Weird Medicine: The Podcast - BONUS EPISODE - Metamyther

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Dr Steve interviews electronic musician Metamyther. Topics include Moogfest, breaking into electronic music, performance in the age of COVID-19, vaccine timing, and more. Check him out: https://www.metamyther.com/ stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) noom.doctorsteve.com (lose weight, gain you-know-what) Get Every Podcast on a Thumb Drive (all this can be yours!) roadie.doctorsteve.com (The ROBOT guitar and bass tuner! And it ain't expensive!) simplyherbals.net (for all your StressLess and FatigueReprieve needs!) BACKPAIN.DOCTORSTEVE.COM – (Back Pain? Check it out! Talk to your provider about it!) Cameo.com/weirdmedicine (Book your old pal right now while he's still cheap!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of Weird Medicine on Sirius XM103, and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. I've got the theory. It's weird medicine, a bonus episode. The first and still only uncensored medical show

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All right, please don't forget, stuff.doctrsteve.com, stuff.com. And I just decided to do cameo. So you can go to cameo.com, I think, slash weird medicine, or just search for weird medicine or Dr. Steve. It's five bucks. And out of that, I make $3.50. So I'm just goofing around with it. uh for now if i get enough of them i'm going to raise the price i got 10 right off the bat so i think that might have that might have taken care of all the demand but we'll see anyway i'll answer

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I can vouch for this one. Anyway, today on this bonus episode, we have a surprise guest an electronic musician who will play a cut from his new AP and afterward discuss a few COVID-related questions.

This was recorded over a month ago so some of the pandemic info is old. But what the hell? You're listening to Weird Medicine. Today we have with us, my friend Tristan Kaneshka, aka Metamether, as he's known to his

fans. Metamether is an experimental electronic music project that explores songs developing along distinct movements drawing from synthwave and industrial music as much as it pulls from classical forms. And his EP is hitting the net and wherever you get your EPs from. Very soon it's called tachogrammatus. And the first or one of the cuts is called New Canons. It's releasing very soon. Tristan, I've been wanting to have you on the show forever. Thanks for being here, man. I'm super psyched to be here. Thanks. So that was take three. Hopefully I got it right this time. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so I first met you at Moogfest several years ago, and we had sort of this core group of people that coalesced

around this. It was just so strange how it happened. I had put out on Twitter that I was going to be at MoGFest, and one of my listeners from this show said, oh, dude, I'm going to be there too. Let's get together. And I'm like, oh, please, no, okay. You know, maybe we could meet somewhere and I'll buy you a beer because, you know, you just never know. So we met at the, I don't know if it was 808 state or it was one of those, but it was at the Armory in Durham. Right.

And we ended up being really good. Good, friends, to the point where, I mean, I talked to John, his name is John Field, and I talk to him probably once or twice a week. And he brought his girlfriend, and then we sort of ran into a couple other people, Jennifer Orango, who's also a musician, and her friend, Giselle Quadros Roberts, who is probably the most knowledgeable person in hardware synthesizers I've ever seen. and from there we just sort of coalesce this group and then all of a sudden there you were and I'm like who is this dude with the cargo pants and I had no idea

that I thought you were a journalist or something I had no idea at that time that you were such an accomplished musician so if you don't mind enlighten me maybe this won't be interesting to anyone listening to this but how you ended up

in our little group of people because it's been interesting just trying to figure out where all these people came from because the group has gotten larger and larger every year. Man, I wish I could trace it back. I don't even remember. Like, I remember connecting with Jennifer kind of early on because I think we realized that we were both based in New York.

So we were like, oh, okay, we definitely have to get together. But as for the writing thing, actually, I was, I think, I have kind of dipped my toe into like music journalism as well. Okay. But there, I don't think I was doing a story per se. I did end up, like, interviewing Suzanne Chiani, who I can't remember if she even played that year. That was the next year, I think. It was the next year.

She did the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And she was doing all this quad sound stuff, which was just really amazing. That just blew me away. I mean, she does all the old school Bucla stuff, which I'm a huge fan. If anybody doesn't know what we're talking about, there is an East Coast. and West Coast synthesis thing, and there's subtractive synthesis was sort of developed on the East Coast and additive synthesis on the West, and Don Bucla was one of the early proponents of that, and Suzanne Chiani is really a pioneer as much as, gosh, anybody that I could think

of even, oh, like Morton, Morton Sabotnik. Yeah, Sabotnik. I remember listening to him when I was a kid, and also. oh gosh, why am I, I'm having one of those senior moments switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos. Yeah, Wendy Carlos, thank you. And Wendy Carlos was my first exposure other than the Beatles, which I didn't realize what those sounds were to, you know, synthesized music.

