On this episode of the podcast, the brother and sister duo of the sit down with their good friend and podcast co-host, John Rocha. They discuss everything from Dr. Phil to OJ Simpson, and everything in between. They also discuss the latest in sports and pop culture, including the recent death of Kobe Bryant and his impact on the way people think about him. And of course, they talk about baseball. Don't miss it! The Podcast is brought to you by SeatGeek. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Logo by Courtney DeKorte Theme by Mavus White Music: Jeff Kaale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 47, 44, 46, 45 , 47, 47 , 48, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 54, 51 , 56, 58, , , 58, 59, , 60, 1, 61, 61, 1, 1 , 1 , 1 , 2 , 1, 2 , 3, 3 , 1 , 3 , 4, 4 , 4 , 5, 5 , 5 , 6, 6 , 6 , 7, 7 , 8, 8 , 9, 8 , 8 & 9, 9 , 8 , 9 , 10, 9, 8, 7, & 8, 10 We're moving, we're moving! We'll see you in person! we'll see ya soon! -Jon & Jon & Jon - Jon & Matt ( ) Thanks Jon & Mike & Matt ( ) - (2, 6 (3, 6) (7, 8) & 6, 5, 6 and 7 (9, 4, 2, 9)
00:12:52.000I keep up with my high school friends and my parents' friends and stuff, and...
00:12:56.000The amount of stuff I see retweeted or reposted from the left and the right is just so crazy, man.
00:13:03.000These weird fake websites with the most outrageous.
00:13:06.000And you can tell, like, you know, most people know it's fake because they're like one like and everyone's just afraid to acknowledge to the person.
00:14:11.000I set a date and I bought a 12-pack of beer and four packs of cigarettes and went into my studio and just smoked every cigarette and drank every beer and just felt like shit on purpose knowing that I wouldn't want a cigarette and I never smoked a cigarette.
00:14:30.000I mean, chicken parmesan tastes a lot better when you're not smoking cigarettes.
00:14:35.000It's like, you know, I don't know, you have kids.
00:14:37.000I had my first kid last year and you end up, you go through that, you know, I think most people go through it and you just realize like, oh shit, like I'm almost, I'm 39, I gotta stick around for this kid and cut the bullshit.
00:15:55.000I feel like every once in a while, it'll be in a situation where I'm like, oh man, I actually really do...
00:16:03.000Want a cigarette, but instantly I'm like, that will mean for me buying a whole pack, being right back on it.
00:16:11.000Although I was like, well maybe I'll give myself one weekend a year and just torture myself and allow myself to look forward to that one weekend a year, smoke some cigarettes.
00:16:21.000If you can make that kind of a deal with yourself, I think that's possible.
00:16:24.000I think I'm capable of it because I do have pretty good willpower.
00:17:15.000And to this day, I'm like, I get up to take my stepdaughter to school at, like, 7, and then I'm like, I come back in the house, and I just sneak back into bed.
00:17:24.000And I try to avoid having to wake up to take care of the baby.
00:18:06.000The cigarette one's so weird, because if you think how many people are doing it right now, listening to this, smoking a cigarette, and all of them know it's bad for them.
00:19:04.000I mean, I think that if you marketed cigarettes right, man, you could get every motherfucker smoking because you could just say, like, it's like the new cacao nib.
00:22:36.000I'm just saying, man, that the thing about the Tesla and all these electric cars is I think that they're really smart and cool, but the idea of having to filter all these rare earth minerals into one place, not much.
00:22:48.000It's the first time that's ever happened.
00:22:53.000We had a buddy who had leukemia and bone cancer, actually.
00:22:58.000And his doctor, who wasn't a quack, I think he was at the Cleveland Clinic, was like, this is from having too many heavy metals in your system.
00:23:59.000And it's just like all of the shit that wasn't copper or gold or silver, but was heavier and sinking to the bottom when they're looking for that stuff.
00:24:58.000My grandpa was a landscaper, and he had a plastic bucket, and he would take the pesticides, and he'd fill the bucket with water, put the pesticide in, mix it with his hand every day.
00:25:11.000Well, I've also heard that lung cancer, a lot of it, a lot of it is caused from, actually, the fertilizer used, which is, and when you, it's like a plummonium, the same shit they use to kill the Russian.
00:26:19.000They think they can regenerate disc tissue, too, and I know they're doing studies on that, like the spongy stuff in between your spinal column.
