if you were overjoyed for more than like a day or something like right right um but no to answer your question i don't even i don't even necessarily

think there's a direct correlation between you know virtuosity and quality when it comes to music i think it depends on the intent but there's virtuosity is almost more common now than ever before i mean you can go on to youtube and see little kids that can do things that i could never do but what is that why wait why is that this is what i don't know yeah i see that shit it's somewhat because you're you're attaining skills but those it's it's basically like if you call yourself a writer if or if your intention is to become a writer or a poet but you get really fast at typing you know what i mean it's like an instrument is just that it just has a musical instrument um is there to facilitate an ideal an idea you know a writing instrument is there to

facilitate an idea it's an intermediary between an idea or a feeling and and expressing that feeling to the world and if you're only focusing on the instrument itself and not the ideas then there's not much there for me emotionally what is an idea before it becomes an idea i don't fucking know what's an idea before it comes becomes an idea yeah uh i don't know well let's let's think about that so what's a song before it becomes a song it's an experience or a feeling and then it becomes the song is a way of articulating that yeah it's like uh yeah i i think so it's an articulation it's a particular way of articulating a feeling like this song is a way of articulating a feeling so the like there is some hopefully in both of us

right now there is a kind of like uncongealed ocean of pre-ideas that at some point are going to be expressed in our minds via some impulse or like you know what i'm saying like that first you're talking about ideas semen yeah that i didn't want to say pre-com but yeah that's what i'm saying like like i'm talking about like the the some kind of briny ocean of idea pre pre-com just this stuff that's like yeah i don't know i feel like that's the stuff that kind of exists out in the universe and then it can if we're receptive we can be fertilized by those ideas right and then we can nurture them and turn it into songs or whatever shows so in your version of things we're like a garden or we're like a plot of land and the ideas are like seeds

and bird shit and they yeah that kind of thing yeah and the bird shit is the heartbreak and it lands on your head and then then you can come up with the idea yeah but but i that's that's not just my opinion i mean it from other songwriters that i've spoken to on my podcast or musicians that i've spoken to i think most people would say that you know those ideas don't seem to come from within you they come through you that seems to be a relatively common way of looking at it and i've heard of it you know i've heard the analogy of panning for gold or going fishing where the artist is just developing the skill of grabbing for the ideas and sometimes if you practice a lot then you are a little bit more adept at identifying them when they come to you or pulling them out of

the ether on demand do you know when you're having a good idea sometimes i can tell if i like a song when i'm writing it and it feels like at first i i i just can tell that it's going to work as an idea that it's going to be fully formed and then uh how can you tell it just uh it feels like things fall into place if that makes sense like if it's it just feels like it works and that it becomes memorable and i can you know it feels like it has a personality tell me about this i want to hear about from the the the this the moment that you're aware that this idea is inside of you how do you what's the first way you're going to get that thing out do you are you are do you sit and literally write it out on a pad or do you write it via

your end with some instrument i've been to your studio you've got a million different ways to do it are you talking about a song idea or a cue for anything like anytime when you're in the process of creating whether it's a song idea whether it's your own personal music or whether it's like working on the midnight gospel or any of the shows you worked on what it like i want to know like how do you you know what's the rough draft look like for you what do you when you you like tell me but and i want to start and i know this is annoying and it might seem like i'm like needling you with like impossible to answer questions but i'm really interested in tell me like that i the moment you're aware of the idea the moment you get the sense or the

compass knee or the i guess the compass needles the wrong word for the moment like whatever instrument you have inside of you whatever needle starts twitching when you're getting a signal describe that to me all the way to like turning that into a finished song okay well i'll start with how i come up with scored cues because for a long time i was kind of blocked as a person when it came to coming up with my own ideas and so scoring was a way of being creative without being as vulnerable as i need to be when i'm writing my own song wait by scoring you're talking about literally writing down music like writing no i'm just talking about writing for picture so for example like on midnight gospel it's much easier for me

to come up with a high volume of ideas because a there's a clear deadline in place and i've been hired to do a job and so i can kind of put on my professional hat and remove myself from it a little bit more than if i was you know writing a song for myself right and b because i don't have to be the arbiter of whether or not the music is working you know that's up to you and pen and to the other people that are working on the show and so it offloads some of the responsibility and then you know paradoxically that makes me more prolific creatively you know because i'm not i'm not having to do that last step where i'm like is this any good and and perseverating about it there's not enough time to do that right so for for those kind of projects so say you know working on

a a cue for midnight gospel i'll use the one from the last episode as an example when you and your mom are talking about crying and and you know kind of talking about heartache so i that scene was cut in a certain way when i saw it and that determined the rhythm right away so that kind of we're talking about you know whittling something down from a big slab of marble into a sculpture right right so the show's already giving it some form already the way that it's visually set up is proposing a rhythm to it and then i just happened to hear a melody um it's a melody that had been in my mind for years and looking looking for a home and i knew it was going to work under that scene oh wow so then i heard the melody you had a melody in your head already like you have melodies in

your head that you're just sitting back there they're like oh i'll use this melody one day yeah yeah but yeah absolutely i mean don't you do that with jokes yeah oh yeah i guess so yeah i never thought of that way though but yeah so wait i guess you couldn't hum on the melody that i it didn't feel like a vocal melody like i had tried i was like maybe this should be a song someday it just didn't feel like the kind of thing that would be sung and it was in my mind and i started humming it underneath the scene and then you know i decided it would be great to use a female vocalist so i ended up getting a woman named anna waranker to sing it she's amazing she has a band called that dog and she's part of a musical dynasty her family are all you know many of her family members

