The Tim Ferriss Show - #348: Dave Elitch — How to Get Out of Your Own Way

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

"Slow down. Do it again." — Dave ElitchDave Elitch (IG: @daveelitch) first garnered attention with his band Daughters of Mara's debut album I am Destroyer in 2007, but his time touring with the American progressive rock band The Mars Volta in 2009-2010 is what really put him on the map. He has since worked with Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, M83, The 1975, Juliette Lewis, Big Black Delta, as well as many others.Dave conducts master-class lectures worldwide and is a regular in the L.A. session scene, including performing on film scores for many major motion pictures. As an educator for the last 20 years, Dave has developed a reputation as the technique/body mechanic specialist who has helped many of the world's top players and educators overcome physical and mental plateaus at his private studio in Los Angeles. His brand new online course, Getting Out of Your Own Way, is available now at DaveElitch.com (use the code FERRISS at checkout for a 25% off discount).Please enjoy this episode with Dave Elitch!This podcast is brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the #1 cloud bookkeeping software, which is used by a ton of the start-ups I advise and many of the contractors I work with. It is the easiest way to send invoices, get paid, track your time, and track your clients.FreshBooks tells you when your clients have viewed your invoices, helps you customize your invoices, track your hours, automatically organize your receipts, have late payment reminders sent automatically and much more.Right now you can get a free month of complete and unrestricted use. You do not need a credit card for the trial. To claim your free month and see how the brand new Freshbooks can change your business, go to FreshBooks.com/Tim and enter “Tim Ferriss” in the “how did you hear about us” section.This podcast is also brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years, and I love audiobooks. I have a few to recommend:Ready Player One by Ernest ClineThe Tao of Seneca by SenecaThe Graveyard Book by Neil GaimanNonviolent Communication by Marshall B. RosenbergAll you need to do to get three months of Audible for just $6.95 a month is visit Audible.com/Tim or text TIM to 500500 to get started today.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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We have Dave Elitch sitting across from me. Dave, how are you? I'm great, man. Happy to be here. On Instagram and Twitter and elsewhere, at Dave Elitch, E-L-I-T-C-H, DaveElitch.com. Instagram would be probably first choice for checking him out. And I'll read the bio, and then I have all sorts of questions about the bio. But I think before I get into that, it's helpful to perhaps as context for some folks,

mention what I said to my girlfriend last night, who asked me, fairly, who is Dave? Why is he in the house? Not in an accused story way way more out of curiosity and you were helping to set up my first ever drum kit yep after many many misfires which we won't get into right now there are a lot of people very very high on drugs we'll volunteer to help you assemble kits turns out they don't follow the directions very well. And I wanted her to hear you play just to tool around after we had consumed many pounds of pork and biscuits and all sorts of other Texan health food. And she had asked me at some point the day before, mostly as a hypothetical question, but also she was very curious, I wonder who Annie

goes to for relationship advice. And Annie, in this case, is a very well-known relationship coach slash therapist. Who does the relationship coach go to for relationship advice? And I use that as a bridge to say, well, many of the musicians you think of, many of the best drummers you might see on stage go to Dave as sort of the drumming whisperer slash mechanic fixer, among many other things. So let's jump into the bio. But for those people who are listening and who are thinking to themselves, well, I really don't know anything about drumming. I really don't know anything about music. This is an audio-only format. I'm not going to be able to watch Dave smashing on his kit.

We are going to jump across all sorts of different topics, so fear not. But let's get into the basic bio. So Dave Elitch, first garnered attention with his band Daughters of Mara's debut album, I Am Destroyer, in 2007. Very appropriate debut album name for a lot of reasons. But his time touring with the American progressive rock band, the Mars Volta, in 2009-2010 is what really put him on the map and certainly put you on my map, which we can get to.

He has since worked with Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, M83, The 1975, Juliette Lewis, Big Black Delta, and many, many others. He conducts master class lectures worldwide. And in fact, you are going to be conducting a master class tomorrow here in Austin, Texas, which is exciting. And is a regular in the LA session scene. And I want to come back to a bunch of vocab here that we can dissect, including performing on film scores for many major motion pictures. And I have questions about that. As an educator for the last 20 years, which for people who have listened to this podcast

for a while, is part of what makes you so interesting to me, is not just the ability to perform, but the ability to transmit and to break down and to convey and to demystify. Let's back to the sentence. As an educator for the last 20 years, Dave has developed a reputation as the technique body mechanic specialist who has helped many of the world's top players and educators overcome physical and mental plateaus

at his private studio in Los Angeles. And your brand new online course, Getting Out of Your Own Way, which is perhaps the best title of any course I've ever encountered, is available at daveelich.com. I have checked it out. It is fucking awesome. Thank you. And I have spent a lot of time thinking about teaching. I've spent a lot of time thinking

about learning. And I'm by no means a musician, but have also digested a fair amount of material related to drumming and cannot recommend it highly enough. I thought we could start with your t-shirt that you're wearing right now. And it's a t-shirt that I liked so much at one point when we hung out in LA and smashed on some drums and then ate a bunch of Himalayan yak, if I remember correctly. Yep. I asked you where I could get one of these shirts.

So could you describe for people what you're wearing at the moment and why? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm wearing one of my t-shirts that I make and are available on my website that say, slow down on the front and do it again on the back. And it came from me having to say that over and over and over again to people as I was teaching them. So I just got tired of yelling at people and saying the same shit over and over again. So I just point at my shirt now and I just go, come on, slow it down. Because so many people, it's not about what you're trying to learn as much as and mentally demanding as drumming, if you don't approach it slowly, your brain has no idea what your body's doing. So all these people try

and rush through something and they physiologically have no idea what's going on. And also do it again because the sheer amount of repetition you have to do to really plug in that muscle memory um and and it's fun i made it just kind of as a joke kind of you know and then people would come up to me on the street and be like oh i'd love that shirt because people get whatever sort of meaning they want the rorschach inkblot yeah yeah absolutely people and people love it and they get whatever they want out of it and uh it can mean all sorts of different things. And this, I think, also highlights for me a difference between, a really critical difference in learning anything, or several critical differences.

One is developing a skill versus demonstrating the skill. And you could apply that to, say, strength development versus display, competing in, say, powerlifting versus training for powerlifting. And in this case, I think maybe a good contrast that comes to mind would be last night,

sitting down at this electronic drum kit, my first kit of that type that I've ever used, and playing with the basic posture and body mechanics. And so you would ask me to relinquish control of my arm and provide dead weight and to do the same with my leg to try to ensure that, for instance, when using the, and I never know if I should call it a kick or a bass or something else, kick or bass drum or pedal rather, that I would be using my hip as opposed to getting wickety whack with my ankle or other articulation. And in aiming to do that, ensuring that I'm not leaning back like I'm in an Easy Rider, because that creates all sorts of instability. And it was incredible to me, but not surprising,

given my time with you, that within about 120 seconds, you took one of my greatest sources of discomfort sitting at any kit, which was feeling like I had to be kind of balanced on my left ass cheek to make the base pedal work properly. And you remove that. So now I could have a little bit of anterior pelvic tilt. And for people who are wondering what that means, imagine your hips are a glass of wine. If you pour wine out the front, that's anterior pelvic tilt. Posterior pelvic tilt would be pouring wine out the back. And so having a little bit of tilt forward so that i can feel my sits bones on the stool which you also helped me to do by taking a weight plate because it was in the garage and the gym is also there and putting it on top of

it so you diagnose that very quickly and then we practice a very slow basic sort of acdc yeah rock money beat money beat the money yeah yeah and in doing that we were able to focus on some really fundamental grips and so on in a very slow fashion but the video that introduced you to me has some a number it turns out of stories associated with it that i hadn't heard it seems like a lot of people have come to find you through this video, so I'd love to tell people about it. And I think it came about because I was on Twitter at God knows what, unholy hour, and was thinking about drumming,

and I've always been fascinated by drumming. So I asked something along the lines of, like, who is a beast drummer who is also a good teacher? And somebody threw a link up to this video. What is the video? So the video is me playing with the Mars Volta at a big day out festival in Sydney, Australia in 2010, early 2010. And I would videotape all of the shows that we played. I'd set up a little camera behind me because when you're in the heat of battle, as you could say, you have no idea

how it's actually coming across. So if I backtrack a little bit with this situation and a lot of situations that I get called for, I've sort of developed this reputation as a bit of a mercenary in that like when someone breaks their arm or someone gets fired or someone needs someone to do a tour, like last minute, no rehearsals, little rehearsal, whatever they call me and I have to learn everything last minute. And it's funny. The cleaner. Yeah, exactly. And so with the Mars Volta, with Miley Cyrus, with 1975, with M83,

you walk into a room, you go, nice to meet you guys. And you might run through the set once and then you're playing in front of 15 20 30 000 people and it's a very unique situation to to be in the amount of pressure uh is unbelievable because as a drummer if you drop the ball the whole show collapses in on top of you it It's not like guitar where you can just like, whoops, flub that, and then you can just kind of keep playing. You do it twice and you're playing jazz. Exactly.

Yeah, with drumming, if you drop the ball, the whole show caves in on you. So the Mars Volta was the first big situation that I was in like that. I got that gig when I was 25. They called hundreds of people to do it. People were sending in video auditions and all kinds of stuff. And when they asked me to do it, I said, yeah, sure. In your head, I'm sure you've had this experience before.

They're like, great, this sounds great. Do you want to do it? And in my head, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. And then I was just yeah, sure. In your head, it's one of the, I'm sure you've had this experience before. They're like, great, this sounds great. Do you want to do it? And in my head, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. And then I was just like, yes. The yes just comes out of your mouth. And I feel like every important life decision I've ever made, that happens. And it's super important to just do it,

no matter how- Grow wings on the way down. Yes, exactly. And so I flew to Europe, met the band. We ran through the two and a half hour set twice. And then we're on tour. And this is like, for people who aren't familiar with the band, it's extremely complex music.

Lots of like, Omar, the guitar player, lots of hand signals and eyebrows and cues. Oh, I didn't realize that. So he's like a major league baseball catch yes yeah yeah yeah and and you know there's a long drum solo every night and so there's you have to really be on point so i would set up a camera behind me every night to just be like i need to know what this actually sounds like. Because in the heat of the moment, you could think you're killing it. And then you watch a video and you're like,

whoops, or the opposite's also true. Always. I could be like, I really, really, you know, that doesn't, that didn't sound good at all. And then I watched the video. I'm like, oh, that was actually okay. So that level of cognitive disconnect is in that scenario is huge. So I would go back to my hotel room after the show and watch the video and, you know, take mental notes about things that worked and things that didn't work. And for me, it's always been very important to put on a visual show. I, I, there's nothing worse than going to see a show and just watching someone looks like they're doing their taxes. Why do you think this particular video, and we'll put

it in the show notes. So for people who want to see it, you can just go to Tim.blog forward slash podcast, and it'll be right in the show notes. So you can find the link. But if people wanted to Google this, is there anything in particular they should search for? You just type in Dave Eulich drum cam or just Dave Eulich, and it's going to pop up at the top somewhere. It's one of the very first videos. Why do you think this videoich and it's going to pop up at the top somewhere. It's one of the very first videos. Why do you think this video, and it's related to where you were going, I think, but why do you think this video caught on in the way that it did? Because I'm going ape shit.