And she came out with that, you know, iconic Switched on Bach that blew everybody away. Yeah, I mean, I would watch Clock or Orange, like, as a teenager. Just to hear the soundtrack. Yeah, and, I mean, the soundtrack just blew me away. But honestly, like my first foray into electronic music, like my first discovery of it was just playing Super Mario Brothers in like in 1985 or whatever, you know? And, you know, all video game music back then, of course, was like electronic music. So that was really my first entrance point. Had to be.

And that was as far as creating electronic music, that was actually my first foray because I was involved in a company called Screenplay. And I programmed all the music and sound for their. for their games, and they used a thing on the Commodore 64 called the Sid Chip, which was a true, you know, synthesizer. And because I had taken electronic music in college from Roger Hene, which that's a name, a lot of people don't know, but he was a contemporary classical composer that was an early adopter of electronic music. And he had a MoG System 55. Anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about, think Keith Emerson except this was the factory version. And the System 55, big giant synthesizer like the one you would see on the cover of Switched on Bach or something like that. And I trained under him for a couple of semesters. And so I was the only person that had any clue what envelopes were or LFOs and stuff.

And so I, you know, I ended up learning machine code and writing electronic music on the Commodore 64. Yeah, like, you know, it wasn't the first thing that I did, which I just had like a general MIDI kind of thing back in high school, you know, with it's kind of these, you know, the standard sounds that everybody knows. But there was this technology called trackers, like mod plug and impulse tracker, which was kind of like a piano roll, but you would have to enter in like these numerical values. And the piano roll would go up and down. So it was just like, and it was kind of like, I feel like it's kind of like what you're

talking about a little bit, like this machine line code almost, like super unintuitive. it would really freak people out. I think today, like, just it looks scary. Yeah, I had whole matrices just full of these hexadecimal numbers that I had to translate from another program that I wrote where I would put the notes in and that would spit these out and I'd make these matrices. And yes, it would just go down and read each one in sequence.

That's crazy. It seems like... So much easier now. Oh, my God, yeah, it's crazy. I mean, when I got back to Ableton, I almost had to like relearn like a piano roll. which is like I just had thought about music for so long in terms of this up and down thing. And, you know, you would enter in volume and pan in terms of like numbers, you know, like, who wants to do that, though?

Yeah, but the people that took the time to do it, you know, made some incredible things. Wendy Carlos didn't have the luxury of digital recordings. So she did everything on tape. And that synthesizer that she used at the time was so unstable that she could only do two or three notes at the time. from what I hear. And then she had to stop and retune it and then start all over again. So the fact that she was able to make cogent music like that must have been mind-bogglingly. It must have been just the most stultifying thing in the world.

But she had the drive to just make sure that it happened. And you know, to do a whole album like that, I can't even imagine. And especially Bach, too, which is like, you know, it's the well-tempered clavier, right? So it's like it has to be so on to be perfect. Yeah. So let's talk about your music. So you're doing all hardware, all software, or hybrid? It's a hybrid right now.

Basically my studio setup consists of an Ableton suite with a ton of VST plugins. I have a Nord Lead 2X and a push. And one of these, what is it, the Bucla overlay. for the what is it the uh oh the uh i know what you're talking about this the sensel morph right i had one and actually and actually today is an amazing day because i'm about to get my first mogue synthesizer oh what do you get i got i'm getting the sub 37 oh okay which to me is a bit of a it's kind of like no it's a good entry to the mogue universe exactly and it kind of helps me straddle the world between digital and analog because they do have an app for it, which I think

is going to be, you know, really kind of fitting into where I'm kind of at. You know, I'm not ready to fully go on with the semi-modular stuff, although I was looking at that too, like the matriarch or the grandmother, you know? Yep. Yep. And I, this is just an aside. I passed on the matriarch because I couldn't get it to make the sounds that, the quality of sounds that I could get the grandmother to make. Really? I just wonder if, well, maybe it's operator error, but I just

love my grandmother. It's such a great sound. That year, like I feel like everybody bought that. There was a Moogfest discount and it was just going off the shelves. Yeah, crazy. That's where I bought mine. So, um, let's talk a little bit about being a musician in the age of