are renowned musicians or record company executives or whatever but anyway so i i had that melody in mind and then i knew that again so the show helped me in this regard i knew that the q couldn't be super complex complex because most of it is sitting underneath dialogue and i didn't want to take away anything from the dialogue and i wanted the q to be something that you could feel but not necessarily here so i knew that whatever else i added had to be relatively simple and repetitive and so i heard a harp progression that would hint at the melody and then started with the harp progression and then built to the melody later so i kind of worked backwards so that was like a very i don't know if this is coming across but when i'm working on scores it tends to be a

pretty technical process like it's almost like building something it's almost like putting together ikea furniture or something like that where there's all these parts that i no need to fit together and they have to fit into it together in a specific way and it's almost like putting together a puzzle so that's it's a little bit more left-brained oriented than writing songs but so when i do write songs it always usually starts with the melody as well no no lyrics no it cut the i mean i should try writing with lyrics i was um talking to dot wigan the singer of the shaggs the other day yeah because they she wrote some of the most singular songs ever and she told me that she would start writing lyrics and then the melody would just pop into her mind as

she was writing the lyrics i that's never happened to me really you what is more what's more common do you think what's them what's the general in your experience interviewing so many musicians what's the and being around a bunch of musicians what do you think is more common if people usually start with lyrics or start with melody i think probably starting with melody is a little bit more common although there's certainly a tradition of people that start with lyrics especially some of the people that are more literary with their lyrics and then of course um there's a whole tradition in this country uh you know dating back a long time but an obvious example of of uh a manifestation of that tradition is like the tin panelli songwriters who were you know

professional songwriters and usually there would be a lyricist and a you know melodic songwriter working in conjunction with one another and that's interesting too whoa and we kind of did that together actually on your show you know we we took some ideas that you had and turned them into into fuller form oh my god that was the most addictive thing to have a joe wong that you could send your ridiculous lyrics to and suddenly they get converted into this like awesome sound like it was such a luxury like you know because i'm thwarted by my and i understand the idea of you know uh virtuosity not being the necessarily what you what you have to have if you want to make music but still like how many times i don't know this probably doesn't happen to you but for

me i don't know how many times i've just gotten lost in the precursor phases of trying to make a song simply because some technical bullshit you know what i mean like i can't figure out how to get a microphone to work and by the time the microphone is working and and the and i've i've i've almost lost whatever the fish was that i reeled in it's like it gets off the boat so to speak you know i'm saying it's your rod snaps in half yeah yeah well that's i don't know if you remember this but that's why in my studio everything is always ready to go so i i try to minimize any opportunity for my critical mind to intervene so right but what you just said is like yeah that's i get it i get it that's like saying like yeah my you know i try to keep my fusion reactor you know wired so that it's

always doing fusion like having a studio wired so that everything's ready to go that's a that's there's a lot in that that you just said that's no yeah i mean i spend a lot of time thinking about that but i think it probably saves me you know far more time than i actually spend putting into it later on it's because it streamlines my process and it allows me to get out of my own way but like like you're saying like why does why does a broken microphone derail the whole process or something wired wrong derail the whole process it's because it starts engaging another part of our mind and that part of our mind overwhelms the process and then scares off the creative part of our mind that's my theory whoa like the creative part of our mind is like oh boy here he is again

there he is the technician fuck you i was just about to i was just about to start singing but there you are in but what do you or it can also just manifest in a different way i mean that's why gear is so highly prized it's it's like okay well it's just it's putting it's putting a barrier between yourself and that uncomfortable feeling you need to sit in for some time when you're creating things right it's like oh it's much easier to think about the next synth that you want to get or the next summing mixer that i want to buy or blah blah blah than it is to just sit in that feeling right because in reality you can write a song by humming into your phone and there's a very good chance that that technology isn't going to fail or you can write a song by writing a lyric into a

notebook yeah man i think we subconsciously kind of erect these barriers to keep us away from that pain of making stuff yeah that so that's why i found like all right i i want to have the most direct path to that and i don't want to have distractions um that will make it easier for me to you know disengage that part of myself because it's so much easier to go into the studio to try to record something and then realize that you need to rewire your you know mixer so that it's so that it's like because something about the way you think it might be going into the speakers is causing the sound to be not quite as good than it is to sit in that pain that oh you're so right it's like is there an analog to that in um comedy one thing that really resonated with me

was this episode of the bernie max show where he was writing a new set and they were showing these time-lapse montages of him and his process was mostly like taking naps watching tv you know procrastinating until he finally wrote the set but i mean musical music has instruments and technology and things like that that are easier to focus on to distract yourself from the actual process of making music but is there an analog to that in comedy well i mean in comedy i guess you could say that the the gear that you're working with is a living machine it's the audience like you're you're having to go work your work the the audience is the synthesizer and and what's crazy about that is the it's a constantly changing sense like it's there's a a quality to any audience that is

identical while simultaneously there's no way you're gonna ever be in front of the same audience twice unless you're like and if you are you better have a better do a different set you know because they already heard your jokes so there's a a a reality like the comparison is that for a comic you can prepare by writing jokes but and you can write jokes all day long you can write jokes all night long you can write jokes all week long on all month long but if you're not going on stage that's meaningless and though you could have seven notebooks full of jokes but those aren't really going to turn into anything good until you bring them in front of an audience as a form of like you know testing them and then through that testing you start you know realizing what's funny and

what isn't over time you might have a you know the longer you do it the more you're going to have an idea of what that is because you start knowing what you want to talk about but uh the as far as like distracting yourself as a comic or it's usually the the anything you do that is keeping you off stage where whether it's like a mental thing you're just telling yourself and i'm the master at but i'm gonna have so many good excuses for not going on stage but regardless like that's the for a comic it's just if you're not going on stage then you're not working on your you can't work on your material it would almost be better to just be going on stage than to be like working on material that being said it's the balance between the two that's going to generate a set that is going to