Fucking berserk. It was standing up, kicking stuff over, you know, like just going nuts. Yeah. Like I think it's really important to put on a show. So people are like, Holy shit. What is this is insane. You know? And so, yeah, I'm standing up and hitting super hard and it's,

it's visually entertaining, but the most important part of that is the playing has to be happening. If you, you know, go nuts and then you screw something up, there's no point. Yeah. So the playing has to be on point, and then I'm going to stand up and kick something over. Before you had your first, whether it's your first performance with the Mars Volta, so you've gone through the set twice. Yeah. You're in Europe. Yeah. Wherever gone through the set twice. Yeah. You're in Europe.

Yeah. Wherever you are in the world. Yeah. What is your self-talk or your prep before going out on stage to play with this band? Yeah. So you'll be into this because there's a lot of note taking. Yeah. I'm already into it. So this is something that I do with a lot of people that

I work with, just showing them how to properly chart out a song. Because so many people write out way too much nonsense, and then it's way too much to navigate. And learning music at the last minute and having to play it, that does happen quite that does happen, you know, quite a bit, um, whether it's like a coffee house or a huge show or whatever. So most people will write out everything and then they go to look at it and they have no idea what they can't read their handwriting. And so meaning like what I do with people is it's just the roadmap. You're not writing out notation. You're not writing out. It's just like intro eight bars first, 16 bars chorus, 16. It's just that that's it. Like, and I might say where my right hand is ride symbol crash high hat, but it's very minimalistic. And so I made those charts for all the songs and I would, I would go through, it's all about how you approach this stuff, right?

So a lot of people would go, I'm going to play through the set list, just bang, bang, bang, down the line. But you're constantly distracted. You're constantly switching. The target's moving, so you can't get deep. So what I would... Why is the target moving? Because you're switching songs all the time. So what I would, why is the target moving? Because you're switching songs all the time. So what I would do is I would take the first song in the set list and I would have my notes and the music and I would play through it as many times as it took for me to be like, I know this really well,

but the same thing on repeat, most people would just go, I'm just going to go through the set. And then it's like, do the, do the, by the songs changing, you mean that show to show or no, no, no. I mean like within the set list itself. So someone would play like the first song and then they, then the second song and then the third song all in a row. Right. And then they can't remember anything because they're working on all the songs at the same time. It's linear. Yes. Yeah.

It's also just because we've both had a fair amount of caffeine, so I feel like we can just make use of that caffeine now. This is also a reason why certain mnemonic devices work better than others. For instance, if you use what is sometimes referred to as a memory palace, in which this has been used for thousands of years. Cicero used it for memorizing speeches, among other things, where you could take, this is also how a lot of memory competitors memorize

shuffled decks of cards, is they will memorize, say, pairs of cards as interacting images and place them along a familiar route. So walking from their front door to the grocery store or something like that. But one of the challenges with that is if you want to get to the 12th item and recall that 12th item, you have to run through the list. And similarly, if you're only memorizing or getting familiar with a playlist or a set

from one to 12 or whatever the number is, and then all of a sudden I'm just imagining like lead singers, like, fuck it. Yep. I'm feeling we should just go to five. And you're like, I'm not ready for five. Totally.

That's a very real thing. And that's a real thing. Also, when people are doing method book work, like out of a drum book, let's say like I might have them learn the entire page. This happens all the time. And I'm like,

cool. Let me hear you start from the end. Yeah. And they're like, so that that that actually is a very important point and that comes later in the process at the end of the process so i will just go through one song over and over and over and over and over again until I know it really well. And this is huge. Practicing not in regards to time, but in regards to goals. So the amount of people who go to music school and they go, yeah, I practice eight hours a day. It's not about how much time, it's about what you're getting done and having specific goals. and writing that down and go, I need to get this from here to here.

Once I get that done, I'm done. Check, moving on. A lot of people go, I need to work on this thing for an hour. That doesn't mean anything. It's not a tangible goal. An hour for you and an hour for me are completely different. One person could get it in 20 minutes. Another person takes two hours.

And it's unbelievable how everyone structures things in terms of time. How do you know when you have a song? It's a good question. I don't know if I can put that into words. What does it feel like? It feels like you've given a lot of talks, right? You rehearse it enough and you're like, yeah, I don't need these notes. I know, you know what your core. Yeah. It's, it's like when you memorize your times tables or whatever, it's that same type of thing. You're not,

you don't have to like gear up to get it going. Someone could like slap you in the face to wake you up and be like, do this and it would just come out. It's in your bones. And I prepare in that regard an insane amount, a ridiculous amount. So I'll play the song, I don't know, five or ten times with my notes. And then I'm starting like, okay, I think I got it now. Then I'll put my notes away and just play. No, sorry. Then I'll play with just the

notes, no music. And then I'll play. As you're saying, so you're playing, you're accompanying the music first with your notes. Yes. And then when I get comfortable, the next step. Turn off the music. And just play with the notes. And then the next step is music, no notes. And then the final step is just to click track, nothing else. So just a metronome. Click track metronome. Yeah. So I'm hearing nothing.

And I have to know it so well that I can get through the whole song in my head, hearing everything. And that's an insane amount of work. But the deal is, is when you get on stage and there's 30,000 people screaming and like with Miley, like people throwing bras and underwear at me, like you're, you're, you're like better than batteries and tomatoes or beer bottles. Like at that moment, you have to know everything so well that that's not going to phase you. So it takes a long time and I'm in there for 10 or 12 hours at the beginning. But, but that type of preparation is, is huge. And what's funny is when I went to Amsterdam to rehearse the set with them, I set up an extra floor Tom on my left side, which

normally wouldn't do that there on your right right side and are you gonna say something no no no i was just going to i was i was going to say for maybe you could just explain what a floor thomas yeah yeah so uh so tom's yeah interesting it's explaining this like yeah so um so um man how would you explain this to a lady i mean i i i'm gonna do a poor job yeah great i'll take i will do a terrible job but uh it's easy for me to come at this with beginner i mean i i i'm gonna do a poor job yeah great i'll take it i will do a terrible job but uh it's easy for me to come at this with beginner's eyes because i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about so if people hear the kind of like snap of a like like the generally please feel free to call bullshit on any of this like that you're going to be hearing say a snare drum

right and when when you look at drummers and they have their hands seemingly crossed, they're hitting the hi-hat, and then they're hitting the snare with the other hand. And that's part of the lifeblood of any kind of rock beat, right? And the kick drum with the foot. So it's like... Yeah, exactly. That is the hi-hat and the snare.

And then if you were to hear a drummer, say, travel left to right, assuming they're right-handed, like, digga, digga, digga, digga, digga, digga. When you hear that digga, digga, digga, digga, digga, digga, that part is very often going to be a floor tom. Perfect. Perfect. I couldn't have done that better myself. So you are right-handed.

Yes. So you have a rack tom up top straight in front of you, which is going to be the higher pitch. Like, do-do-do-do. and then you go down further and though you get bigger drums which are sitting on the floor floor toms right so having those on the left is right not not normal not normal so why why did you do that so i put it on my left so i could put my notes on the left and no one i thought didn't think anyone would see him. And I go to the bathroom after the first set, and I come back, it's all gone. Oh, fuck. Yeah.

And I was like, uh. And the bass player's like, it's cool, man. You got it. It's all good. You don't need those. And I didn't. You're like, thanks, bass player, who's done this set 400 times. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. OK, great. So I want to just note something for folks. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. identical to how a lot of the best public speakers also prepare their keynotes and they will say, take a keynote. And I, I learned to do this as well, but I was borrowing from other people. And instead of doing, let's just say it's a, for the sake of simplicity, a 60 minute keynote, rather than trying to give the 60 minute keynote from start to finish. They'll break it into say four pieces or what they'll do. And this is something I started to model is because the beginning and the ending is so important,

actually breaking out like the first five minutes and the last five minutes. So you have say five minutes, let's just make it simple. If it's a, say a 40 minute talk, it's to make the math a little easier. Like first five minutes, then you have three 10 minute sections in the last five minutes and to practice each one of those individually as opposed to yes in sequence yes and initially not paying attention to time

although having some rough idea of the total length and then recording listening to it, making the post-game analysis edits necessary. And then also, at a later point, I remember when I was, and I picked this up from someone as well, when I was practicing, you're talking about the bras and the panties and everything, when I was preparing for my TED Talk about a year and a half ago, which was going to be opening session main stage nervous as fuck uh and just as a side note i'm sure you have a million of these so i'd love to hear some of these war stories sure there's this area uh behind the stage at ted which is it's called something hilarious like the zen room or the chill out room where the people who are on deck like the three or four speakers are on deck are meant to hang out there and they're little misters and like cold

water and so on and you walk in there and at least when i walked in there it was some of the most polished speakers in the world basically freaking the fuck out and i was like i need to leave here now this isn't helping i need to leave right now. This isn't helping. I need to leave right now. This is like, you know, being in the water with Bear Grylls and all these survival experts and they're losing their shit because they're like great white sharks in the water. You're like, I can't, this is not helpful. I need to not be here. And, but one of the things that I'd done in the last week or so of preparation was to

load myself up on way too much caffeine, like three or four coffees, before giving dress rehearsals to strangers at my friends' companies. I would have them call in people during lunch hour, and I would give a rehearsal in front of people who really probably didn't particularly want to be there. Sure. Not a super warm crowd.

Sure. Who don't care about my feelings particularly and you're all jacked and i'm jacked to try to simulate the adrenaline i would feel that's smart i actually got out there yeah uh in any case i don't know i don't want to brain vomit on you too much that's what we're here for reserve some of my brain bomb for later. But the, the point being that that progression you use applies to so many things. And well, you know what, we're going to, we're going to come, you can see me fondling these, these fondlings is a strange word, but these gifts that gifts people get your mind out of the gutter uh that you gave me which i do want to talk about

sure so you've you've followed this progression song by song you've gone through the set twice yep hour before you get on stage what does that hour look like uh for that for that particular like yeah mercenary yeah mercenary it's extremely stressful you're waking up in the middle of the night going how does that bridge go freaking out because you have the weight of the world on your shoulders

and it's extremely stressful and a lot of these situations it's funny I was thinking about how to present this to the layman and it's like your first day on the job. It's some really, you got like a giant promotion or like you're at a new company, different title, different role. And you roll in and you meet everyone.