COVID. So you were a working musician and, uh, then COVID hits. so first off when you perform are you performing your music mostly and if you do what kind of venues were you in and now what the hell yeah basically i was just starting to play out shows um i had played a really awesome like album release party for my first album and had kind of been working on songs with the second album which i previewed there um that was a super small show but kind of i had a show lined up, you know, down in North Carolina where we all met up. I was also going to see if I

could play a show at the Berlin Loop Conference, you know, just kind of set up really ad hoc. I'm sure that kind of stuff would happen all the time there, you know, just kind of collaborate and jam with some musicians, right? Yeah. Most of my professional work is based in video post-production, actually, and last year I started dabbling into making music for pictures. So that I see as more of a like an easier revenue stream potentiality than just kind of playing out shows, right? Where obviously, like, you know, we're at, we're at such low capacities here in New York that shows, I'm not really even sure if they're going to return by the end of the year. Wow.

So when you say music for pictures, you're talking about film? Yeah, just kind of doing, like, you know, I'm already editing video and, you know, so I'm already on the post-production end of it. So it's not too much of a leap for me to just slug my music in there. and if the client likes it, they can kind of license it and we can kind of go from there. Yeah, you know, that's really smart because Kubrick used to just throw whatever music in. And there was actually a soundtrack for 2001 that ended up not getting used. Because when Kubrick put in Strauss's Blue Danube for that sequence where they're going from the Earth to the Moon,

he ended up liking it so much. He just kept it because he couldn't get it. that you couldn't see the images without hearing that anymore. So for you to just throw your music in there, you know, you know they're going to end up using it, at least part of the time. Yeah, we call it rough cut love for a reason. Oh, is that? There's a term for it.

That's great. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So Tacogramatus is your third album. Yeah. And it's got five cuts on it. And tell us a little bit about the inspiration that went into this briefly, because that's a really hacky question. But, and then I want to play some of it.

And if there are anything interesting about the hardware or the software setup in this first cut? So there's a trumpet that features pretty prominently in the cut. I got that from Spitfire Audio. They have this free VST called Trumpet Fields. I was looking for this perfect kind of Miles Davisy kind of drawn out a little bit reverberated tone. Like Bitches brew kind of sound?

Yeah, totally. like sketches of Spain kind of thing and you know and I just couldn't find it because I kept finding like all these like big band kind of brassy like really in your face kind of stuff I was also referencing like Steve Hassel who has this amazing he's kind of picking up from where Miles Davis left off but yeah I just found this and it really kind of opened up the track for me it's a bit of an aggressive cut so I kind of like this interplay between the electronics and the sort of organic elements. As far as the album itself, Tocogrammatis was kind of like, you know, I just created this

kind of entity that visits the earth and starts talking about, you know, he delivers these five tracks and they're all of the, and all of them are kind of used to start talking about our world and how it could kind of be better. Okay. They're all kind of glimpses into how we could be a better society. So the first one, I feel like new canons is all about, like, if art is going to be the kind of savior of society and our way of kind of getting to a better tomorrow, then I think we have to expand what our notions are of the canons, right? And that might mean that some of the canons have to be actually thrown away entirely. And, you know, it's not like I'm naming any specific artists, but I think, you know, we're living in such a specific time that,

You know, we just need to be listening to much more adventurous music in general, you know? Totally agree. I mean, to me, I started thinking about, like, music could be a system of control, right? Or it could be a system of liberation as well. So that's kind of where my head was at with this one. You know, like the rest of the five tracks kind of go in different directions, and they're kind of like different recommendations of how we could kind of get to a better place. Yeah.

Well, demanding that every note. be in one of 12 equally tempered, you know, notes in a scale is a form of control. Yeah. There's a guy, actually, I just read on a pitchfork. He made his own sort of microtonal daw, which is, like, kind of amazing if you want to, like, look at it. For people who don't know, it's a digital audio workstation. We're using a lot of jargon. Also, VST is an abbreviation for virtual studio technology.