entertain people nobody wants to hear your lazy ass right on stage which i have done and that feels really dirty when you're doing that because it's like man i couldn't have like at least sat down for two hours in a cafe to like work out this idea that i have like i'm going to wait to write in front of these people who the fuck do i think i am that i would do that you know you can do it some people like it and i've seen some of the great comics do that and i've really enjoyed it it's really cool to watch and sometimes when it's done right it's got this raw quality to it that's cool anyway i've i'm sorry i got off track here i'm more interested no i like that i like that topic because i think for a long time i well i started off playing in bands and and i toured

and made some recordings as a young person and then i went to music school and then that sent me on this side trajectory where for a while after that i was really concerned with becoming what i consider to be competent as a musician and also feeling like i wasn't qualified to make a statement almost like i was trying to learn how to speak from the ground up again and i wasn't willing to make a statement until i had a phd in linguistics you know what i mean and it was like that was all i recognized that was all just a way of um you know avoiding vulnerability yes um but now you know it is what it is it i did work really hard at acquiring a particular skillset that i can now put in service of ideas and it all worked out but um you know i mean it took me

like a decade or more to get get to the point where i felt okay putting myself out there and it's still terrifying it's a matter of like recognizing that it's not necessarily going to get any easier nor should it that so this you essentially you you burnt you threw yourself in the kiln of discipline and you had some instinct that if you knew that you had to do that but maybe because i know i didn't have to do it i mean i i've talked to enough people that have been very successful without doing that that just followed their gut and made it happen for themselves well that that's them yeah but for me yeah i felt like i at the time i was like well why should i make records when there's records out there by john coltrane and stravinsky and all these geniuses

like what do i have to offer nothing so all i can do is you know start practicing the same discipline as some of those people and see where it leads and uh yeah man turns out i didn't get as good as john coltrane or stravinsky yeah yeah yeah let's see what happens when we double your life span but like good but you know this to me one of the interesting things about any artist is that we i think we all have some crucible that we put ourselves into whether it's necessary or not you can never answer that question i you because you already went through it i mean i saw you at the hollywood forever cemetery that was the last live music show that i went to and what's the name of your band joan night creatures and the night creatures yeah and that that uh is that the

first time you perform live with him yeah that's the first time i've ever sung in front of people yeah that's what i remember you telling me and i you know i was so blown away by that experience that it is one of my i don't know if you have pandemic memories where you think back to the time when we were well i saw you i saw you perform stand-up you were the last person that i saw perform stand-up and i was also thinking about you know in coming on this show i listened to your episode with dan harman the other day yeah and i think he's the last person i had a drink with before this all went down and i'm not close friends with dan by any means but he was in a movie that i scored and after the premiere he and the director who was staying with me and dan

and i all went out um and had a drink and um turns out dan's from the same town as me milwaukie and we know some of the same people from there well that's crazy but yeah he's he's such an interesting person but anyway um yeah so those is that what do you mean by pandemic memories yes like you yeah the most all those moments you had that you were completely taking for granted i mean i wasn't taking your show for granted i i i recognized how great it was but you know i was taking for granted that i could just hang out with people without worrying if i was going to get some viral pneumonia and that that that that was such a great show joe man thank you so much well here's the thing that's interesting about it is you know i'm definitely happy with the music that i wrote

and i was felt ready to be putting it out there and it was terrifying like my left brain my rational mind completely shut off the minute after we did soundcheck um but you know all that time that i put into practicing was mostly on drums and i barely played drums at that show i was i was playing i was like using my newest musical skills singing as the focus of it and so that's interesting to me because i had i had invested all this time in another thing but i think that the time that i invested in um you know practicing an instrument and dedicating myself to it that all still translates to the newer skills and to just my overall approach and the way i relate to other musicians in the band but yeah that was crazy i mean the band itself i i also took the approach of just surrounding myself

with brilliant people with the hopes that it would camouflage me the neophyte oh right see you're the neophyte yeah right that's what's so funny about you joe and so well in that in that sense it was i was literally the first time i had sung and led a band and so i know i know the guitar player was mary timony who's been doing it for 30 plus years the drummer's matt cameron who was in sound guarded he's in pearl jam that's his other band joe this is what i love about buddhism is the final temptation of the buddha the final thing that mara the force of death or whatever you want to call the distraction of the world or i don't know what you would call mara the king of the world the final mind fuck was he asked buddha why do you deserve to be the buddha that was the final

question that was the like theoretically these questions are happening in order of difficulty first it was terrifying the buddha with like the death which didn't work at all second was like offering the buddha all kinds of opulent things symbolized by mara's daughters and the final one was just the existential question which is why do you deserve to be up there on stage joe wong why do you deserve to be seen for a long time i would my answer would be that i don't and that if i work hard enough maybe i can earn the right to be up there on stage and that's not true i mean hard work does play into it but there's always people that'll work harder than you and to me it's like i going back to what we were saying before i recognize that the songs

that i wrote were a gift to a certain extent in the sense that i didn't they're not completely created by me they were you know the raw materials for the idea like what we were talking about came from somewhere else and um i liked the songs and i saw it as a responsibility to put them out into the world and so it's really not even about me that's my way of putting it to myself right yeah you the the buddha's answer is maybe even more mysterious he just put his touch the ground and that that was it and then boom now we've got buddhism thank god and i've got asked a bunch he just touched the ground he just touched the ground well that doesn't translate as well on a podcast so what do you mean well if i just touched the ground when you asked me that question