You pick five random people out of the office and you say great you guys are gonna go on stage in front of 30 000 people together you you just met or you're gonna spend the next month in a bus together waking up next to each other it's a very weird situation and who knows how that's gonna work out as far as personalities and everything so yeah yeah, but the, the hour before the show, I'm, I've done like the Sam Harris guided meditation. I've just been, I just go to an area by myself and sit down and breathe and just try and stay as relaxed as possible. This is the, uh, the 10 minute. Yeah. So for people who don't know, so Sam Harris, uh, neuroscience PhD, also very well-known author. I think it's just samharris. Yeah. So for people who don't know, so Sam Harris, a neuroscience PhD,

also very well-known author. I think it's just samharris.org. Two R's, one S has a number of really good guided meditation. So you, you will have done that. Yeah. Is that the morning of,

is that right before? Both. If I'm feeling really anxious, I'll do it right before. Um, one of the things that took me years of touring to figure out is a lot of people will will you know drumming is an incredibly physical instrument especially with how hard i can hit at times and you have to really treat yourself like an athlete and a lot of people will just sit there

and and warm quote-unquote warm up like on a rubber pad and kind of gingerly hit it around for 10 or 15 minutes. And then they go on on stage and their, their feet are cold. So I started bringing a jump rope on tour with me and I was just like, Oh my God, how did I not figure this out earlier? And so I skipped rope for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and that gets the blood

flowing. So when I walk out on stage, I feel like I'm three songs in already, which is a game changer physiologically. So I'll do that. It kind of gets your head in the zone because skipping rope is the same. It's the same exact thing as playing a musical instrument in terms of focus. It's like a detached focus.

If you think about what you're doing, you use a different part of your brain and neurologically, and you'll screw up whatever you're doing if it's a highly learned embedded task, right? So if you're skipping rope and you think about what you're doing, you'll hit your feet and screw it all up. If I'm playing a show, I have to either be totally zenned out and not thinking about anything at all, or I have to be thinking about what I'm eating after the show or doing laundry or whatever.

I can't think, oh, here comes this part, or right, right, left, left. I'll just immediately bungle whatever I'm doing. But skipping rope gets my head in that mindset and and it also gets me warmed up so yeah it's just a lot of pacing well i don't drink coffee or red bulls or anything because i know my heart rate's already going to be insane so i try to actually not do that and yeah do you have anything that you any particular rituals or things that you say to yourself before you go out or if you are alternatively do you take either or both of these when you're talking to a professional who perhaps is really nervous about a tour they're

about to do or gigs that they're doing what's your advice to them right before they go out? My advice is what I try to live by in that if you put the time in and you know the material, there's nothing to be nervous about because you know what you're doing. And as soon as you get on stage after about five minutes and the adrenaline wears off, you should be comfortable because you're like, I've put in so, I couldn't have put more time in. Like I put the time in, I know what I'm doing. This is fine. What's really scary is when you don't have the time to put the work in, then that's freaky, which I try to never put myself in those situations. But yeah, as long as you put the time in and when I'm working But yeah, as long as you put the time in,

and when I'm working with someone, I make sure they put the time in. And usually it's a lot of guys who have been in bands for a long time. They have like an ample amount of, they might have a month of rehearsals. So it's not really about, do I know this material? It's maybe some other issue.

But I tell everyone to do the Sam Harris guided meditation, especially people who aren't familiar with that. Because when I first started doing it, I literally had to relearn how to breathe. The guided meditation? Yeah. My breathing was... Because I was driving to the studio

and I was recording this record with this band, Anti-Mask, I did with Omar and Cedric from the Mars Volta after the Mars Volta. And Flea was playing bass on it from the Chili Peppers. And I had just finished doing the Killer Be Killed record, which was a metal band I was in. And I had to learn the Miley set after being in the studio all day with the anti-mask so i was driving to the studio and i was white knuckling the steering wheel and i was holding my breath and i realized oh my god like am i doing this all the time is this my normal yeah this is crazy and then i started paying attention to it. And I realized I was holding my breath all the time. And when I started doing that short guided meditation, I realized, oh my God, I don't

know how to breathe anymore. So I had to literally learn how to take a full breath. Because I didn't, you know, from just getting kicked in the balls over and over again in daily life, your breathing gets, gets shallow. Yeah. Uh, so I, so that was massive for me. So as far as like the, the rituals,

that's, that's huge. Even if I don't have time to like sit down and fully do the meditation, I'll, I'll try and get into that headspace because if you start your day with that, you can very easily go back and access that mindset later on. It's much easier for me to go, okay, feeling the stress, like, okay, there's a full breath. Whereas like,

if I didn't start off my day doing that, I might not physically be able to access that full breath. You haven't limbered up psychologically and physically. Yeah. It's huge. Yeah. The, um uh the breathing facial tension yesterday you're asking me when i was sitting at the kit about the jaw yeah in the mouth and and we were chatting about that last night it's like well is it is it just from the standpoint of teaching there's so many different skills that can be enhanced, oddly enough, by paying attention to sort of mouth, jaw, tongue relaxation. And we were chatting last night about,

is it best to tell someone to relax the jaw, or is that too hard? And in fact, if you ask someone to relax the tongue, do you get that entire structure to relax more easily? And all of which transcends music specifically sure and uh this is a conversation i've had a lot with someone who's been on the podcast you know kelly starrett who always talks about breathing in positions like if you can't breathe in the position you do not own the position and that's why i was so excited about doing this with you because i knew there was going to be

tons of carryover from different disciplines and that's what I really love. And so you telling me, Oh yeah, if you, if you relax your tongue, you'll relax your whole face and your jaw that I was like, of course that's huge. And that's the way I'm going to present it to people from now on.

Yeah. Cause that's a better way to teach it. It's, uh, it's, and you, you and I were having a conversation last night, romantic candle lit conversation amongst ice baths.

That's true. We did ice baths, which was also a great opportunity to work on breathing. Holy shit. Big time. And we can have around two. Uh two uh but the we were chatting about in part we were talking about a lot of things but what what keeps me excited and my answer was seeing the interconnectedness and and the transferability of these types of concepts.

Because even if you bleed the stone and work in one area on one discipline, and you get to a point where perhaps you just feel fatigued and you want to try something else, but you're not sure if you could ever recapture the excitement you felt in the nascent stages of that first dominant skill. For me, it's been, I've realized that there are thousands of different disciplines you could be exposed to and take to like a fish to water because you have knowingly or

unknowingly developed all of these meta skills that apply. And you gave me a few gifts that I alluded to fondling earlier. And one of them I'm holding here, and I'd love for you to just tell people what it is and why you gave it to me. Sure. So this is a book called The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Galway. It came out in 1974. And it's sort of one of those books where people are like, oh, yeah, that book. It had a huge effect. And there's all sorts of spinoffs, like The Inner Game of Music actually is a book.

And the amazing thing with this book is I've read, both of us have read a lot about Zen buddhism and the thing about zen buddhism is by the very nature of what it is it's very difficult to pin down and point at directly and define uh because it's so amorphous right uh and this is the first thing i ever read where he nails it down in the context of tennis. It's easier to do that way. Are you a tennis player? I'm not. This is important.

Yeah. So the book talks about essentially these two selves that we have, self one and self two. So self one is the analytical, cruel self-talk, harsh critic who, you know, you hit the ball on the net, we're going to stick with the tennis analogy, and self-one's like, oh, you fucking piece of shit, like, come on, get it together. And self-two is your subconscious automatic self that's just, hey, I'm just trying to make this happen here. And the whole idea is calming down the critical analytical self one, your self-talk, right? And letting self two, the automatic subconscious, take over. And if you let that happen, everything will just happen automatically.

So what's interesting is what I do with so many people is very technique oriented. And this book can be described as like an anti technique because you're, it's sort of the opposite way of coming about it. But what's interesting about this is with the Zen stuff, they will lead you down a path and then just leave you there a lot of times. And the brilliant thing with this book is it's very easy to understand. Anyone can pick it up and learn. You just replace tennis with any other thing, any other discipline.

The brilliant thing with this book is, is it takes you somewhere and then he's like, yeah, so, you know, this is a, this is a plateau you have to overcome and this is how you do it. And that happens multiple times.

This is the problem. Here are a few approaches to resolving the problem. As a, you know, for instance, if you're really getting in your head, we'll stick with the tennis analogy in a match and you need a device to overcome that self one,

because like I was saying earlier, if you think about physiologically what you're doing in terms of movement, you use a different structure in your brain and you'll botch it. So if you're serving a tennis ball, you throw the ball up and you go, I throw the ball up, then I move my rat. You're fucked. Yeah. Right. You're going to hit the net every time.

So in order to not do that, he'll say, focus on the laces of the ball as it's coming at you or focus on the wop of the sound when you get like a good hit and just focus on those things in and of themselves and that will take you into that that space and we were talking about this last night everyone that talks about being in the zone or being on fire that kind of thing as a state that you can willingly inhabit, it's not really a thing. It's not really true. You can set the stage for it by this type of thing, but you can't willingly enter into that or else everybody would do that all the time. Yeah. And when I'm having these out-of-body experiences when I'm playing music, which is what gets you to do it in the first place,

sort of time slows down and unfolds in front of you and you see what you're going to play. And Neo backbending. It's exactly, it's exactly the same thing. And that's, that's what gets you, that's what got me hooked.

That, that, that, yeah, that matrix thing. And you can use that in any discipline. Yeah. And you can't, as you said,

guarantee that you can follow the boot up sequence and automatically enter flow at any given point in time, but you can increase the odds. Sure, absolutely. You can increase the odds. Absolutely. And you were mentioning in the context of, say, tennis or a tennis serve,

but last night when we were tooling around on the drum kit, very similar, right? When you were, you were noting, you were asking me to note the difference in sound from say, switching from a sort of French grip, if I'm getting this right,

sort of thumb on top to a German grip, which is, it's like all in a more internally rotated. Like a flat hand. Flatter hand, but using the wrists. As a whip. As a whip for, I guess it was rim shot or. Yeah, yeah, that's it.

On the snare drum. And asking me to really notice the feel and the sound of it. And what's amazing about this is we're playing an electronic kit. We're not playing an acoustic kit. So even though you're hearing sounds, theoretically it shouldn't really sound any different cause it's not real. You know what I mean? But this is,

that's what's even cooler about this being on electronic kit is like once we got you relaxing and getting those, those, you know, those techniques happening and trimming the fat, it, and your feel was totally different, even in that situation. and I've played very little tennis, but knows the gratification of that proper thwack when you really hit it in the sweet spot, or anyone who's boxed and found that sweet spot on a heavy bag, acts as an anchor for the 27 biomechanical ingredients that make it up.

But if you try to recall the 27 separate ingredients discreetly when you're pulling your arm back to hit the ball, you're fucked. You hit the nail on the head, man. And that's, and that is exactly, that's the kind of stuff that I find so exciting is, is, are those carryovers. When you hit a home run, when you smash a baseball, it doesn't feel like you did anything. Like nothing. How did I, that doesn't feel, whereas if you hit it like wonky, you're like, you know what I mean?

Like it feels terrible. Yeah. And it's this, it's the same thing with drums. When you hit them, right. The energy, energy should be going out,

not back in. And it's the same with any thing else, any athletic movement. And you gave this book, the interview of tennis to, and we're going to definitely come back to this topic, but to your therapist. Yeah. Who's 81.

Something like that. Yeah. 80-something and very wise woman. Yeah. It now has a prominent placement on our shelf. Yeah. It's a spot on our mantle as like one of the five or six books she gives out to people regularly. You know, I didn't ask you this,

because I don't think you mentioned the five or six other books, but do you know offhand any of the other books? The Pia Melody Facing Love Addiction is one of them. Pia Melody, P-I-A Melody. Yeah. I don't know the other ones. We can make that a bonus feature for the show notes. I'll look closer next time. So we'll put those in the show notes.