These are just, they're basically apps that you can plug into your music generation app to do different effects or sounds and stuff like that. So we may have some people who don't know what the hell we're talking about. Yeah, so for example, if you wanted to have that classic Moog sound, you could actually get a pretty faithful reproduction through Arturia. They have an amazing suite of, you know, digital synths. And one of them is the mini-mogue, which is a classic. Yep. And it's very inexpensive. You can save yourself about three grand by just buying.

the app. And of course there are space considerations in New York, right? Yeah, that's true. Now, speaking of microtonal-type scales, have you ever heard of a guy named Harry Parch? I love Harry Parch. Oh, you do? Yeah, dude, I saw a concert of his music performed

because I think he's passed away since. Yeah. Yeah, he was old when I heard about him back in the 70s. I think he died in 74. So he may have already been dead by the day. time that I discovered him. When I saw that concert, it just really cracked my skull open because I was like, wow, I feel like I haven't heard music before this.

I mean, I consider that to be one of the formative concerts that I've seen, and that was maybe only within the last five years or so. Okay. Well, I knew there was a reason why we were friends. I'm going to, just for a second, I'm going to play two seconds of a hairy parche piece called Castor and Pollux, which was this guy developed a 40. tone scale, and he also made his instruments, many of them out of instruments of war, like he would take missile warheads and make instruments out of him.

Let me see if I can get this to play. I'll just find a snatch of it somewhere in here. There you go. This guy's instruments are amazing, too. They're beautiful instruments. Anyway, if you want to check him out, check out Harry Parch. On YouTube, there's a bunch of YouTube stuff about him. So anyway, well, let's listen to new canons from Metamethers, new,

are you calling this an EP or are you calling it an album? Uh-oh, I made you go away, sorry. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Is an album or EP? You call it an album? I'm calling it an EP, yeah.

But, you know, yeah. All right. So let's listen to a cut from Metamethers' new EP called Tetragrammatus. This is the cut number one called New Canons. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. So, you know, I'm going to be able to be.

So, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. We're going to be able to do. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be.

You know, I'm going to be able to be. So, you know, we're going to be able to be. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. So, you know, I'm going to be able to. Holy crap. Okay, that's it. I'm throwing all my equipment away. I read a story once where Duke Ellington saw Oscar Peterson playing in a bar,

and he said, I'm never playing the piano ever again. That's how I feel after listening to that. That was awesome, dude. Thanks, man. Damn, man. Yeah, it's like I had no idea back in the day, when I mean back in the day, like three years ago, that you were doing this kind of stuff. And when I listened to your last EP, that's when I reach out to you.

I said, we've got to get you on the show. I have so many questions, but I got to, that's a different podcast. They're all technical questions that would just drive everybody crazy. We should, you know, Giselle and I talked about doing that kind of podcast where we delve into, how did you do this, how did you do that, what meter was that, how did you do the four over three and all that? But we would probably have three, it'd be an awesome podcast, we'd have three listeners. Yeah. But I have a million questions, but the main one.

is, dude, where do you go from here? I mean, how do you, how do you, I mean, why aren't you at Moogfest? We were going to have you at Micro Moogfest. You should be at real Moogfest. You know, how does that happen? Trying.

What do people have to do to become 808 state or Stefan Bodson or something? I mean, what the hell? Is it just putting in the time and then some luck, or is it all luck, or is there a method to getting to the place where people kind of know who you are and are demanding to hear you on a larger scale? Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of what I've been thinking about recently has been like genres, honestly, like, you know, what, there's tangential genres that this is relating to,

but I think, you know, if you're not strictly synth wave, right, you're not going on some of these editorial playlists or what have you so it's kind of like you know if people don't sort of know how to categorize you it's it's difficult to market yourself right yeah um so i mean that could that could be potentially one pitfall but then again it's like i have to make music that sounds like me do you know what i mean it's i'm not going to just make tech house if that's not me you know right right well yeah if you make music that's not you you're just end up being milly-vanilly or something and uh right yeah It's just inauthentic. Yeah, wow, man.

That blew me away. So the money's all in the performance, though, right? Is there any way that you could make a living off of just making EPs in 2021? Yeah, I think, like, the music sort of becomes the calling card, but then you could funnel people to, like, merch, which is something that I'm thinking about now. You know, just because I have no idea when shows are going to return, and it's kind of like, you know, do you have to be on a, you know, somewhat, reputable label to get, you know, spots at Moogfest and what have you, right? Like, you know, it's just kind of like you're not dealing with the inner circle at that point, right? Because I'm not signed as such, so.