you'd just be waiting for me to respond i'm touching the ground you just so you know i'm touching the ground did you just touch the ground well my feet are touching the ground i suppose exactly and that's why you deserve to to see yeah and and and that's why it's a perfect answer touching the ground because it's like i'm here of course i'm going to do this this is where i'm at and but i get it man i mean i have i constantly torment myself with the imposter syndrome regarding any kind of creative output i'm always running up against myself in that regard and i'm all like inevitably it's whenever i finally am just creating just because i love doing it and i like that feeling and i love the way it feels that's when i it's everything works even

when it doesn't how would you answer that question why do you deserve to have a tv show do you hear that you just touched the ground not the ground not the ground joe wait but do you do you feel did you feel a sense of imposter syndrome during the production of the show uh yeah i mean i i what so i not i i went i go beyond imposter syndrome i get imposter syndrome so bad i just figure i'm in like a shopping mall in the future and i'm gonna come out of a simulator and my friends are gonna make fun of me because i like did you really figure out a tv show like you believed it it's that realistic you know like when i'm things become so surreal uh when you're doing a thing like that because it is a dream

come true and it's in in the sense that it feels like you're in a dream and so in that way it's it's sort of it's no longer even a imposter syndrome as much as like well i mean this is happening so it must i must in some some way deserve it to be happening in the sense that it's happening i don't feel entitled to it and having you know did it feel as distant from the dream as you know losing your parents felt as distant from that nightmare you know what i mean did it feel like it was in in practice it was different to the same extent yeah you i couldn't have possibly predicted what that what what it was like i the best way i could put it is i felt like i've been granted access to like uh a laboratory you know like they they talk about there's all these like radio

telescopes or i don't know how to put it i felt like i've been given like access to some kind of like high tech laboratory that scientists only or like spend their entire lives hoping to get like two hours working with some kind of maybe very rare element or some kind of crazy supercomputer and you only have this tiny little amount of time to work with it and and so i felt really lucky to be in the situation of like having access to like you to being able to you know because it's a we're you know right now and the reason i'm asking these sort of i guess annoying questions about ideas themselves is i'm fascinated with this i the the concept of um i don't know how to put it some kind of uh condensation dripping into this realm from a lighter realm like so so like and

it sounds so cheesy but like that concept of things mattering you know that matters to me or it doesn't matter to me and that we are matter you know and that that matter is this dense stuff and ideas are in matter because they're happening in our own consciousness at least when they you know when the sea the sea lands it but still they're lighter than our the our bodies for sure like an idea is a light thing and then in the same sense that you know if you study the human brain you can see the emotion in the brain like the brain is expressing the emotion that's where it originates but but matter i always think of it this way Duncan in the same way that the alphabet is the you know art is the building block uh are the building blocks of written language i think matter

is the alphabet of you know it's the supernatural it's a manifestation of something greater and this is coming from someone who grew up in an agnostic atheistic way i mean i don't necessarily know what that greater thing is but i don't think i think it's reductive to say we are only our physical manifestation and love hate all of those things are simply you know impulses triggered by chemicals in our body and expressed through you know electrical impulses in the brain i mean that's true but it's expressing a larger idea in the same way that you could say that your favorite poem is a series of lines on a piece of paper yeah yes that's true but it's it's bigger than that those lines are expressing something beyond the piece of paper and beyond the ink and i think that's that the same

thing could be said for matter in general that is beautiful this is this is that's it man it's like this we're living in some kind of cosmic alphabet and you know the nature of the thing is like if whatever poem that we happen to be in you might you might just be a letter or a part of a letter and i might just be a part of a letter and it's difficult but not impossible from just that to begin to like extrapolate a little bit about what the poem might be and that to me is a delight but i'm really in like the the reason i'm asking you about your studio and ideas in general is because it's like we're we are definitely at the very least we are in some kind of cosmic 3d printer and whoever is decided to send over the thing that we're printing out via the stuff that we're

creating together or as you know individuals or whatever uh that that there's some definitely it feels like there's some intentionality behind it and which is why you know yeah i love the artists who subscribe to the concept that this idea is not mine that i'm getting a download or that i'm receiving or picking something up i think it is like that i think we're like wireless we're wireless printers and we get an idea and then we take that idea and because the idea has come from a non-place that we can't even see we have no idea where it came from it was in the cloud then the idea densifies just enough so there's a trickle of a concept in our mind or a little humming melody or something and then when the moment you become an artist or a crafts person

or whatever is the moment you take that idea and start putting clothes on it and that's when you're writing it down or when you're making a tune on a piano or when you're sculpting or something right now the idea the idea has hit this dimension it is now solidifying right in front of you and that's what it was like working with y'all was like holy shit i'm getting access to all these other nodes of this hyper dimensional printer that we're in meaning that my ideas that i'm the signals i'm picking up the parts of them that are fucked up because like maybe whatever my receptor is for ideas is a little slanted that it can get that though that the static can get scrubbed out not just by me but by you and pin and jessey and everyone there so you can really get a

clear signal and then together we like signal boost for signal boosters that yeah that's the collaboration which is why in in witchcraft you know you need a coven in church you need a clergy you know it's like this sort of team or you in a temple you need you need congregants you know you need like the people who gather together in a temple to not just in tone you know praise or whatever weird ass religion you're in but also to like receive ideas and then sing those ideas into the world to me that's what collaborating was like and when you keep keep your head on straight regarding that process instead of being like i've got a tv show then you're gonna do great right because it's you're just part of a you're just in a temple and you're just singing praises

through the stuff you're making that's how i was thinking of it right once you recognize that you can't force things into existence or that it's usually not to the best uh it doesn't lead to the best results to force it no you surrender yourself to the to the team and and um yeah i wonder if you see it the same way when you come down to your very self like if you think about dunk and trestle as a laboratory that you have access to for the next you know few decades before your spirit goes and inhabits something else oh my god or it becomes dispersed i mean are you able to see it your life that way yeah well not until you just said that whoa man that's heavy yeah yeah i see that i see that yes yes that's that whenever i see myself like that you know what the moment the moment