00:26:26.000They think they can regenerate that stuff with stem cells, but there's no proof yet.
00:27:26.000I mean, I've seen medicine save people's lives before.
00:27:29.000And then I've seen also, like, it'd be like, you know, Basically, it feels like they still don't know what the fuck is happening in your body a lot of times.
00:29:01.000If I know that there's one thing that...
00:29:03.000And like, you know, someone really close to me had a really severe life-threatening episode earlier this year that was very fucking traumatic for everybody involved, including myself.
00:29:14.000And I ended up gaining like 20 pounds in a month, basically.
00:29:32.000The bedside manner was just like insanity.
00:29:35.000Because it was the first time I'd been in a real, someone that wasn't, didn't have like a long-term illness, just like life, it's life or death.
00:29:42.000And it was like, there was no, there was no comforting.
00:29:47.000It was like, oh yeah, at any minute, this person could die for like five days.
00:29:55.000I was like, is there anything you could do?
00:30:15.000Well, the idea that this one person had to sit me down and tell me what was going on and, like, the look in this dude's eyes, it was like...
00:31:34.000I mean, like, when we first started playing, we would play these indie rock clubs, you know, because we come from that background, like, I guess what they would call now hipster shit or whatever.
00:31:45.000And that was just people who liked, you know, really passionate about certain types of music that wasn't massively appreciated, you know, which is still kind of what we're into.
00:31:53.000But because of that, most of the people that would come into our shows were, like, the high-fidelity type record store clerk.
00:31:58.000You know, you're playing a show, and it's just like...
00:32:34.000Like if you're looking at this big crowd, but then I ultimately do, I ultimately tell myself, I was like, the worst band of all time has probably played to more, you know, like some terrible menudo has played to more people.
00:33:26.000No, I read this thing that Captain Beefheart, one of our favorite musicians, said, and it was like, if you think about what you're doing, you've already lost...
00:33:35.000The reality is that I don't need to think about, and I know Dan doesn't, we don't need to think about what we're doing.
00:33:40.000So because we're not thinking about what we're doing, like, the trick is to stay in the moment with the music, but I can play and not think about it, and then I start thinking, like, what's that person fucking thinking about out there?
00:37:22.000I can't do any of that shit before I go on.
00:37:24.000I can't be relying on that before I play.
00:37:26.000So I was like, I got a recommendation to go see this hypnotist who specializes in quitting smoking and fear of flying and also stage fright.
00:37:38.000There's a lot of actors who are going to do plays for the first time.
00:37:45.000At his house, and we were playing some shows at the Palladium, and he did this thing, hypnotized me, and the second night, like, I went that first night we played, it was, like, better.
00:37:58.000The second night we played, it was, like, pretty much gone, and then I woke up in the hallway of the Roosevelt Hotel in the stairwell in my underwear at, like, 7 in the morning.
00:38:09.000And I'm literally in the staircase in my underwear at 7 in the morning.
00:38:56.000I'd never had it before, and I wanted to try it.
00:39:00.000I was like, okay, I had these thoughts that it was probably bullshit, or it's for people who have weak minds.
00:39:05.000But it's a state that they can talk you into.
00:39:08.000And someone who's really good, like Vinny, can talk you into this state, and then you're totally conscious, but you're definitely in this weird tunnel where you feel safe, like mentally safe.
00:39:19.000And you can talk and think about things in a way that's almost free of normal, regular anxiety.
00:39:25.000You can address the anxiety, you can see it, but for the brief amount of time while you're really in that state, you can get rid of all that shit.
00:40:30.000And then I got really nervous a couple years later when we were supposed to play the Grammys on TV. And I just got really fucking nervous about it.
00:40:38.000And I think I got nervous because it's just, it's like one of those things that's not natural for us.
00:40:43.000It's like we're going to be playing music on stage with all this pop music and stuff that has nothing to do with what we're about.
00:42:51.000We win rock performance of the year or something.
00:42:55.000We go in the Staples Center conference area, wherever we go, collect our award, and we're standing on the side of the stage, and they say, next up are the rock song of the year.
00:43:06.000They list all the nominees, including us.
00:43:08.000So we stay there because we're all nominated for this award.
00:43:10.000And also Neil Young for whatever song.
00:49:06.000Our record advance for this record was less than that.