Move to Florida. I'm sure they're doing shows down there tonight. Yeah, it's true, right? Like just no masks or anything. It was, we were down there and it was great. You know, every, you still had to wear a mask if you went to like Walmart or something like that. There are local requirements for wearing masks. but most of the time, everything was still open, though.

And so I don't know. I've got a lot of friends that are leaving. You live in Manhattan? In Brooklyn, actually. I lived in Manhattan for about like 12 or 14 years or something like that, and then I moved to Brooklyn recently. Okay. Yeah, because I have friends that are moving from Manhattan to Long Island,

and I've got friends that are moving from Long Island down to South Carolina just to get the hell out of there. So it's got to come back, though, right? Yeah, yeah. And I will say, like, you know, New York is generally handling it pretty well. Like we're really, you know, masking up whenever possible, which it's like, you know, it's not that much of an ask, honestly, at the end of the day, right? Just put a piece of cloth over your face. Yeah.

And it's like, look, if that can save lives, fine. If we find out five years from now that it didn't really do that much, it's like, well, you just put a mask on your face. It's really not a big deal. Fair enough. One of the things that we've been talking about on this show is that if there's a number called the R sub T, which is the number of people in the real world, one person can infect if they are infected. And that includes some people might have immunity and other people's and others not. And the number across the country runs around 1.1. And that means that one person can infect 110 and the, you know, I'm sorry, 100 people would infect 110 and so on.

And if you can get it down to 0.9, then 100 people infect 900, which infect 810 and, well, 820 and then, what, 810 and 720 and 640 and so on. And so it will always go down. People say, well, masks don't work. Well, they don't work all the time. But what if they work 10% of the time? Then you can get that R sub T from 1.1 down to below 1. And all of a sudden, the cases start to decline rather than increase. And those are the times when masks really make a huge difference.

I thought the RT was even higher for COVID. Like it was something, it was lower for like the common flu? No, you're thinking of the R0. The R sub 0 is like 2.4 for COVID. Got it. And that's what the theoretical. radical number of people that one person will infect in a vulnerable population. And for influenza, it's 1.2, which is why we haven't seen any flu cases this year.

Measles, 12. And there's this puke bug going around that's probably got an R knot of 5 because a lot of people are getting it, even though they're doing universal precautions for everything else. So it just gives you like stomach? Yeah, it's just a puke bug. But it's like I was hoping that we would. never see one of those again either. We haven't seen any flu this year, and I hate to puke more than anything. I'm what they call an ametophobe. You know, I just have a phobia

about puking, and when I heard people were still getting this puke bug, even though they're all masked up, I was really, I was disappointed. But that just means that it's our nod is higher than COVID's, that's all. Right. So you had some questions. This is a medical show. I understood that you had a couple of COVID related questions. And there's a lot of COVID fatigue out there. be about one of the last shows we're going to do that even mentions COVID, I hope. Good, good. Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally hear that. It's like, you know, it's all anybody could talk about it, but, you know, it's impacted the world in such a crazy way. So yeah, yeah, that's for sure. My first question is, what are the implications for getting the second dose later than recommended, right?

Like, so, you know, I was told, okay, come in like pretty much three weeks to the dot. Right. to get the second dose, is there any, like, downside to getting it a little bit later? Probably not. The reason that they have to recommend it that way is because that's how they studied it. So when they originally studied the Pfizer vaccine, they said it had to be kept at, whatever, negative 140 degrees, because that's what they studied it at. Pfizer wasn't effing around.

They wanted to be first to market. So they said, if we test this and start, store it at a temperature that we know those microscopic, you know, lipid globules will be stable, then we can get this thing to market quicker. And then we can do the next study that says, well, let's just study it at negative 30 degrees or whatever. Likewise, when I was in organic chemistry before I went to medical school, if you were doing a reaction, let's say a sealed vessel reaction,

on Friday, and then you went away for the weekend and came back on Monday. You would have to put in your notebook, let the reaction sit for 48 hours. And then the next person that had to reproduce your experiment had to let it sit for 48 hours, even though there was no reason to do it other than the fact that you had just gone away for the weekend. Now, someone else would have to come back and do another study or another experiment where they didn't do that to see if they could make it more efficient. but to reproduce it, you would have to do that. So that's the same thing here. They studied it at one week and three weeks,

and there were reasons why they picked three weeks, but that's how they got their approval, and that's what they got to tell you. Now, if you show up at four weeks, you're probably going to be just as protected, but obviously I can't recommend that because it's indicated for three weeks. It's just uncharted territory at that point.