i that that's a reminder what you just did it makes me remember something i always forget because when i forget that that's when i get really dense but when i remember it like you just made me remember it's like oh it's like you start over again every time you remember that you know what i mean like every time you remember like holy shit i've been given access to this life what do i have i mean i think i definitely gained an increased increased appreciation of that when i was watching everything my dad was going through and he didn't have full functionality of his and full control over his body anymore you know um whoa joe i love that anyway but here's the other thing that i was thinking about is um when it comes to existential questions you know the other

thing i i i think about is if we're merely a product of our genetics and our life experience neither of which we have any control over if that's the case then we have no control over anything that we do right um because we're simply responding in a genetically predisposed way to a series of events that we didn't start um and that's kind of where that whole question of all right well is that true and um or is there something is there some sort of you know semblance of agency that we actually have and if so where does that come from so what have people that you've spoken to you know what would ramdas say to that question well you know i can i can answer the question from someone this bob thurman who's this buddhist scholar

he was talking about that at a ramdas retreat out for if you want you know if you want to figure out a way to like not feel bad about dumping oil into the ocean or whatever uh then one thing to do would just make everything a biological process like reduce everything to pure materialism reduce everything to predetermination reduce everything to some kind of like you know equation happening in matter that is not really intended or anything it just it is and then yeah and i think there there can you can make a pretty convincing argument if you adopt that stance well i you could say like humans are here to you know maybe our greater uh function on the planet is to create plastic and change the composition of the air and then another species will succeed us and they'll eat

plastic and breathe smog you know what i mean yeah it's a george carlin joke like maybe that's what the earth wants plastic how do we know the earth is like i just want to shit ton of plastic right now but right yeah but i mean the same way that the dinosaurs didn't know that their fossils were going to become oil millions of years well yeah right i mean the the there's so the to me i think that the layer of matter that we happen to have landed in as humans is uh what's really interesting about it is there are you can definitely go down that road and there's going down that road you'll meet an entire group of people welcoming you like come yeah you're right it's just matter just forget about it it's all just a predetermined thing just forget about the whole spirit bullshit

it's just a bunch of bullshit don't buy into that shit and you'll and the further you go along that road then the more the idea of the spirit or all the spiritual shit will seem like a kind of dream and i imagine eventually you won't even think about it anymore you'll just be a you kind of no longer disconnected from this material universe and to me whether or not that's a good way to be or a bad way to be i'm not positive it's i think that because of the nature of things things get denser but then also um you know i think there's things also lighten up and in that lightening up thing then matter becomes a little less important that that the body this the life the the fixation on the self it all starts kind of loosening up a little bit and with that comes a letting go that

i think you summed up so well in the closing song of the show and just that you know you let it go you you you you just start letting go of it all and then in those moments of really letting go it's like you zoom out or something i don't know the best way to put it but so yeah i mean what i say in the song is one of the lines that pertains to what you were saying is the weight of will diminishes uh or slowly diminishes and i was thinking about you know our ego or our will to do whatever live or um you know affect the reality around us or affect change on the world that's a burden after a certain point which gets us back to what we were talking about before with this notion of living forever extending our 20s yeah indefinitely i i don't know i i think that

i think that that's overlooking this idea of just the will is becomes a burden you know yeah that is it the that in a lot you know there's a whole school thought when it comes to that we're just like no the will is the you know the will is what is the the thing you call the will is the printer it's the receipt printer receiving the signal from the cloud it's the thing you call the will is that's your contact with what your divine destiny is which is to print out whatever the particular poetry or instruction manual or whatever the sum total of all things in the material universe are that we happen to be part of we're co-creating so the will is actually you know but i you know i i agree with your song which is that if you explore the will if you

explore the self if you if you study things and just kind of just look at things from the perspective of what is heavy and what is light in my experience in my field of experience what has a quality of lightness to it and what has a quality of heaviness to it and go in the direction of the light stuff instead of the heavy stuff then you know all of a sudden your life becomes lighter and lighter and lighter and then i think that's why they call it enlightenment it's like it's some final ultimate place where you live in the world the ideas come from but you're also here somehow i mean you talk to these people who've met beings like this and the descriptions are pretty trippy man pretty trippy you ever talked to anybody have you ever met an enlightened person i mean i don't

know if i've met somebody who's officially enlightened you know he's gotten the license he has like an enlightenment diploma yeah i don't know i mean i not in the same capacity you have i mean i i'm sure i think you know lots of the folks that i've spoken to on my show have achieved a form of enlightenment through the discipline and vulnerability of making music i mean it's just one discipline that can draw you closer to the to your humanity or to the essential qualities of the universe um yeah all these practices are getting at the same thing right like meditation isn't all that much different from playing an instrument with intent you know well i don't you know that that's what's so funny about neem kurali baba ramdas is guru

is he would they you know they would the hippies would go off to do a med like a meditate like a of a up of a passionate retreat or something they go meditate for for 10 days or 20 days and they'd come back and he'd have to and he'd say did they did you learn how to meditate and laugh because he thought it was so funny and because when you were around him it wasn't the problem with it it's like you got around him and all your you know all that weight it just melted away and and and so once you got into that field of whatever he was putting out there everything you remembered something that that was much easier to forget when you weren't hanging out with him if you're far away from that being or far within yeah it's like yeah just another like

bullshit guru tricking acid head hippies into like believing you had some potency or something i mean that is a that sounds that i you know i appreciate that hustle too believe it or not i mean when i was watching the source family i was like man i want to start a cult so bad well it was my takeaway from man you don't start the cult the cult starts you i think that's the problem is like suddenly this guy named curly baba who you know or whoever it is a person who like does that i think this is one of the possibilities when you're here and and is that you can die while you're alive and that but to do that you really have to let go of all of everything that you think you are and it can be done apparently and when it really happens then the that person becomes