00:49:13.000So I was like, if Dan and I were just on our own record label, we could give ourselves $5 per ticket and we just take the money from the right hand to the left hand, give you a link, if you counted it, we get the sale, we keep the money.
00:49:27.000That's basically what the fuck was going on.
00:49:53.000People are going to buy them or they're not going to buy them.
00:49:57.000And I think that it's detrimental to the music industry.
00:50:01.000To pay too close attention to certain metrics, man, the whole system right now with these majors is signing shit that has the most social media interaction, the most streaming.
00:51:06.000But that's the problem, is that there are two different things at play here.
00:51:11.000There's the music industry itself, which is like, certain people who work in the industry, high ups, are like, we need to sell records, we need to We need, like, this pop producer to work with this writer and this artist, and we need streaming numbers.
00:51:26.000And then there's certain people, you know, like the old guard, like the Lenny Warnaker or Seymour Stein or, you know, even lots of younger guys, too.
00:51:35.000But, you know, they're like, actually, what we're doing is curating art that we really like.
00:51:40.000And it's either going to sell or it's not going to sell.
00:51:42.000And a lot of the records that we grew up listening to, most of them, We're records made by these kind of insanely eccentric, weirdo people that never sold records, but have literally changed our lives.
00:51:55.000And Captain Beefheart being one of them.
00:52:00.000Tom Waits has sold some records, but still, it's a much different type of commercial viable thing.
00:52:05.000But these artists are why we make music.
00:56:49.000You know, it's great that you openly talk about having these panic attacks because there are so many kids that I'm sure who are huge fans of yours who also have panic attacks and they can't fucking believe that you guys,
00:57:04.000with your level of success, could still have these little battles that we've all had.
00:57:10.000So that's so huge that you're willing to talk about that and say that.
00:57:14.000I'm telling you, that is definitely going to make an impact on people.
00:57:18.000You know, I mean, once you have it, like the first time I ever really had a panic attack.
00:57:23.000I had one, and then I kind of didn't have another one until this moment on Lollapalooza.
00:57:29.000But the first time really was on the way from Amsterdam to London, Dan bought some mushrooms.
00:58:08.000I eat the rest of this thing, this massive ass thing, and I just instantly start sweating, and it smells like portobello mushrooms seeping from my skin.
00:58:17.000And I yell to the driver, I'm starting to spin out, I'm like, how do you get this to stop?
00:58:24.000He turns around, he only wore black and his shades on, and I really thought at the time he was like Satan, he was like, drink loads of beer!
00:58:53.000And then we get out, and I'm like, I just need some fresh air, man.
00:58:56.000I'm like, we stop at this gas station in Belgium, and I walk into the bathroom with Dan, and they're like, this woman's speaking in French, basically saying it costs...
01:00:16.000And then it seemed like it was crazy because when we got back in the van three fucking hours later, our driver was like, dude, we gotta go.
01:00:22.000I was like, we've been here for 20 minutes.
01:00:23.000He's like, it's been three hours of you guys talking about this dumpster.
01:02:13.000But, yeah, you think that that was the first one, and then from then it maybe has opened up the door, and because you had one, it makes it easier to have another one?
01:03:11.000If you can get a good one, a good person who can hypnotize you can put you in a state of mind and sort of change your course, just give you a little adjustment, adjustment in your perception, how you look at things.
01:03:22.000It feels like you're in like a little bit of a tunnel.
01:06:00.000Because everyone was trying to figure out, what is this file sharing thing?
01:06:04.000And then the music business, you guys felt it first.
01:06:08.000You guys were the big hit, more than anything.
01:06:11.000It's not the same to watch a movie on your TV. Even if you can download an illegal movie, I'm sure it'll have a little bit of a hit, but people want to go to the fucking movie theater.
01:06:20.000But with your shit, once people start sharing things, you just get a file.
01:07:04.000Whereas that Napster thing was the first time this was happening, and he was the guy who was this really, really wealthy guy who was a huge success saying, don't do this.
01:07:16.000Well, yeah, it's like David versus the Goliath type of thing.
01:07:18.000I mean, clearly people shouldn't steal, but is it Metallica's job to tell people that?
01:07:26.000Maybe, but maybe they should have gone directly to Napster or to their record label.
01:07:33.000But when streaming first started becoming a real thing, we had a talk with a friend of ours who basically encouraged us to look at it and not do it.
01:07:45.000And I went into with our manager when I'm talking to someone at Warner Brothers and said we didn't want to do it.