Yeah. Let's take a look at these other two. Sure. Because I think they are also a fun way to, to dissect you a bit. Sure. Let's go with this one next. So this is a very small book and I always get excited about small books

one would not think that one would not think that every time I set out to write a 20 page children's book it ends up being a 700 page like bludgeoning tool but this is title

the medium is the message subtitle an inventory of effects yeah marshall mccluhan that's it yeah m little c uppercase l-u-h-a-n and quentin fiore yeah so the graphic designer and then produced i didn't notice that by jer Agle, I suppose. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. So who knows? That's not something I typically see associated with books, so I'm not sure what that means. But tell me about this book.

So Marshall McLuhan was a really interesting and very popular social and media theorist in the 50s and 60s. So I find it really fascinating that he's not a household name now being that media is such a massive part of everyone's life now especially people who do their own thing uh like we have to have instagram and twitter and all that stuff like it's you just you don't have a choice, right? So, I find societal issues and media and how we process and consume media very interesting. And this dude was so ahead of everyone by decades. It's almost creepy. Just in terms of his predictive ability?

Yeah. decades it's almost creepy just in terms of his predictive ability yeah and and the interesting thing about him is he would he would spout off all sorts of inflammatory crazy things and people would get you know furious about certain things or pick pick things apart and he would contradict himself all the time and make these grand statements and that maybe would have been something that would have bothered me years ago but now as long as there are gems throughout and he's hits the nail on the head in certain areas and i can take away things that shift my perspective as a whole that's all that matters to me so the medium is the message this is actually the medium is the massage because they screwed up

when they were oh that's so funny i didn't even notice is the massage because they screwed up when they were That's so funny. I didn't even notice that. Well, because they screwed up when they were printing it originally and he thought it was hilarious and he's like, just leave it. It's fine. So it was supposed to be the medium is the message, but it's actually the medium is the massage. And he's like, that's great. That's great. Let's keep it. Yeah. Yeah. He like loved puns and he was kind of a quirky, weird dude. So the whole idea of that phrase is that the medium with which information is submitted to you is more important than the actual information itself. So an example I like to use is something like autotune. So for people who don't know what Auto-Tune is,

if you think of that Cher song, like, Do you believe in life after love? Like whatever that was like 20 years ago. And so Auto-Tune is a software that people use to correct someone's vocal take. So if someone's vocal take is wonky, they just sort of massage it a little bit. It's been used quite a bit in hip-hop. Yes. So the new thing with that Cher song was they used a different key signature to auto-tune it.

So it way over-corrected itself. And that's what got that weird, now T-Pain sort of sound. Yeah. and Drake. And now, so like as something that was a, a, an experiment now has currently changed the way music is. The software itself has now changed the art form. And to the point where I'll have producer friends of mine tracking someone

doing vocals in their twenties and they're like, Hey, why is my, why does my voice sound weird? And they're like, that's what your voice sounds like. That's actually what it sounds like. Oh, uncorrected. They expect it to sound like auto-tuned. So the technology has now affected the art form.

It changed the content, but also changed the perception of the raw materials. Yeah. And you could say the same thing about, there's something called beat detective, which is something that, that drummers the world over to hate. So it's the same sort of a thing for drummers. So like they can,

you can, you can track something, record something in a studio, and then they will artificially adjust everything to a crew, to a grid. And if someone's lazy about it, they just snap it to the grid, and it just sounds like...

It's very stiff and computer-like because that's what it's been turned into. Spock on drums. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But people got used to hearing that. Can you remove the soul from my music? Yeah.

So I've done sessions where I i'll go in and and i think do a pretty good job and then i'll hear it back and i'm like why did you even have me play on this because they just are lazy it's more that's just them being lazy and not going through and you know but but people got used to hearing how quote-unquote perfect that is and if someone hears something that rushes or drags or is a little bit not perfect like oh this is weird and so a lot of things are beat detected to the point where it's just totally artificial now and then you've drained the blood yes and then the pendulum will swing back and you know that's why adele was so successful because it was real music and they're like jack johnson yeah

yeah exactly do you have the pendulum sometimes swinging the obstruction. Is your interest in this, because I know it's not limited just to this book, and one I wanted to bring up, you have mentioned this to me many times, and in fact, this is a documentary series that has come up repeatedly on this podcast. I'm embarrassed to say that I still have not seen it.

Adam Curtis's BBC documentary series, The Century of the Self. Yeah. And hyper-normalization. Yeah. So you've said it changed the way that you saw the world forever. And I'll just continue here. Sure. Even if you just check out the first,

these are your words, the first 20 minutes of Century of the Self, it'll blow your mind. Why is, maybe you could segue into the Century of the Self and hyper-normalization. Tell me why this is so interesting to you. Because this seems to be thematically something

that is of great interest to you. Yeah. And we were just talking about Beat Detective and other things. People might assume, oh, it's because he's a musician and it's how these things affect music. But I don't know if that's true. So can you talk about how did you find Century of the Self? Because it has come up surprisingly frequently on the podcast.

And why does it grab your attention? My buddy Chris is a musician friend of mine, and he told me about it years ago. I think it came out in 2000, I think. I'd have to double check that. Uh, it's the, the premise of century of the self is it starts with focusing on, on Edward Bernays. So Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew, and he took all of Sigmund Freud's theories on the subconscious and came to the conclusion that human beings are either savage animals that are going to rip each other apart, or they can be controlled and made docile via consumerism. The opiate for the masses.

Yeah, it's literally that. So, Edward Bernays used some of these tactics that he pioneered in uh propaganda for world war one and then after world war one he was like oh well we can use these in peacetime for uh capitalists selling more detergent yes so the whole notion of you buying a pair of shoes to express your inner self was single-handedly formulated by him. So we think that's just always been around. But really before him, if people were thirsty, they drank water. If people needed it, they would wear shirts for years.

And as that dude who I am a big fan of slavoj zizek so we're gonna come back yeah yeah slovenian philosopher yeah s-l-a-v-o-j second name z-i-z-e-k amazing name yeah please continue amazing person we'll come back to that yeah so what he talks about he he says you know if once you drink coke instead of water, the excess is with us forever. You can't go backwards. So he did interesting things like having a bunch of women smoke cigarettes. There was some sort of subconscious phallic connotation with that. But at the time, women didn't smoke.

And he hired a bunch of attractive women to smoke on like in like a parade or in public or something to get it like quote-unquote trending yeah um so the idea so basically having the celebrity where the sneakers yeah exactly so he created focus groups and he created the idea of pr this is all him so this guy single-handedly shaped America as we know it. And of course, America affects everything else in the world, um, up until recently anyway. Um, and so, so especially the world we live in now with Instagram and social media, he's maybe the most influential person. I mean,

in terms of society, most people don't recognize. Yeah. It's it. So it blows my mind. He should be a household name. And this is Edward Bernays. Yes. And you know,

the documentary is E R N A Y S. Yes. And the doc. And what's interesting is, is you would think he like, you would think he made himself famous via Sigmund Freud, but it was actually the other way around. He took all of his tactics and made Sigmund Freud into Sigmund Freud.

Huh. Yeah, it's crazy. That I didn't know. Yeah, that's really wild. So it's four one-hour episodes, and the first episode is called Happiness Machines. That's the first episode century of the self yeah it's called happiness machines that's the first episode and adam curtis has a really interesting style of making these documentaries i saw him do a talk in los angeles when hyper normalization came out in 2016 and he said you know these aren't really documentaries they're kind of just things that i make and they're almost

like video essays or collages and m McLuhan talks a lot about that, presenting things as sort of a star pattern of images, because language is sometimes insufficient to convey the ideas. So it can be like a weird collage. You're like, what am I? I show this documentary to people, I'm like, what is this is this it's really strange and the music's really weird and bizarre what are you talking about sorry i'm talking about hyper either one anything he's made anything adam curtis has made is the same style uh and uh so it's four one-hour episodes and it goes all the way up uh until the clinton administration because this idea this ever bern stuff, weaves its way into politics and all sorts. And it goes into other things, too.

So that completely changed the way I think about everything. I think about it every day. What would be an example? Is it just that you're aware of the way your subconscious is being manipulated? Is it that you view other individual and collective behavior differently because you question the free will ingredient? How does it, on a day-to-day basis, impact how you think about things or view reality it's all it's all of that and and if you're just let's if we're just talking about consumerism if i want to buy something whatever it is like a drink or a snare drum which i buy a lot of or some art which i also buy a lot of why i think why do i want this

yeah what what's driving this and a lot of times the answer is different than than what you think it may be yeah or what you want it to be yeah well a lot of times you're filling that you're you're filling the void right so uh that's something that that's a whole other other topic existential angst but that is a big topic but that's why a other, other topic, existential angst, but that is a big topic, but that's why a lot of people are, you know, are buying things is, is to, to, you know, make themselves feel better. But, you know, I, I heard this quote not too long ago. It's actually in a collection of quotes. I love just collection of quotes. I'm such a, like a promiscuous quote reader, but there was one and I don't know the attribution. Someone out there on the internet can certainly

indicate who the proper attribution is. And I'll actually, I'll put it in the show notes as well. I'll write down this note. Mankind existential animal quote, question mark. And the quote is along the lines of, man is the only animal for which his own existence is a problem to be solved. I love that. Yeah. I love that. That's it right there. It's like my dog Molly does not seem preoccupied at all.

No, she's just having a good time. Yeah. You mentioned artwork and we're going to come back to some of the music and we're also going to jump into some of the rapid fire questions that I love to ask, which I haven't, I mean, we've known each other for quite a while, but I don't think I've ever asked certainly 90% of those we're going to be coming up on. But the artwork, I follow you on Instagram and I love your drumming. Thanks. So don't take this the wrong way. I find the artwork that you discover to be fascinating. Thanks.

And strange. Thanks. You're welcome. So I use your account also as a way of discovering different types of graphic design and art. Mm-hmm. types of graphic design and art. Uh, have you always been interested in visual art or, and if not, how did that become what seems like an important part of your life? I don't know if it is. Yeah. It's a very important part of my life. How did it become important? Why is it important? I used to make art. I used to draw a lot and do watercolors when i was a kid

and then when i started playing drums like really young like five six seven and then i when i started playing drums i didn't do anything else like it took my full mental capacity um so that sort of fell by the wayside and then i hit a certain point in my career where you know if you just have those blinders on and you're myopic about something because you're very, very focused and driven, you end up burning out eventually. And touring is incredibly stressful. So I hit a wall a few years ago. How old are you now? 34.

Okay. So like 31, 32. Something like that. Yeah. okay so like 31 32 something like that yeah and i turn to art as a sort of oblique form of of inspiration i don't i don't want to hijack yeah the flow here when you say hit a wall is that physical fatigue what do you mean by that mental fatigue mostly because you get to we were sort of talking about this last night you get to a certain point where you check all the boxes of things that you've

wanted to do and i got to a certain point where i was like i've done everything that i wanted to do career-wise right now what do i now what do i do yeah right and also uh i was talking to um jimmy chamberlain about this i've been uh he's a good friend of mine and i've been helping him out a little bit who is that he plays drums for the smashing pumpkins and we were having breakfasts a few months ago and we were talking about the same type of thing and he was he was saying yeah and people are like man this is great your band's doing so well or or you're you're you're you're doing all these tours, and you're like, isn't that amazing? And I was saying, yeah, it's not amazing. I always knew I was going to do this. This isn't a surprise for me. I always knew this was going to happen. So in a way, it's hard to

get to the top of Mount Everest and be like, I did it. Because you're like, well, duh, of course I did it. Now, how much of that, when you say I knew it was going to happen, how much of that, and there's certainly could be an option CD and E, but how much of that is I knew it was going to happen because I knew I was really good versus I'm just doing my fucking job. Like as a professional drummer, like I am putting in the work and therefore like it is my job to ultimately do X, Y, and Z.