kind of like the opposite of a black hole like which is a the most dense thing we know of in the universe is so dense it's eating up the universe you become like a a subjective white hole so to speak and that and and when people get around you it's like they've smoked DMT but they haven't smoked DMT they get around you and it's like you're you're like bending space and that bending of space is what people call miracles which is why when you get around someone like that you're seeing stuff happening and experiencing things that are impossible that just can't happen this can't you know you you just it's impossible there's no way based on the way you've been taught about the way the world works that this could be happening but people see it and experience it and that that and

it so who the fuck knows they because these these people that are the real deal they're like doorways and when you're around them for a second you go through the doorway and i i believe it i am you know and having been around ramdas who never i don't think who didn't claim that level of like realization but just having watched the things that happen around him all the time you know seeing the it's not just like the way people around him are acting but just like ridiculous things would happen man ridiculous things that weren't heavy duty stuff they were always had a quality of silliness to them and lightness but also a quality of like what are you fucking kidding me man come on can you give me an example sure like one of the craziest things we one of these retreats

have been raining every single every day and then while it was raining he just went out into the ocean he would do that and this little floaty thing because he'd had a stroke he'd go out in the ocean and he was like surrounded without and he would be surrounded by people from the retreat i wanted to go swimming with him was so fun they'd like throw flowers at him was beautiful and like he would laugh and you float out there but yeah he just went out there it was raining and it sounds so cheesy and so ridiculous i'm sorry to the ramdas people people it's not like people say don't talk about these stories and i get it because it's like they're not the they're just a byproduct of something it doesn't matter but sure as shit he gets out there it just stops

raining and an instant rainbow forms right right above where he's floating you know what i mean where you and it's like what the that not only is that so silly and so cheesy you know and so beautiful and so obvious you know like the it's like ridiculous it makes you laugh you have to laugh because it's ridiculous you know that that but then those those moments um i mean there's so many moments some of them i don't think i even want to talk about because it it seems like it reduces it i mean the one of just the cause because it's not about those moments right the moments are just um symptomatic of this guy's overall vibe yeah and also any body is like mildly skeptical should should anyone hearing bullshit like this out of anyone's mouth should be like

come on that's a bunch of crap that's okay that's discernment you should think well yeah i mean and what i would say is okay well it's a coincidence oh yeah that's the thing that's just the problem is like all the coincidences like that seem to happen more often around him than other people up in around sure that's well the other thing to the the other thing to keep in mind is that coincidences make the world go round yeah everything is a coincidence to a certain extent yeah i mean yeah but the the exactly and you know with neem curly baba the stories that they told about him were were really really odd and really intense just a basic clairvoyance a basic ability to read people's minds that was just accepted and wasn't like maybe like a tv psychic thing but like he

could just he would he could just do it and you know all these like crazy stories but he i don't think those weren't the weren't the point the point was that here was this being that had somehow turned into love it wasn't it you know i don't know he is bringing birds back to life or whatever that he could read your mind or that he was apparently could be two places at once none of that mattered what mattered was that here was a person who was love you know i'm sure if like whoever our precursor hominids were if they saw the way we are now we would all like need look like neem curly babas to them you know we're like using tools making fire flying in planes they would look at us and be like what the fuck how is that possible what is that that's us that's

what we could be i think that's the real miracle is that the people can turn into love that people can be in this place where anything that's in front of them they fall in love with for real and that is one of the that's one of that's the great miracle and something about that contact with another being falling in love with them for real not pretending to love them or acting like you love them but fully being in love with them like you've known them forever and it does something to a person it heals a person so anyone coming around you it's not like you're curing their leprosy it's like you're you're giving them the feeling of what it's like to have unconditional love and something about that was what transformed the people who met him the miracle stuff was just

like you know i think something that they to laugh about it was like a side show or something the you know that's what that's my understanding of it i mean damn that to me is way better than i'd much rather be around unconditional love than somebody who can you know levitate a little bit or something though i would love to see someone levitate well i think you know as far as my personal life goes i'm not capable of giving everybody new that i meet unconditional love but i do aspire to be open to feeling something in the relationship and trying to at least um like the person like trying to connect with them on a real level um and that's been something that i've had to work at because i think i've you know in in the depths of my jadedness there was a point when i found it

harder to connect to people oh my god that what you just said that's it literally the intent i mean way back in the beginning of this conversation you were talking about that the intent that's it to me that's it what you just said that's it forget about trying remember when you when you were a kid and you met a new friend how exciting it was like somebody how exciting it was to have somebody in your life that you just resonated with and that maybe had some of the same um interests or you know that you just thought was cool yeah man i mean you actually i you told me the story of meeting email amos and how that changed your life but i'm talking about even before that like when you're a little kid and you meet some of your first friends how magical that is oh god it's well

because you're the your whole universe changes at that moment when you make a new friend that's it you're in a new you're in a completely new realm everything's different from that you're gonna go you're gonna go to sleepovers you're gonna so you're gonna trade toys you know it's it's like everything yes i remember that i think that is something we all forget is and then yeah when you get older then you have such a larger frame of reference and so you're comparing everybody that you meet up against this appendix of other people that you've met in your life and they then become like somebody else or an amalgam in your mind of other people and other personalities and it's not as fresh and in the same way that time seems to pass more quickly when you get older i think