01:09:42.000He follows 500 bands, which means that there's no possible way that he's going to be listening to all 500 of those bands in even a six-month period of time.
01:09:52.000But when he does choose to listen to a song, it's worth, like, X... Like, 10x versus this person who's listening to Old Town Road a thousand times a day.
01:10:46.000And I'm like, the way to really do this that's fair is you take my 10 fucking dollars, right, and listen to 100 songs, that's it, because I've got so many ways to listen to music, that you listen, you take that 10 songs, and you give everybody 10 cents.
01:11:14.000If I'm giving you $10 and you're going to take 30% off the top, like Apple Music used to do when you would buy a CD, and then you take $7 and throw it towards the artist, that would make sense to me.
01:11:37.000But I know a lot of artists who just, they get checks for like $2.50 for a whole year.
01:11:43.000On a record that normally would sell like five or six thousand copies, but there's no need, like you have to basically be an idiot to buy a CD nowadays.
01:11:52.000Because it's a digital file that you ultimately could download from Spotify onto your phone and have it with you forever.
01:12:04.000If you're in Alaska or North Dakota, maybe you need to have a CD. So few people are printing CDs, then it boils down to how much of an infrastructure do you need as an artist?
01:12:14.000How many people do you need to be representing you?
01:13:20.000So we basically, I mean, we made this record, paid for it ourselves, and we went on tour with this agent named Ralph Carrera, booked us a tour, like kind of a mercenary agent who would like book, he booked, the label I think paid him a couple hundred bucks to book us his tour.
01:13:35.000And it all kind of started steamrolling, you know what I mean?
01:13:38.000But we had no infrastructure, we had no management, we had no agent, we had nothing.
01:13:42.000We just kind of got in the van and started going.
01:13:44.000And I think in a lot of ways nothing has changed except for that when we got to the second level, there was a couple thousand dollars there for us to make a record.
01:13:55.000There was opening slots that touring was a little bit different then.
01:14:01.000But I think we've always kind of done it in a way that was pretty DIY. It's the same way it has to function now.
01:14:07.000The only difference is there's fewer record labels that are going to sit there and give you $15,000 to make a record and maybe give you $10,000 to help you buy a band.
01:14:18.000That's the threshold where bands are having a hard time getting through.
01:14:23.000Once you get through there, then you get to where we were for years, which is you're on a bigger label, you're making records, and no one's paying attention to you.
01:14:31.000The only reason why we ended up getting attention paid to us, I think, by Warner Brothers was for our six record brothers.
01:14:53.000Especially in the rock and roll business.
01:14:56.000And we had this record that I thought was great, and I went to talk to Lior Cohen with our manager.
01:15:05.000Lior was one of the heads of Warner Brothers, and I was like, we're the most synced band on Warner Brothers, which is when you get a song on a TV show or a movie or a commercial.
01:15:17.000I think there's no other band for the last two years that's had as many syncs as we've had.
01:15:21.000But I don't even know who works the radio department at Warner Brothers.
01:15:25.000And we've been on your label for like four or five years.
01:15:27.000And Lior basically was like, fuck, he prioritized us like that week.
01:15:34.000And for the first time was like, we're going to work on your band.
01:15:38.000And when that happened, that's when the Lollapalooza shit, that's when radio, K-Rock, everything fucking changed.
01:16:29.000Because we've had opportunities to have our songs sent to, like, top 40 radio.
01:16:35.000And there was this thing where, like, if we won Record of the Year for Lonely Boy, Warner Brothers was going to service that song to top 40. It would have never probably been a hit.
01:16:44.000But if we would have won that Grammy, it could have fucked our whole band up.
01:16:51.000I've seen it happen with lots of bands.
01:17:35.000Someone's going in there to get like...
01:17:37.000Someone's going to get shaving cream, and this band that used to play at the fucking Casbah in San Diego is playing while they're checking out.
01:18:03.000Even though you've gone experimental and you've done different styles of songs and some of them feel more bluesy, some of them feel more...
01:18:40.000He was the original guitar player in the James Gang.
01:18:43.000So, like, Joe Walsh says he first saw him in, like, 65 or something, and he was, like, on somebody's shoulders in purple bell-bottoms, no shirt, playing electric guitar solo.
01:18:56.000And he said, Joe Walsh said, that guy made me want to play electric guitar.