And I did X, Y, and Z. So why would I pat myself on the back for doing my job? Yeah. Sort of both or something else. Well, it's just like,

I'm, I have a lot of the ladder. Like I struggle with that quite a bit. I'm going to work harder than you are and I i'm gonna be the first in and the last out and if if this guy can make it work i can certainly make it work so it's really that sort of thing like i'm gonna i i i always say this to people i'm working with i'm saying look you can have a good amount of innate ability at whatever you're doing but the person who puts the work in is always going to surpass you and if you have a good amount of innate ability at whatever you're doing, but the person who puts the work in is always going to surpass you. And if you have a little bit of innate ability, like I think I do,

and you work harder than anyone else, obviously there's a certain amount of luck involved in anything, which you can't do anything about. But there was no other option. And the thing I was talking about with Jimmy is he was like, that's a, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy down to your, down to the molecular atomic level.

If you, if you're operating from that state, things will unfold in that manner because you're, you're working in that, not like the secret kind of bullshit, like not that crap. He recommended this book to me and I have so many books I have to read.

Is it On Becoming Yourself? It's super popular right now. I'll have to look it up. I wonder who wrote it. I have it in my... Is it Krista Tippett? No. She's great though.

She is, yeah. I'm reading this Ellen Langer book called Mindfulness, which you're going to super dig. I've watched you carrying it around. Yeah, it's great, though. She is, yeah. I'm reading this Ellen Langer book called Mindfulness, which you're going to super dig. I've watched you carrying it around. Yeah, it's so good. And Ellen Langer was on her podcast. That was how I found out about her.

Got it. All right, so we will follow up. So Jimmy recommended a book. Yeah. Maybe On Becoming Something or Other. Yeah, God, I have to look it up. What's the gist of the book? Or why did he recommend it?

It basically goes way into that in terms of a scientific vantage point like how all of that stuff works it's very and when you say that stuff you mean when you place yourself on a certain direction and make thousands of micro decisions that are subconsciously aligned with that direction yes how things how does that work scientifically instead of some voodoo weird i want a new car so i'm gonna put that into the into the universe and then it'll just happen like not that you know it makes me think again i'll be gonna blame it on the caffeine but i just like jumping around and interjecting because i'm too hyperactive we were talking about maria bamford yeah yeah he's a fucking amazing comedian yeah yeah and at one point she was doing this bit on having read The Secret.

And so she said, I went home and I created a vision board. And on my vision board I had all the things that I wanted. And my sister came over. And her sister apparently is some very successful lawyer or something. And her sister comes over, very type A. And her sister's like, what is this? I was like, oh, it's my vision board. She's like, you have a microwave on your vision board she's like a fucking microwave that's ridiculous i'll

buy you a fucking microwave and then maria's like bam manifest that's awesome so we're not talking about trying to make that no no but i haven't read it yet so i'm kind of talking out of my ass here. But he was saying it's incredible. How did he think it would help you? Or why did he prescribe that? Because we were talking about it anyway, and he was like, Oh, have you read this book?

That's sort of what it's all about. So it's in the queue. I haven't gotten to it yet. What did he share with you? Or what were his thoughts on this position that you find yourself in where it's like, all right, I seem to have some degree of innate ability for this particular field. I was drawn to it. I've applied myself very diligently over at this point, I guess, decades. And I've done what I want to do. Now what? And you said something.

I don't know if you want to debut it here or not. I said, oh my God, you should put that on social media just to further outsource your self-esteem. Sure. Which I think is like social media in a nutshell. But you said, do you want to try to take a stab at it? I said, anyone who says do what you love for a living and you'll never work a day in your life hasn't done what they want to do for a living. Yeah, you do anything. Day in, day out.

Yeah. For decades. Yeah. There's a point where you're like, okay. Even to the point where I'm doing these tours where I'm super stressed out and you're walking on stage in an arena for 15,000 people at Staples Center or whatever. And you're like, after a week, once I have the000 people, Staples center or whatever. And you're like, Oh, you know,

after a week, once I have the show down, I'm like, yeah, whatever. Megan, the donuts, you know,

especially if it's a pop thing. Cause it's literally the same thing. Every, every, you know, if it's something more improvised, that's a little bit more exciting, but there's something that happens that I have to help people out with who are on tours for a year and a half or two years.

And it's a pop context. Shit. I didn't realize tours were that long. Oh yeah, dude. Album cycle. Totally. So you're playing the exact same thing.

Note for note. So it's like being on book tour until your next book comes out. Yep. Basically. Well, and then you'll take a break. You'll do some recording. You'll take a break,

do a new record. Yeah. But it's intense and you're out with the same people the same texts you're away from your family it's pretty rough yeah um and so something that happens to people is they're playing the same thing over and over and over again i mean literally this note for note because if you're playing a pop, like when I was doing Miley, that's a massive production. It's like eight buses, 12 semis. Uh, the stage production is, is insane. I'm going up, up and down above and below the stage. There's a huge video wall. She's riding a giant hot dog, like 20 feet above the air in the arena. There's a lot of things that

go on there. So you can't do anything different because you'll because the dancers will be like what what just happened right so you have people playing the exact same thing note for note for a year and a half two years and they start to lose their mind uh because it's so monotonous and repetitive it's like the polar bear doing like the lap in the one 10 foot pool and then exactly it's exactly the same thing so what interesting what starts happening is your brain starts creating weird quagmires for you to for you to fall into because it's bored we'll be an example so like for instance you'll get to a certain part and you'll be like why can't i play that it's not hard to play uh like

there was a guy i was working with who uh has played with like janet jackson for a year you know a lot of people he's a fantastic drummer and he had like some issues with his with his foot and he went to see someone in atlanta like a neurologist and she had some helmet that he put on to, cause we were looking at like the technique, the physical issues. And I guess there were some parts of his brain that were like turned off, like to control the foot. It's crazy. I don't know how that, that, that technology works, but, um, your brain will, will fuck with you. So there was times at the Mars Volta or with Miley or whatever, where I would be like, oh, here comes this part. And it's like, ah, you're already dead in the water.

Yeah. Or like when I was doing M83, there was one section where I would hear the beat in the wrong place. Weird. You did like an auditory hallucination yes yeah wow yeah and and like it was it was very very it's a very simple section and i remember it sound check uh and me like going whoa whoa whoa what's going on here this is like and your brain is like i need something to do yeah it's crazy uh so i forgot why I got on that tangent. We were talking about Jimmy and climbing Everest and what his thoughts were on what to do.

Well, his situation, we were just, we were talking about this sort of last night. It's like, you know, in certain situations, there aren't a lot of people you can talk to about certain things, right? So we were just kind of going back and forth at that type of thing and the thing with him is he is in a band that was it's still huge um and the thing with being in a this is the thing that's uncontrollable in the music industry or you know there's tons of parables here but i can work really really hard and it doesn't matter if my band makes it or not in a way that if you really hit the lottery that's totally outside of your control so that they put in all the hard work uh but that band hit the lottery yeah and that out of your, out of your control. But again,

you can sort of set the stage for it. So where he's coming from, because he's in a band that is huge, is totally different from someone like me. Who's a mercenary. Yeah. Right. Um,

so it's, it's a Blackwater sniper of drumming technicians. Totally. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a totally different thing yeah but he's very very intelligent and great player uh really great guy too he's amazing you guys would get along really well yeah i'd love to meet him yeah for sure how long has he been uh the drummer with with he took a break for for a while and then he recently got back together

with them and they're just on tour right now doing their new record yeah there's so many tracks that just fueled me through so many parts of college oh yeah another point zero butterfly yeah no bullet with butterfly yeah dude oh my god oh yeah i love that amazing i think we should maybe jump into some rapid fire. But after end, we will incorporate this. Thank you for the index finger point. We're not going to miss this because you mentioned a word earlier, which is a very useful word, oblique. We're not talking about the sides of your abs, although I suppose we are.

It's used in that context here. We're going to come back and talk about oblique strategies. But first, since we've consumed, I think, several black teas, although I suppose we are. It's used in that context. We're going to come back and talk about oblique strategies. But first, since we've consumed, I think, several black teas, several green teas, several Topo Chico's, and are working our way through a couple of cappuccinos and more green tea, we'll take a short bio break

and return for your listening pleasure. We'll be right back. And we're back. As promised, Oblique Strategies. This is a black case that is holding what looks like a deck of cards. And this deck of cards has all sorts of things written on them. The first two, which I pulled out yesterday, which were highly, highly relevant to a number of corners I've painted myself into recently,

were card number one, simple subtraction. Card number two, what mistakes did you make last time? What are these? Oblique strategies. So they're cards that Brian Enoo and peter schmidt made together in 1975 and they're who are those two people so brian eno is a super famous musician uh he's he's done a lot of of different things over the years but he was first uh famous with the band Roxy Music. And he went on later to sort of pioneer ambient music with music for airports.

Wait, literally music for airports? That's what the record's called. It's called music for airports. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I should have clarified that. I feel like they would get along with McLuhan and the medium is the massage. Yeah, yeah. Well, he wanted to make something that sort of neither had a beginning or an end

and you could tune in and out of and it didn't really matter. So he's a very interesting, brilliant person. And these are strategies when you're making anything. I mean, this is in the context of making music, but you can obviously apply them to anything. They're devices to knock you out of your present state of mind. Like you said, when you paint yourself into a corner, like, yeah, I've got to get out of this.

Or you just feel like you've painted yourself into a corner. Sure, well, that's a whole other thing, right? Yeah. So there's a whole deck of cards that are very simple, minimalist suggestions, right? So the ones that you picked out, you know, you already said, but if we pick out like just a few random ones. Tidy up. Do something boring.

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten. Ain't that the truth? Overtly resist change. Discipline self-indulgence. Yeah, so these are prompts. Yeah. In a way for getting unstuck or unfucked. So, you know, I've had a set of these for years,

and I thought you would be super into these how do you use how do you use these cards and and i'll i'll i'll just buy a little bit of time because i noticed there's a there's a description card which i hadn't noticed earlier these cards evolved from separate observations of the principles underlying what we were doing what we were doing i'm imagining, is very much musically related, but sometimes they were recognized in retrospect, i.e. intellect catching up with intuition. Sometimes they were identified as they were happening.

Sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack, a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind, or by drawing a single card from the shoveled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case, the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear they're not final as new ideas will present themselves and others

will become self-evident yeah there you go how do you use or how have you used these cards i always think about them in terms of how i'm supporting music as you know on for the greater good, right? So a lot of times in an improvised context, these are very, very applicable. Because with an instrument such as drums or guitar or piano or bass, where you don't have to breathe to play it, you run the risk of vomit chops. What does that mean? It means you can just play as much as you want. If you're playing a wind instrument, you literally have to breathe. So that affects your phrasing. So you can pause.