you know these kind of human interactions can lack the depth that they had when you were younger in something that i've been trying to work at for the last couple years is getting back to that feeling and the reason why i'm trying to get back to it is ultimately that's what allowed me to then put my own music out into the world is you know i had to get in touch with my internal compass which was buried under a whole junkyard of you know hurt feelings or heartbreak or whatever it is that i accumulated by being a person i had to get back to that and not only did it help me write songs and put them out into the world but it the bigger thing that it helped me to do is connect with people god that's such such an important thing to remember man is that you've

got to shut down those apps you've got running that are keeping you from being with a person as they are and and it is like those apps are trying to they're like antivirus apps they're trying to protect you from getting hurt right and um but sometimes do you know what i'm saying you i don't know if you've ever put antivirus software on and then realized that it might as well be a fucking virus because anytime exactly yeah exactly yeah and you this so this meeting meeting other people as though you don't and you are going to get viruses you're going to meet some bad people or mean people or people that um that hurt you uh but you have to be open to that in the same way that you have to be open to writing 10 clunky songs before you get to the one that really moves you

this is it this is the this is what i love about my vague understanding of christian existentialism and the embracing the christ image as this being that's like yeah go ahead break me i'm gonna when i meet you you probably are gonna like crucify me and the whole time you're doing it i'm gonna be loving you for real and like that shit is crazy when you think about that like fuck that i'm not gonna let some motherfucker you know snuff me out mentally or whatever have something on me or trick me or get one over on me or deceive me like the other motherfuckers did back then i'm gonna be a tough jaded cynical successful person who isn't going to be fooled by these pigs right and that's one way to be and it might be the right way to be depending on your goals but like the transcendent

quality of the christ symbol which is like no you just go ahead and kill me i guess and i'll still love you and i that's just the way i'm gonna be i'm just gonna do that i'm not gonna have any i'm not doing i'm not what getting far i'm not gonna say like the ultimate abundance mindset right yeah man i'll have another life it's okay yeah exactly it's like i i'm gonna be fine i i understand like you need to kill me you got to get this out of your system i guess but yeah and even that act of you killing me i'm still forgiving you in a real way this is why like that remember a while back that guy was on this on a train and he stopped a knife attack but the guy stabbed him and like as he was dying he said tell everyone on this train i love them and wow i don't remember that but

that's pretty awesome yeah and he was dying and he's like tell and he meant the guy who knifed him and it was just like shit i'm sorry you call you you where you're at you're all dense you've got all these antivirus you got so much antivirus shit up on your subjective computer screen that you're stabbing people because you're so scared and i you didn't mean to be that way you just run in too many apps you're malfunctioning but i still love you well that kind of brings us back to what we were talking about earlier when it comes to the question of whether we are merely the product of our genetic makeup in our experience or whether we have some sort of control and i struggle with that question because you know central to my compassion for people that

do so-called bad things is the thought that perhaps they didn't really have much of a choice but then on the other hand that's kind of a condescending thing to think because maybe they didn't have maybe they did have a choice well i mean who knows you're the only one who knows if you have a choice and if you put your money but you don't know right that's the whole thing like that's actually something that i apply the notion of faith to more than say god and maybe it implies a god or a larger spirituality but i try to have faith that i have some semblance of control over my life and then i'm not just watching a vr game play out like a demo or that i'm not just in a simulator in a mall in the future but you can you can choose how to watch it and

that was the thing ramdas always said is like see your life as though you're looking at a beautiful flower that you're looking at it and love it love though that's that is what you got that that might be the amount of control that you have that might be it like sure of course right now if you want to you can like stand up and sit down and raise your arms or whatever and you could decide to have a beer i'm not saying i mean those and who knows maybe that's your gut bacteria or whatever decided to do that but there's a level back of that which is this place of just what i think what ramdas called the soul or soul land and he would say that's just love and you can choose to be that to feel that and then this life that you have plays out in front of you and you're just loving it like

oh this is beautiful i love this that's happening that's the choice that it might be a very limited amount of control we have in the sense that all you can do is decide you're just gonna love everything even if it sucks and you know and that could be a mistake but you can do you do have that that to me feels like some form of choice well i i haven't gotten there yet but i at least i think i have gotten past feeling hate towards anybody you know yeah um say man because there's definitely been times when i felt hate towards people that hurt people that i love or that hurt me and um i think i've been able to drop that baggage i mean i i don't i it to me it's there's certainly times where it can get triggered but for the most part it's not doesn't dominate my thoughts it's moment

for me it's like sometimes it's there sometimes it's like i don't it's a moment to moment thing where you know talking about it makes me remember and then i'll forget it pretty soon and then i'll read some shitty thing that someone wrote or whatever on twitter and be like you mother food and that just hurts but we you know man i don't i don't i think the question of free will is a great question but what how about this let's say there isn't free will it is all just a thing that we have no control over then whatever we have no control over how how wonderful would it be if all of a sudden that thing decided to start allowing us to experience unconditional transcendent love towards all phenomena well that would be amazing and if like part of that lack of control

is suddenly we imagine that we're opening up to the world and loving it when the reality is we're just at that part of the outflow of matter into time that the little rivulet of meat that you call your body and self starts experiencing this transcendent love so what that's great i don't give a shit i don't care if i chose to suddenly start loving everything i don't care if some vr code in me sprung up and i just started loving everything i don't care if i'm being sock puppeted by the fucking demiurge that's making me feel transcendent love for all things either of those outcomes it's all the same it's love and it's that would be wonderful that being said that's not what's happening to me either joe uh unfortunately how often do you

feel transcendent love anytime i'm with my baby i feel it and and i that that was a shocking thing to realize how much money i'd blown on acid when all i had to do is have a baby well babies are pretty expensive too no but god damn it they for the baby it's like at least when you're hanging out the baby you don't look in the mirror and your face is turned in to like some kind of litch native american woman you know what i mean there's at least that your face at least stays the way it is well you're presenting this like it's they're two mutually exclusive worlds i mean you can take a ton of acid and be with your baby at the same time dunkin no see what happens then i would have no fucking way they tried that back in the 60s man i'm not running that experiment