01:19:02.000And this guy, I used to go see him all the time and he would play these songs, which happened to be religious, which is just like another story, but it sounded like cream, crazy guitar.
01:19:11.000Anyway, two years ago I had him at the studio and...
01:19:17.000All these memories were flooding back of all this heavy electric guitar and seeing Link Wray in Cleveland, Ohio and playing in the basement with Pat.
01:20:49.000Most of the stuff that, you know, that's what's important about music is it's just to do what you are good at, what you feel, what you connect to.
01:20:59.000And I think that, I guess that's ultimately what I'm trying to say is that it's always been this way where it's like there's always been this noise of like, you know, annoying, bad kind of mainstream music.
01:21:11.000And the problem is that because everything is getting streamed on the same platform and there's There's less independent record stores.
01:21:52.000I think that there needs to be a better way to highlight this stuff.
01:21:55.000It's still crazy to me that there isn't a website that I can go to as a crazy music fan that I think is curating music that I actually want to hear.
01:22:06.000We both have really open minds when it comes to music, but there isn't one thing that's just highlighting stuff from the underground, from mid-level rock bands.
01:22:18.000Have you ever thought about doing something?
01:25:04.000I felt like I entered a different dimension.
01:25:06.000And I came back to the U.S. and I put on my satellite radio.
01:25:09.000I was like, why am I hearing the same fucking bullshit There's so much good shit out there.
01:25:13.000And even when I go to the algorithm, my algorithm on a...
01:25:17.000I was sitting with this guy named John Vanderslice the other day, who's a well-known indie producer.
01:25:20.000We were looking at our algorithms, our predetermined Spotify thing.
01:25:25.000And every single thing was something that I had listened to already, except for one artist.
01:25:31.000And it was something I didn't even care for.
01:25:34.000Like, with all the technology, with all the ways to hear all the millions of songs on Spotify, they still haven't figured out how to satiate someone's desire to hear new music.
01:25:45.000Do you think it's because they try to program those channels strictly to be commercially viable?
01:25:51.000They just want to make money from it, and they feel like if they put U2 or an old Elton John song on it, and you're flipping through the channels, you'll stay on it, even if it doesn't match the format that you're looking for.
01:26:57.000That means that what you're adding is just some dumbass that's good at social media.
01:27:01.000I mean, if that's what qualifies you to get on the radio, then we're all fucked.
01:27:07.000Well, they should have a better social media, so they don't have to think about that.
01:27:12.000So when they find a new artist that's great, you pump up their social media with your social media, and then you put them on your network and people tune in.
01:27:20.000And if you have a trustworthy list of people, if you continue to recommend really good artists, they go, oh, holy shit!
01:27:39.000I think that it, you know, there's a couple of these kind of like, I don't want to name names because I don't want to talk shit about it, but it's like this form of music that I, it's like pop, rap.
01:27:54.000That it's always like some white dude with tattoos all over his fucking face that just came out of nowhere.
01:28:18.000Not to say that that's bad, but I'm saying like, you can't as an adult, like, programming a radio station, look at that and be like, this means something.
01:28:27.000I mean, honestly, if you go back to 1991, right, to when Nirvana's Nevermind came out, The equivalent of social media, they didn't have shit going on.
01:28:39.000They had a fucking song that just knocked everybody across the fucking face.
01:28:42.000And because the programmers are looking at these other dumb metrics, they're not going to get that song across.
01:28:49.000I mean, the Billie Eilish thing is pretty cool, actually.
01:28:54.000But I think there's a Billie Eilish to be found every month.
01:31:04.000So we had to park our shit way across the field or whatever, and we go over on the golf cart or whatever, and Lil Wayne's supposed to be done.
01:31:53.000And then it all ends with, like, him getting an electric guitar, and, like, I don't even know what the fuck he was doing, but it wasn't playing it.
01:31:59.000But it was loud, and it was, like, people were...
01:32:01.000I think he thought that, like, he could pretend to be a guitar player at a festival, and people would understand it.
01:32:07.000Like, would just not know that it wasn't...
01:37:09.000I worked at a record store when that Korn record came out in 1999, and that's when I first really got a glimpse at how fucked we are.
01:37:20.000There's like a Modest Mouse record that come out and I sold like two or three copies of it and there's just like droves of morons coming in.
01:37:28.000It's like, I need the new Korn record.