Drumming, you don't have to do that. You can play a million miles an hour forever. Right. And after two minutes, the listener wants to kill themselves. That's true. There isn't as much of a as much of a there is a biological limiter but it's not as obvious to the listener no yeah with with with a saxophone or something you have to breathe every 15 or 20 seconds so you have to have space and that cliche

that cliche thing of it's not about what you play it's about what you don't play it's it's cliche for a reason it's really true and and that's something that i try to focus on a lot because it's if you have a lot of facility yeah it's very easy to just you know barf all over the place and overwhelm everyone i'm not a musician as i've stated repeatedly but i remember someone said to me music is the space between the notes and i was was like, Ooh, interesting. And with drumming, especially because you're keeping time for everyone, it's, it's a very meditative state. A lot of people will count in between the notes and they'll be very precise

about it. And I've always tried to be very zen about it and just feel the void in between the notes that you're playing it's a totally it's two totally different ways of doing it and depending on what you're doing at the moment one could be better than the other but yeah man so you would then give, give me an example if you could. Yeah. It could be hypothetical. Yeah.

When would you pull out of this deck and be like, all right, I really feel like I need one of these cards. So, you know, I do a lot of the body mechanics stuff with people. And I also have people who are just like, hey, dude, give me a bunch of cool, crazy licks to play. Like song enders. You know, that kind of a thing like i did that with stacy my buddy stacy jones who's miley's md and drummer and that was my d uh musical director sorry hell of a combo let me finish this song and then here's an epiped in the leg so he was like hey dude i just want to get some rad song enders it was like great we can totally

do that and so i showed him a bunch of licks we had fun and this is the kind of situation that's great for these because people after you work on phrasing they after about 20 minutes they've played everything they know and then they're like oh what do i do now so you could just pick something out of the deck. Like you just picked out, give the game away and how you interpret that. You can go a number of ways, right? It's like slow down on your shirt. I mean, anyone who picks that up, they're like, what does that mean? Like, what does it mean to you? You can like therapize them. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So like for me, the first, the way I would process that is like, I'm just going to, a lot of times when you're building up solos, you don't do that. You want to lead someone in and sort of set the stage.

Because if you start off on... Don't give them the filet mignon as the appetizer. Exactly. So this, to me, the way I would interpret this is, I'm going to come in guns blazing and then try to work my way out of that. Because that's the biggest no-no i'm gonna do that on purpose right and then see what happens someone could also someone could also say like if you're thinking about it in a sports analogy you know you could just be like i'm just gonna play the game and see what happens just let it happen on its own it's not about

winning or losing. Cool. I dig it. Yeah. Yeah, this is good timing for me. Great. So we've talked a lot about playing in front of huge crowds and the musicians you work with, and certainly this show tends to feature people who are very good at something. Sure.

I would like to talk about failures or disappointments. And this is a question I really enjoy asking, which is how has a failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? It could be a disappointment, but, or anything, but do you have any particular favorite failures or failures that come to mind that were in retrospect, very valuable?

I've gone out for auditions for plenty of bands and I haven't gotten gigs. I mean, that's just how it goes. And if you go in there and again, you're really prepared and you fully present yourself accurately and they don't want, it's not the right fit. What else, what else can you do? You might think of like, Oh, I didn't get the gig. Like it's a failure. But what about if you, it's the same thing as dating right what if you present a fake version of yourself and then they like that and then you have to keep doing that and then you're like who am i yeah so there's plenty of situations where i go in doing the dave smash thing like in that mars volta video and they're like holy shit like jesus christ like

get it straight yeah and it's too much and they they get freaked out. And it's just like, well, you know, I might not be that guy all the time, but that's definitely possible. Yeah. A real life situation, which is what I always try to talk about because that's the most important thing. So many people run into problems when they just, for the hyperbole. Yeah. problems when they just for the hyperbole yeah uh so when i was out with the 1975 uh maybe a couple years ago uh george the the drummer i've been teaching him for for a while and he broke his collarbone on tour so it's the same type of situation how do you break his collarbone uh maybe it's not i family programming. I don't know.

I don't know. But he was just like, dude, I broke my collarbone. Good recovery. Continue. So I was like, who knows? So he was like, can you come out here and fill in? So same type of situation. I have to learn all the music last minute.

It's big, really large venues, arenas. And I show up to Toronto, meet everyone. We have a line check on stage, which is you just make sure all the connections are working. We run through a couple songs, maybe. The people attempting to assemble my drum kit did not do this. Well, that was another thing george i'm you know i'm like five six on a good day right george is at least a foot taller than me if not more wow yeah he's very tall he's probably like six nine holy yeah he's very tall

so i had daddy long legs yeah drum kit yeah long legs long arms long everything so i had to rearrange his kit a lot of times you have to sit down and just play it, which can present some problems. But I had to rearrange things because it was like impossible. And so yeah, outdoor stage in Toronto, 10,000 people, and you just have to go for it. You said you were going through a line check. And then it took us off the reservation.

Yeah, so line check is like kick, kick, kick drum, snare drum, guitar, checking everything's working, right? And then he was, Matty, the singer, was like, can we do this song? Let's do this song. And we just did like a couple songs. And he was like, OK, great. And then it's just showtime. All right.

Yeah. And so everyone was like, because that's the type of situation where it's a band. And you have to come in. And the very difficult thing is you have to assume someone else's character. Yeah. And try to make everyone feel comfortable enough to where it's comfortable. Yeah. Right?

So they were like, play the parts. But you can have some fun. And so I threw in things here and there, and they were laughing into it. And it was super fun. And so we did that run for about a month. And then I sat down with Matty, the singer, and he was like, you know, man, we have to do Glastonbury and some BBC One stuff. And it's really important that this band sounds like the 1975. And right now it sounds like the 1975 with Dave Yelich.

Because your personality is just huge. And at the time, I was like, fuck. I was so bummed. Because I really like Matty. I really like George. All those guys. And I really like the music a lot. And I was just likemed because I really like Maddie. I really like George, all those guys. And I really liked the music a lot. And I was just like,

fuck man. And, uh, and then I was like, wait, this is like the best compliment anyone could ever give me. Yeah. Cause having an identity is the most important thing when you're making art.

And I was like, you know what? That's fucking awesome. Yeah. And, uh, and so, you know, that was, they yeah and uh and so you know that was they got they got um my buddy freddie who was doing it for the week until i got there freddie sheed

he's a really great drummer in the uk they got him to do it again until george could come back and and freddie's great and he's a really good buddy of mine he did a great job and i was just at the time i was like so bummed uh but what helped you reframe it like when did when were you able to reframe it and view it the way it took a while took a few months did you do it on your own did it come to clarity through therapy what helped maybe talking because a lot of people don't recover from they they're not able to reframe something that might have been a very difficult time it continues to be something that was very difficult right and they just take it takes them out forever yeah or just becomes this pain this

like dull ache that they revisit every time they have the memory but you've been able to reframe it yeah i think through enough experience and through having enough success outside of that situation, I can definitely see that happening if it's like, that's your one shot and that's the only amount of success you've ever had. But I've done a lot of other things and I did things after that before. And so it's like, oh, that was just that one thing and it wasn't like oh you you fucked it up yeah it was just like you're too distracting what's the shittiest music gig you've ever had and it could be like oh man it could be anything it could be freaking halftime at like a rogue olive garden i don't know like um man i don't know if i can answer

that without getting in trouble or any have you ever have there any ever been moments when you've doubted yourself or doubted the music path where you've just been like fuck oh all the time what would any examples come to mind they could could be super early. They could be at any point. Well, the industry has changed so much in the past 10 or 15 years. Just the way it's structured as a business model alone makes you question things. Like, is this even a working model anymore? Yeah. And that changes on a daily basis so just thinking about things monetarily um sometimes is this even makes like for me like

am i gonna go out on tour and be away from home and make x amount of money when i can just stay home and sleep in my own bed and make x amount of money teaching, you know, that, that kind of a thing. And then it's like, well, do I want to teach you? Do I want to play music? What, you know, and then it's like the grass is always greener. So that's just constantly swirling around in my head. Uh, yeah. When you're auditioning for gigs and you're like, really that dude got the gig. Are you kidding me? And then you're auditioning for gigs and you're like really that dude got the gig are you kidding me and then you're like if that's what people want like that's garbage like what and everyone else is like oh gross and you know like i can't like that dude's such a cheese ball like why would they you know and and they're like well is that what people want and then if like if that's what

people want why am i doing this Because no one has good taste. You can get in that whole thing. So just, yeah, totally. And I think what's very important is doing a multitude of things. I teach a lot. That's really my bread and butter. But because of that, I can be selective and learn how to say no to things because of that. So if someone calls me for two playing gigs, yes. Yeah.

So if someone calls me for a tour and I heard a lot of bad things about the artists, like they're a pain in the ass, I'll be like, nah, I'm good. Yeah. I don't have to do it. I have a lot of friends who tour and that's all they do have to do. And they're like, God, you're so lucky you teach teach i have to go out with this piece of shit right now you know and it's like and then it comes around to doing what you love for a living you know and then they're like like what's the point if if you go out on the road and you're bumming yeah so there's something to be said about the weekend warrior who goes to their their suit and tie

cubicle job and then they get out of work and they're like yeah i'm gonna go play drums right now and they're stoked yeah there's something to be said for that yeah because it's still like a wholly special thing and that's something that i struggle with with art yeah because i love art so much and it's so important to me and everyone's like when are you gonna start making stuff and it's like but if i start making it right then i'm part of it and then it's like tainted yeah in a way well it makes me think of some of my friends who are very very successful travel writers it's really hard for them to travel for fun because they're constantly thinking about what would the lead be? Oh, how would I describe this? Oh, maybe I should take some notes just in case.

They have a very tough time experiencing travel without thinking about how they would craft the narrative. Well, same thing for me. If you go on tour a lot, you don't want to go traveling for fun. You're like, I was just out for six weeks. I just want to be home. So like, everyone's like, man, you should take a vacation. And I'm just like, I don't, I don't want to go anywhere. I want a staycation. Yeah, exactly. You were talking about the teaching, which I think is really a point I want to revisit because you do, you do multiple things. You have a number,

you have many different interests and it strikes me that in a sense you've number one, diversified your identity in such a way that you don't feel psychologically compelled to always tour. Secondly, with the teaching and, uh, you know, with the online course right getting out of your own way which i think could be like maybe it will be the title of this podcast uh so interrelated as it relates to that was a terrible sentence but you get the idea oblique strategies the inner game of tennis i mean so many of these creative pursuits professional professional pursuits, personal pursuits are not about doing something brand new that is this gigantic skill you have to acquire over 15 years. A lot of it is just removing the blocks. Right.

But the point I was going to make is that you are not in a position because you've developed these different branches of your life where you have to to feel or act out of desperation and it makes me think for instance this might seem like it's totally out of left field but arnold schwarzenegger never really auditioned and this is something not a whole lot of people know about him. It's not a secret. But he made millions of dollars in real estate before he ever had his break in film. So he focused on real estate in Santa Monica and other areas and had also other types of business. He had a mail order business. He had a bricklaying business with Franco Colombo so that he could be selective about the roles he took.