That's right. This whole thing is that's part of the problem with this, is there's no long-term data on anything. By definition, there can't be with a novel virus. And you probably would be fine just because of what we know about how vaccines work, but they have to recommend it at the, the FDA compels them to recommend it at the frequency that they got approval for. and that's just because they studied it.

If they only studied it in women, it would only be approved for women, that kind of thing. Right, right, that makes sense. Yeah. So the main take-home is if you're a few days late or even a week late, don't beat yourself up and you probably don't have to start over again or any of that stuff.

You just, you know, show up and they'll give you your vaccine and go on your way. Yeah, people in New York are getting vaccinated, like, pretty well. I mean, we had this kind of debacle with one of the vaccines where they had to be, like, recalled or something like that. But I think, you know, we're doing pretty well. Like a lot of my friends have their second doses. I have both of mine. My girlfriend has both of hers. Yeah. I heard today that 80% of people over the age of 65 in this country have gotten at least one dose

and the death rate in that group of people, which was the 80% of people who died of COVID were in that, were 65 or older, has fallen precipitously. So that's good. That's the good news. And they just today opened it up to 16 and above all over the country. So today is Wednesday, the 21st. And I just heard that announcement just before we went on the air. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see, like, how quickly we can get to herd immunity and kind of beat these variants.

Yeah, the variants are the next thing. If the variants are as deadly, which they shouldn't be, but if they are and they completely evade the immunity that we have already generated with vaccines and from infections, then it's a whole new pandemic. The good news is we already know how to beat its ass and we can do it a lot faster this time because coming up with a variant vaccine

doesn't take nearly as long as a novel vaccine. True, true. My second question, it might have almost the same answer as your first one, but, you know, because it's just like what we studied. Yeah. But are there any implications for mixing vaccines? I know that, you know, we don't do that, but it's kind of like, you know, I figure the vaccines are somewhat different, so we just kind of don't know how they interact together. But is it kind of just like, well, we haven't studied that?

Yeah, haven't studied it. And there have been some people that have accidentally gotten it. So you know that they're on top of those and they're watching both Moderna and Pfizer probably both contacted those people where that's happened just so they're thinking, watch them over time. The two mRNA vaccines are very, very similar, if not identical. I haven't seen the sequence, but they're very close. AstraZeneca and

J&J use a similar vehicle, and I don't know how similar the genetic material is for coding for the spike protein, so we'll see. But yeah, we just don't know. It should work, but

there is this thing called antibody induced immune enhancement that can be a problem when you have two antibodies that are similar to each other and they actually can promote the infection. And so that's why we're recommending that if you start with one vaccine, you finish with the other one. So far, no evidence of any of that happening to anybody. So we're probably fine. But it's wise to just stick with the one for now until we know more.

whichever one you started with just finish it off unless you had one of the single dose vaccines then you don't have to worry about it yeah when you talk about like seeing the sequence for it like how is that even presented to you is that just like a g c t or like okay wow yeah and then can you interpret that in some way can you read that like you certainly can um those those codons basically code for an amino acid and you can just run that you can run that there's a different software that will just tell you which amino acids these things code for. And they're even getting software now with quantum computing that will, you can take a string of amino acids and it will show you how they folded.

That's been the biggest problem is that when you make a string of amino acids, it will fold into a shape. And sometimes those shapes are useful. That's what an enzyme is. It's just a bunch of amino acids that fold into a shape. actually catalyze a reaction. And the weird thing is that computers can't figure out how it folds. You can tell it the sequence, and it will take the age of the universe for them to figure

out how this stupid thing will fold by sampling each electron shell and trying to figure out where it would go at its lowest level. Whereas with quantum computing, you should be able to collapse that instantaneously. So that's going to be very interesting in the future. And when we have that, we'll be able to design, you know, designer. enzymes out of protein strings, synthesize them in the lab and use those for things. So hopefully oncology will benefit from those kinds of things as well. It's pretty neat.

Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, we're talking about technically over my head now at this point. So I think everybody's lost. Yeah, probably. You know, that's half my show. Yeah. Just going over people's heads. My last question is about the decision to make, like a decision was made to get people

through the complete pipeline, as opposed to getting more people, like, you know, just getting their first shot. Is there a reason around that? Okay, I see what you mean. So, in other words, you've got 100 vaccines, and you can vaccinate 100 people once, and then pray that you can get the other one, or you can vaccinate 50 and make sure you hold the other half for those people to come back. Is that what you meant?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's just because, again, it was studied that way, and to get to that 100% protection from hospitalization and death, you've got to, so far, as far as we know, you've got to have the two shots. So it's not really fair to get a bunch of people together, say you've got to have two shots, blow your wad on the full hundred people, and then go, well, we don't have the second shot. So that's why. That's why. I don't know that it does make sense. I was, you know, it would have been nice if they had done a cohort of Pfizer and

Moderna patients where they only gave them one shot and just seen what the hell happened. They could have done that. I mean, they had 30,000 people in that trial. They could have taken, you know, a couple thousand of them and just done that. And, you know, there probably were some people in the clinical trial. I was in the Pfizer trial that only showed up for the one vaccine or for the one shot, but they probably didn't come back. If they didn't come back for their second shot, they didn't come back for their blood work.

They were probably lost to follow up. So doing it intentionally would have made a lot of sats. But they didn't do it. Maybe they'll do it now. You were in the trial because you're kind of on the front line? Well, what I promised my listeners back in the day was because nobody knew what the hell was going on with this vaccine. And we were all freaking out. I said, listen, if this thing kills me, I'm 65.

Who gives a shit? You know, I will be more than happy to step in front and tell. take the vaccine and take the hit. Now, it just looks like I was just running in front of everybody because now people want to have the vaccine. But at the time, it was kind of nerve-wracking because you didn't know if this thing was going to make us worse, if we were going to get that antibody-immune, antibody-dependent immune enhancement or any of it.

You know, I just wanted to, I was so sick of this, I wanted to, and I don't want to sound so effing noble either. But I just wanted to do whatever I could do to move things forward. And so, yeah, so I signed up the day we could sign up for the vaccine trial. I'm glad I did, you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But anyway, well, listen, man, this thing, and you fit into the format of the show perfectly because I always like to have guests on and talk to them

and then have them ask me questions because it's all about me. But this is a medical show. And this way we can sort of justify, yeah, we're going to play this guy's music. I think he's got some questions, too. Tell people where they can hear your music. And if you're going to be playing live, plug whatever you want to plug. This is your chance. Yeah, for sure.

Well, if you go, just go to www.medither.com, that kind of has, I would call the portal for, you know, all the social links and all the places where you can listen to music. You can type in Metamither into Spotify or Apple Music or Deezer, I guess, or even YouTube. and there will be new music coming out Friday, which is the 23rd. So, you know, by the time you're listening to this, it might already be out. And I'm going to be releasing tracks from this album, one a month. So the second one will be out a month from pretty much today, and then so on throughout the summer until we get all five tracks out. So don't post these tracks you sent me on my website is what you're telling me.

Right. Well, I mean, I guess you could pose the first. one, right? Okay, okay, that's okay. Yeah, and future releases include the political call to action, Red Death, Blue Dawn, and the epic slow burn of sinews and singularities, and the tribal psychedelia of psychoscopic fields. And then you have the last one that you're releasing is the cathartic crusades on unpaved roads, which is like a real image, you know, that's cool. For sure, yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, it's instrumental electronic music, right? So we to do what we can to evoke images, and, you know, I hope that, you know, it sounds as epic as

you know. Sure, sure. No, I was in a, I was in a grindcore band at one point, and we had titles like ingestion of crack whore giblets and stuff. You got to, you got to have the titles that go along with the genre, you know? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. All right, Tristan Kaneshka. It's not going to be cows grazing in a meadow. Exactly, right, right, right. My friend, Tristan Kaneshka. aka Metamether, that's M-E-T-A-M-Y-T-H-E-R, thanks for being on the show, man. It was really great having you, and I hope that I can see you at Moogfest again someday soon.

I honestly cannot wait. Thanks so much, Steve. And I mean with you being on the stage, but I'll take you just sitting there with us like the rest of the schlumps. Yeah, it could be both, you know. Okay. All right, man. Take care.

All right, take care.