no way you this is the thing let me give you an i'm sorry do you do you got a few more minutes yeah i've but do you feel um here's what i want to know is i can remember feeling you know transcendent love towards my family when i was a little kid but then the first time i felt it outside of my family context was when i started playing music with people and i can still remember the kid that i played music with the very first time and i remember he knew like three songs on guitar and i was playing drums and we just kept looping those three songs and in some ways i've been trying to find that feeling ever since oh wow yeah yeah yeah um yeah man so do you feel that when you're doing comedy yes yes i do and the best on when it's when it's working i mean i i think one of the

qualities of that feeling is that to me there there is a certain spookiness to it it's so powerful and beautiful it was really powerful to have that feeling as a 12 year old it was almost like my that's what turned me into a person like into a fully formed person it was my vehicle into the world you know it was like a second it was a i was a born again musician you know it it it gave my life purpose that and it it gave me a means with which to to define myself but you want to know the craziest thing yes is when i started my podcast it was because i had completely been disconnected from that feeling and i was trying to figure out if other musicians experience the same phenomenon like i thought of it as kind of like how they say you know when

you're married for a long time sometimes it just becomes companionate and there's love there but it's not as visceral anymore and you don't necessarily have mind-blowing sex anymore and it becomes more muted and i was wondering if that's you know a natural thing that was happening to me creatively and i started asking other musicians that question and that was a big part of the reason why i started doing the show because i was trying to kind of navigate through this kind of traumatic feeling of feeling you know lost when i was sitting down to play music do you and but then a few years later the kid that i first played music with turns out he's a big podcast fan and now he lives down in arizona and it runs his own business where he's out working outside

lots of the time and he heard my podcast and got in touch with me so it all brought it back to that moment yeah man i mean this what you're talking about is just the that seems to be the inhalation and exhalation in the life of any mystic or artist is sometimes you feel legitimately forsaken and like you aren't getting it like not only you're not getting it back like you start wondering if you ever got it maybe that was just a dream when you were exactly you're like wait am i just building this up to be bigger than it is like is it a cornerstone story that my mind is it a construct of my mind yeah but this is this is when when jesus is being crucified this is one of his last words father why have you forsaken me i mean this is like that's the that's the like that to me that's

why i love christianity is because i mean i can't i i i could count i can't remember were you raised christian yeah yeah but just i mean i love them that that particular messiah figure because that's a messiah that's that's at the very end is saying i was totally wrong like i don't feel i'm not feeling this i mean it's getting crucified not that you are gonna feel it but it's like you're you're in the moment it's not just he's saying where are you like where is the thing that i thought i had that got me up on this fucking cross and then i thought what he was saying was weren't his last words more than just a pan and crust more than just delicious pie that's what he said right after father why have you forsaken me that's a little inside joke for you midnight

or something maybe joe listen i could keep yapping with you until the crows come home but i i gotta go man and i my last question for you is i didn't look i realized i could easily just google this and uh figure out what it is i have the feeling but maybe not what the fuck is a trap set anyway that's the name of your podcast what's a trap set well my podcast started off as kind of like a sociological study of drummers yeah and a trap set is an antiquated term for drum set um early in the instrument's development some people referred to it as a contraption and and perhaps that's where the uh phrase trap set came from but um it's just kind of an antiquated term for drummers for a drum set and uh it also served as a you know relatively neutral name for a podcast

and i thought of it as a set of people that i was talking to it was like a very specific set of people trying to find universal themes talking to a very very narrow niche of folks got it man you do that you are such a good interviewer folks listening you gotta listen to this podcast his podcast is so you are such a pro interviewer and you really like listen to the episode we did y'all it was you like broke me down i'm still feeling it from that conversation it was so good man i'm so grateful that you let me be on your show because that was like you know i've been doing a bunch of interviews that was the penultimate one like you really have like penultimate that means second last right oh wait penultimate first ultimate ultimate

it's the penultimate penultimate ultimate fucking for me penultimate means ultimate ultimate i don't know shit oh god why do you have call me on my music well i was scared if that's your penultimate interview you'll ever do that might mean that the grim reapers coming for you sooner than later hold on i'm looking at are you sitting on a roller chair right now yeah i'm sitting on a roller chair too last but one in a series if that's that's like a big word thank you for correcting me by now it's too late i can't even imagine how many times i've used that word incorrectly and people haven't had the goddamn compassion to be like you dummy that's not what you mean it just sounds smart so thank you show i mean your pot it was my favorite interview and you're really really

good at it and um thank you so much well you're on the same wave you're on a similar wavelength to me so i think it was easy to for us to connect uh and i was glad to have you on yeah and i'm really happy to be on your show too yeah man i mean i'm so happy that we're becoming friends and i feel so luck i got to work with you on the midnight gospel joe can you tell people where they can find you yeah they can find my music including the song that i which is the it's actually going to be included on my album and also potentially the midnight gospel album it's called dreams wash away and it's on any streaming service and my music can be found at nightcreaturesnitecreatures.com that has my tour dates and such and then my podcast is the trap set which is available on

most platforms and at our website all the links you need to find joe are going to be at dugatrustle.com joe thank you so much it's been a real pleasure love you duncan love you harry christina much thanks to purple and story worth for sponsoring this episode of the dtfh the best way for you to support the dtfh is to support our sponsors so check out story worth and get yourself a nice purple mattress a big thank you to joe wong for coming on the show and also for making the midnight gospel have the coolest music of all time and a big thank you to you for listening i will see you next week until then harry christina a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop jc penny family get-togethers to fancy occasions

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