That's incredible. And he was able to craft a trajectory even when, and you're talking about the cheese ball, taking the gig. Yeah. When he got started, people were like, this is never going to work. Right. You're a freak show. Right. Nobody wants that.

Right. started people are like this is never gonna work right you're a freak show right nobody wants that right like people want al pacino and taxi they do not or taxi driver with a taxi taxi driver one of the two hey robert de niro oh yeah there we go wow how many ways can i get that story wrong we can edit that out yeah yeah close enough close enough this is audioite folks. I'll leave it in. Uh, well, you get the idea. And he was, he was able to buy it his time also so that at some point he could, he could put himself in a position where he could be exactly what people wanted.

And, uh, you were, I actually, I'll, I'll, I'll give you a public thanks also for, you can see where my,

how my brain is connecting these days for your introduction to Bill Burr. Sure. Media, who's also on the show, who you teach, who, for people who haven't seen it, does one of the most hilarious Arnold Schwarzenegger bits of all time,

which I won't spoil. It is definitely not suitable for work. So don't play it at full volume on YouTube at your job and then get pissed off at me on the internet. But the diversification of identity, psychologically, very, very important. And then the income diversification for you,

allowing you to then, as an artist, craft a more deliberate path i think are really really yeah absolutely really important and if you're not being deliberate about what you're creating then what the hell are you doing you're just making garbage right yeah absolutely you mentioned george so this is george daniel right yep of the 1975. So he has said, and I quote, among other things, I'll read the whole thing, but Dave saved my arms and hands. He made me see I could, in fact, contrary to my belief,

develop technique that would save me from blisters and help solve tendonitis for many years of horribly inefficient technique. We don't have to talk about that. We can, but the next line is what's interesting to me. He taught patients exclamation point, an incredible player,

really great teacher and all around lovely human. What does that mean? Or what does he mean by he taught patients? I think probably I'm very, as long as someone is putting the work in, I'm very patient with people because seeing the light, the light flash in their eyes when something clicks is one of the greatest feelings imaginable. And also probably for him, I think being patient with himself, like taking the time to, to really hone

in on certain things and not having to rush through things and just be like i'm gonna put the work in and i'm gonna take the time so all this stuff happens the way it should happen and and you have to be patient with that or else it's never gonna manifest itself or with something that's as physical as drumming if if you rush it and your technique is not biomechanically suitable for a human body, then... Well, that's what I was saying earlier, is it's inherently an issue of the drum set as an instrument, in that the way the drum set was formed initially around the turn of the century was called a trap kit because it was short for contraption

so like you think of these dudes around you know late 1800s 1900s uh taking disparate uh concert percussion instruments like a bass drum by itself and a snare drum and then we had to make a pedal to use the bass drum and the hi-hats were were originally called low boys because they were on the floor and you only played them with your foot you didn't play so it's evolved in this really bizarre strange way so it's physically strange yeah uh but also the bar is incredibly low in terms of uh entry so it's very easy to play drums in the beginning you sit down and go doot tat doot tat doot tat doot tat and they're like oh i can play drums i can do this i can play along to acdc and michael jackson and like this is great and so no one thinks about how anything functions because they can already do it and then they go on tour and then 10 years later they're

like oh my arms are destroyed or my hip is just sort of my then 10 years later, they're like, oh, my arms are destroyed. Or my hip is just sort of my back, because they're doing everything inefficiently or incorrectly. And then also, they get stuck, as far as the vocabulary goes, because they can't express themselves properly, because they're in their own way. So a lot of it is inherently part of the instrument itself. And I always use violin as an example. You have to sit there for six months just getting your intonation happening. Or saxophone, you have to get your embouchure together.

Your what? Embouchure. Embouchure. What is that? It's basically like throat control, like how you produce air pressure. And that takes a while. You start learning clarinets. You're squawking all over the place. throat control, like how you, how you produce, uh, air pressure. Yeah. And that takes a while. You know, you start learning clarinet or you're squawking all over the place, have to develop that control and you can't just sit down and just make a sound.

You have to, there's a certain amount of gestation with drums. Yeah. You can get the reward without having to develop immediately that body control. Exactly. And that's the problem, but that's part of the instrument. You know, what I was going to say earlier, we were talking about being able to wear many different hats, do many different things, be deliberate about what you're doing. I was talking to a friend about this and he was like, yeah, if your identity is largely based on what you do for a living, whatever it is, what if you wake up one day and you don't want to do that thing? And then you're like, who am I? Yeah. And that's a mindfuck.

Very common. Yeah. Super, super common. Mm-hmm. Yeah. For people who say, like, try to retire. And then they're like, oh, wait, I've spent 12 hours a day for the last 30 years doing X. And then you have a whole other black hole where if you're a very important person and you get a lot of respect and then you retire, you're just some guy.

Yeah. And that's a whole other thing to deal with. Yeah. And then what are you going to do with your life when you just wake up? Are you going to play golf all day? You know, that's a whole other thing. Yeah. Huh.

What would you put on a billboard if you could put, metaphorically, right? A message, a few words, a word, anything on a billboard to get it out to millions of people. He's holding this t-shirt. Slow down. Yeah. Yeah. Slow down. Because generally speaking, so many people need to do that

slow down take a deep breath yeah just relax you can also cover up or hide a lot of your own mistakes and sloppiness from yourself by doing things too quickly absolutely that's very common in music yeah very common music it's very common in a lot of things uh when i watch really good say boxing instructors they're always like slow down uh in the beginning certainly sure like look yeah anybody can flail their arms around so that nobody can see what you're doing exactly like i want to see exactly what you're doing really slowly in the beginning and it also brings to mind one of my favorite expressions I've learned in the last few years,

which was from a friend of mine who's a former Navy SEAL. And it's not specific to him. It's something that you hear quite a lot, but it is slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Yeah. It's just like, I like to not rush. Cause if you try to like rush or reload or rush whatever

it might be and you botch it now you're really slow you're slower than than you would be even before yeah like yes well it's that it's the same like the weights can shit in the smaller circles yeah to learn things in large movements or whatever you want to think about this in whatever paradigm you want to think about this and whatever paradigm you want to think about this and then as you get more comfortable with it gets smaller and smaller and smaller yeah and then you're just throw someone across the room and for those people wondering that's josh waitzkin who it's a fantastic guy good friend of mine who's thought of what he is the basis for the book in the movie searching for bobby fisher uh Really a master in many, many disciplines.

But that's one of his concepts, for sure. I tell everyone I teach to get that book. Yeah, The Art of Learning is a fantastic book. He was the second ever guest on this podcast. Yep. And a lot of great concepts. Also, for people interested, did a television episode with him where we looked at brazilian jiu-jitsu which is a black belt in cool among other things uh that was the

first time for that tv show that he got on in front of a chessboard and i think i want to say 15 years something like that his wife said i cannot believe that he's getting in front of chessboard i've never maybe never seen him do it that thing in the episode where he talks about playing like 50 chess games at the same time yeah the simultaneous games yeah and talking about feeling the flow of energy in the room and then he felt like a shift yeah he felt like he'd been juggling 30 balls and one of them got dropped because he was playing it was something like 30 kids and one of them cheated yes and he came back around and he didn't know exactly what had happened but he's like this doesn't feel right and that sounds like spooky shit that's a real thing

yeah i was that was so that episode was so affirming and exciting for me yeah because he said a lot of things where i was like oh i'm doing this right yeah i'm on the right path because there were so many things that we did similarly it's this it's the the the transfer is so it's so clear huge uh which is part part of the fun it's a big part of the fun of having this podcast for me is interviewing people across disciplines that at first glance you would expect to have nothing to do with one another and you just realize that people who are playing their a game in any field have nothing to do with one another, and you just realize that people who are playing their A game in any field have more in common with one another than they do with the B players in their own field. That's one of my favorite things to do with Burr,

is we sit down and talk about comedy and drumming and the massive amounts of overlap between the two. When we first started working together, he had basically like a John Bonham, Led Zeppelin, almost like a replica kit. He's a huge Bonham fan. And everyone who plays drums is a John Bonham fan. He's incredible. And he has a very specific sound.

So he got this early 70s Green Sparkle Ludwig kit, giant 26-inch bass drum. It's a thing thing it's a very specific thing and we're working together and we're talking about identity and what he wants to say and who he wants to be and getting his posture together and and i was like dude you wouldn't walk out on stage and start yelling like Sam Kinison. That's his thing. You do your own thing. You walk out on stage in front of whatever 12,000 people, Madison Square Garden, you're doing your own thing. Like bring that to this.

And he sold the kit immediately. Got his own thing. He's figuring out what his own thing is yeah it's it's it's uh and that's so much fun for me to to do uh you know and he's one of the smartest dudes i i know i mean he's brilliant he's very smart guy yeah yeah you have uh i think within within any field certainly you have certain philosophical underpinnings or paradigms that people choose as like the foundation for a lot of their decisions and career path and so on. Then you have the strategies and you have the tactics and the, the lower level you go in some respects,

the more the fields diverge, but certainly at the higher levels, whether it's tennis, comedy, drumming, or otherwise, there's so many, so many commonalities. Yep. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

That I love? Yeah, I'll give you an example. Yeah. Or just compulsion. For instance, Cheryl Strayed, who wrote the book Wild, and excellent author, also fantastic podcast host. The example she gave was she likes to reassemble sandwiches. So when she gets a sandwich, it bothers her if all the tomatoes on one side of the sandwich and the avocados on the other, she wants every bite to be as uniform as possible. So she'll have to reassemble her sandwich.

I like the number 555 because I finished editing the final line and the final pass of the four-hour body in a Samovar tea shop in San Francisco ages ago and looked up and it was 5.55 p.m. So that became this kind of good luck charm. So I take screenshots of that whenever it pops up. So it could be anything. It's funny. i think to be good at anything you need to have a touch of ocd yeah absolutely you have to be detail oriented and i do have those things but i i can't think of anything off the top of my head other than like checking the stove 10 times and i'm leaving the house i'm like you know checking my studio door

four times make sure it's locked i can can't think of anything weirdly specific like that at the moment. No problem. I'm sure there are depths to plumb there that you can return to. do you eat Indian or Himalayan food with some type of curry type consistency? Every day, pretty much. I mean, that's why I go to the gym six days a week, because I have to work off all the clarified butter. All right. I'll leave that.

That may qualify. When you feel – actually, I'm not going to ask that one. Let me go somewhere else. Sure. See, one thing that's come up in our conversations recently, because I've never worked with a therapist, and I've listened to interviews you've done where you've mentioned therapy and you're a therapist,

and I've always had, I think, a a certain degree of resistance particularly to talk therapy for a lot of reasons i won't bore everybody with and uh i'd like to talk about that because it seems like you've benefited tremendously from it so why if you're comfortable talking it, why did you end up engaging a therapist and what have been, how did you, how did you choose your therapist and what have been some of the benefits that you've derived from it so far? Yeah. I initially, because you, sorry, I'll just really continue to step all over your answers all good uh you as well as a few other people when i have mentioned that i've not worked with therapists are just like what in the fuck are you serious especially you yeah yeah they're like really like okay maybe

this is something i should explore so yeah absolutely this has come up multiple times from multiple people. So, your story. So, I started seeing a therapist around when I was 30-ish, something like that. And it was mainly to figure out relationship issues that kept happening over and over and over again. And I was like, there's clearly something here that's a blind spot to me. And I don't know what I'm doing. I need to figure this out. That was the sort of specific reason why I started going. And I found my therapist through a really close friend of mine who is a therapist. And we obviously can't work together because she's a close friend of mine. So she was like, you should see this person. She's incredible.

And seeing it, working with a therapist, having, having a good relationship with someone where you can really trust them and you care about each other and, and, and it clicks. That is unbelievably important.

You know, there are so many bad drum teachers out there and there are so many bad therapists out there and it's, it's can be extremely damaging to someone. So having a good, good therapist who you get along with and connect with and who's very competent, like that's why I pick someone who was,

I mean, we, we hit it off and it was obvious, but she's 80. Yeah. And it's like, it's like these, all these life coaches running around who were like 25. It's like, the fuck do you know? You don't know anything. So having a therapist who, where I can bring up anything and she's like, yep, been there. Right. Right. That's huge. Yeah. And so it started off with the relationship stuff and then it obviously shoots off in all these other different directions.

And even just having someone to go in and dump on and just like brain vomit, who's only there to help you out, help you sort things out, the world would be a completely different place if everyone had that. That type of outlet. Yeah, to just unload what what are some of the ingredients for success say in the beginning would you say that it's it was important to you to say meet every week for a certain period of time given how much you could potentially travel right sure like what were what were some of the things that made it work what's the same thing with with drumming i Hey, look, if you're serious about this, we got to do this once a week because it's like going to the gym.

You don't go two days a week for four hours, right? You go once a week for every day. You go every day for an hour or something. Right. It's, it's, it's,

it's, it's, it's, you grab, you, you have consistency. That's crucial. And you're able to make progress because it's a,

it's a recurring dialogue you're, you're having with someone. And so I went once a week for years. And when things got particularly messy, I would sometimes go twice a week. And there were times when she really saved my saved my life, like, uh, dealing with PTSD or, you know, you literally feel like you're going to die.

Yeah. Uh, so, and now I go once a month and sort of check in. And what's funny, we were talking about this last night, but the times when I'm like, ah,

everything's kind of cool. Like I think I'm, I don't even really need to go today. Those are the times when you stumble into some massive paradigm shift. And it literally is, it's a paradigm shift. You see the world in a completely different way. And a lot of the times when that happens, it's funny. I'll just be talking out loud, like thinking, but verbalizing it. And you sort of get on a path and then you're like boom

and something happens and you're just like holy shit like where did that come from yeah it's almost like an out-of-body experience so a lot of it is is is trying to get outside of yourself and which is extremely difficult and thinking about, well, is this aspect of my personality, is this learned from my parents or someone else, or is this part of me? And a lot of things that I didn't know I was even doing are learned things that can be unlearned. It might take a lot of work.

It takes a lot of work. It's the hardest thing I've, I've ever done, but I'm a completely different person. Like a very specific example. That's like something small. If I'm at the gym and someone rewraps their weights improperly, it drives me fucking bananas.

It drives me crazy. Like, if they take the 25s and put it on the 35s. Oh, my God. It drives me crazy. And it's like, this could not be more black and white. Like, how is that acceptable? Yeah, yeah. And then that fucks up the flow for everyone else.

So, you know, and one day she was like well you know they didn't see that you were wearing your invisible police uniform they just didn't see it and i was like and i start laughing and i'm like oh my god you're totally right like a feeling this need to police everyone and and it's obviously a need for control yeah right uh which is a learned thing yeah and that's something that i constantly have to check myself about you know and uh and and if you and and that that'll take you out yeah because there's so many so many things like that on the daily i mean yeah hundreds thousands yeah that'll and they're everywhere why does this guy not know how to use his chip reader on his car yeah or like why did you park like an asshole

it's mostly like people being inconsiderate that drives me crazy i have one friend i'm not sure he'd want to be named uh explicitly so i won't mention his name he's he's a very, very brilliant guy in his field. And when he goes through TSA and airport security, it drives him completely fucking bananas when people don't know how to go through security. And they'll leave their belt on or they'll have a huge container of water after the person has asked them four times if they have any liquids so what he started to do he's he's been also uh very recently

seeing a therapist and has figured out certain coping mechanisms and so one of his coping mechanisms which i think is really hilarious is he will he will say something like he he will he will become the voice that he imagines they have that is 30 feet away so he'll go what do you mean i can't take water on the airplane last time i here, I could bring my computer through the metal detector. And he'll do this. And so I remember asking him at one point, I was like, oh, that's really funny. So that's what you say to yourself. He's like, no, that's what I say out loud. And he says,

I say it loud enough so that everybody around me can hear it. And people start laughing and like chill the fuck out. It's a way to diffuse it. I think he just did it initially because he thought it was hilarious and uncomfortable to say it out loud but now he's become like a stand-up comedian at the back of the line uh and i now know at least a half a dozen people have spent time

with him who now do the same thing that's hilarious but it's the little things that are the big things well and it's and it's also like why would it's also for like that are the big things. And it's, and it's also like, why would you, it's also for like TSA employees drive me bananas. I travel a lot and a lot of them are totally incompetent. So, but it's like going to anything where you have to deal with someone in that type of a job. Yeah.

You go, wait, why would this person be competent? Yeah. A competent person wouldn't have this job in the first place. So why am I expecting that to begin with? I'm setting myself up to get angry. Right? Yeah. It's the small things. We think about these big existential dilemmas and questions, but it's

in so many cases, that stuff is important or it can be important, but it's also like, are you giving yourself like a 100 pats on the back in your day or are you giving yourself 100 paper cuts? Because you have ample opportunity for both. And what we're talking about might sound trivial, but you stack all of those things up and they'll take you out. Oh, yeah, for sure. Oh, my God. We will at some some point maybe tonight over some wine come back to more unusual and

absurd things that you love because i'm sure there is a treasure trove yeah uh one or two last questions you've mentioned a few books here that you gifted to me which are very very timely but are there any particular books that you've given the most as gifts to other people the andre agassi open book is phenomenal incredible book even if you don't care about tennis at all it is an incredible book i tweeted years ago i was like hey does anyone know any good sports psychology books like and directly related to tennis or golf? Because I was really fascinated with those. I don't really give a shit about sports, really. you have to navigate by yourself is the same as when the red lights on in the studio have to do

these film scores where you have to sight read everything you've never seen it before they throw up a book sight reading is you've never played it you've never seen the music before they throw up the sheet music and you have to replay it perfectly the first time because you have to do the whole movie in a day jesus right so it's very's very, very stressful. So it's the same amount. It's the same amount. Including films like Trolls, The Book of Love, others. Logan, that Wolverine movie. So good.

Yeah. That St. Vincent movie with Bill Murray a few years ago. All the divergent, insurgent. But like same, same, same same same same but different right in terms of the sports the tennis the golf yeah like when you hit the ball in the sand and you're like fuck and you can't and you have to go just leave it be and you have to you can't let that ruin the whole game yeah same sort of thing when the red light's on in the studio or when you're playing in front of 30 000 people it's it's the same. You screw something up.

You can't be like, and, and let, let it screw up the whole show. It's the same exact thing. And I thought that was fascinating. So was the Agassi book recommended as a result of that? Yeah.

So you put up. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I was like, Oh my God, this is incredible. So I,

I give that to people all the time. Uh, the art of learning. I give to people all the time. Josh Waitzkin. Yep. Um, I give that to people all the time. The Art of Learning, I give to people all the time. Josh Waitzkin. Yep. I give The Inner Game of Tennis. I give Zen in the Art of Archery to people all the time. I feel like that was the very first book that spawned all of the Zen in the Art of...

Fill in the blank. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Just so popular now. God, I need to look at my bookcase. There's so many. Horton, here's a who. Last but not least.

There's so many. You are one of the best read people I've met in the last, I would say, five years. I'm just saying a lot. Yeah, thanks. I meet a lot of people who read very widely. And this has been so much fun. We could go on for many, many more hours.

So maybe we'll do that at some point. But where are some of the best places for people to find you? We talked about DaveElitch.com, Instagram, Twitter at Davey Litch. There are other social profiles, I'm sure, but it seems like maybe those are the best. The online course, which is really stunningly shot and very well done, Getting Out of Your Own Way. That's available at DaveElich.com. Uh, any other places where, where people can find you that you'd like them to pay attention to or any other, uh, recommendations or asks of the audience, people who are listening? Well, the easiest place to find me is Instagram,

just Dave Elich, uh, or my website. You can contact me through my website. I'm not super active on Twitter or Facebook anymore. Um, you know, someone else who I, a lot of books I recommend are, uh, Douglas Copeland's books. He wrote generation X, Copeland, C O U P L A N. Yeah. He's also, he's also an equally amazing visual artist, which is incredibly rare. Uh, I find a ton of inspiration from, from him. He's, he's, he's also an equally amazing visual artist, which is incredibly rare. I find a ton of inspiration from him. He's great.

So I recommend a lot of his books. Generation X is great social commentary from the early 90s. And he coined that term, Generation X. He's an interesting sort of social tech theorist. I think he has a job at google now very well could yeah they tend to gather interesting eclectic folks yeah he's an interesting dude um so yeah uh those are the those are the two best places to contact me my website or instagram and if any you know if anyone hears this and there's sort of kindred

spirits in terms of uh what motivates us or or in terms of any sort of creative endeavor, reach out and say hey. Lob out a note or a hand wave through the ether. Yeah. That is the interwebs. Dave, so awesome to finally get you on. Yeah, same, same, dude. And many, many adventures ahead. I'm excited for you.

I'm hoping to pop in to the masterclass tomorrow, which I will be completely unqualified for, but nonetheless, it is a fly on the wall. Awesome. I really look forward to that. And before I forget, Daughters of Mara. Yeah. Is Mara, I've never thought to ask this, but is that a reference to the, what

is it, Hindu God? No. I can't, I think it's Buddhist. I think it's Buddhist. Yeah, it's Buddhist. Yeah, yeah. Mara, who's sort of the equivalent of. The devil.

The devil. Yeah. So we had three daughters that would sort of tempt people, sort of like the snake in the Garden of Eden, that equivalent. Daughters of Mara. Yeah, that was a band I was in in 2005, 6, 7, that was on Virgin Capital Records and did a record, and then EMI got bought out by Terra Firma, and that was that.

I Am Destroyer, appropriate. Yeah, very relevant. Little did we know. Dave Smash. All right. appropriate yeah very relevant little did we know dave smash all right everybody listening as always you can find links to all the things we talked about including say the crazy mars volta video and uh we will also look up a few other things like the the books that in addition to the pia melody book the other books perhaps some of the books that in addition to the Pia Melody book, the other books, perhaps some of the books that your therapist has on her mantle and,

uh, the mankind existential animal quote, question mark, et cetera, will all be in the show notes. Uh, you can also find links certainly to getting out of your own way and everything related to Dave at Tim.blog forward slash podcast.

And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet

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