01:38:06.000I went to this rural county fair outside of Nashville a couple weeks ago because my wife wanted to take our baby to see the little piglets and stuff.
01:38:17.000So we go into that, like the 4-H kind of area, and it's cute and like, you know, real motherfuckers who work their asses off in there.
01:38:27.000But then we go into the actual fair part where, and it is these people I sold corn records to, like 20 years ago, are now there.
01:39:37.000I'm like, how is Bernie Sanders talking about paying back college loans when there's people who don't have a middle school or high school education?
01:40:57.000And after two quarters, I had a teacher who just came up to me in the morning after a 10 o'clock or 10.30 class or whatever, like reeked of whiskey.
01:43:03.000I got asked to pay for some of Lewis and Clark, you know, and it's fucking $60,000 a year school in Portland.
01:43:12.000Man, there's a school called Oberlin, Super Liberal Arts School, really cool radio station, a lot of cool people go to the conservatory, you know, man, but very liberal school.
01:43:22.000And Dan and I are pretty liberal motherfuckers, you know, and it's not far from Akron.
01:43:31.000My girlfriend went there at the time, and I would go see concerts and all kinds of shit.
01:43:36.000But every time I would go there, like, all these kids that were, like, from New York City, rich kids from New York or whatever, like, oh, man.
01:43:42.000I would express an opinion about something.
01:43:45.000And they'd be like, man, you're just a townie, dude.
01:45:29.000I just don't mean to sound that irritated.
01:45:31.000I really don't care as much as I sound.
01:45:34.000But I need to show you that there's other stuff to do, and you guys should be hanging out.
01:45:41.000And then, like, it was weird, because I was telling them, like, you know, when I was a kid, we used to watch Troll 2, and, like, we would have sleepover, watch Troll 2, and make fun of it.
01:45:50.000So I'm like, I go up there, like, late at night, like, one in the morning, they're all watching Troll 2, but the thing is, like, they're deep into the movie.
01:45:56.000I'm like, oh my god, we always turned it off after the first hour.
01:46:00.000You guys, I forgot to tell you, you guys are gonna warp your brains watching all of Troll 2. I've never seen Troll 2. I only saw Troll 1. What's the difference?
01:46:12.000There is a movie, I think, called Troll, but it's not related.
01:48:09.000Well, you know how the secret knowledge of things, like videos getting passed around before YouTube, and it's no different than music was the same way.
01:50:42.000West Virginia is a strange place, man.
01:50:44.000And those people that are, you know, living in trailers and doing a lot of pills and there's like entire communities have zero hope and insanely poor.
01:53:12.000But growing up in Akron, you guys had to feel like you were on the outside of the music business, right?
01:53:19.000Like the business itself was in Nashville and L.A. and New York.
01:53:23.000Growing up in a town, do you think there's an advantage?
01:53:26.000Well, we did, but oddly, Pat and I had a connection to the real music business, both in our family.
01:53:34.000My cousin was Robert Quine, a guitar player, who played with Lou Reed and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, one of the first punk guitar players, really influential, and then Pat's uncle's Ralph Carney, saxophone player, played on all the Tom Waits records,
01:55:23.000Well, that's why someone who doesn't understand anxiety is never going to understand how a person like you, with all that success, could still get weirded out.
01:55:53.000And we all knew bands growing up that kind of did, right?
01:55:56.000They had a couple good albums and then things kind of went off the rails.
01:56:00.000Dude, it's like my favorite band is growing up with Devo because they're from Akron and they're like this different kind of crazy band, punk band.
01:56:10.000There is something special about Akron, though.
01:56:55.000But yeah, Akron, I mean, Ohio and the Midwest, it's an inspiring place because it kind of is a vacuum and the people who are operating there, like 99% of them are operating just because they have no other choice and they love doing what they're doing.
01:57:10.000So you go to New York the first time and it's like, you know, the smallest little band has a connection to the biggest producer and it's like that here too, you know?
01:58:43.000We realized at the age of 22, we realized if we signed this shit and they can't get a contract to us to even look at in six weeks, if we make a record, we're going to be so fucking logjammed.
01:58:55.000We're never going to be able to do this shit.
01:58:57.000So we took the gamble and we signed with the small indie and just kept fucking going.
01:59:01.000And when we finally went to a major, it was a subsidiary of a major with a really supportive president and we were kind of on the outside still.
01:59:12.000Even though we were inside, we were on the outside.
01:59:16.000We've never had an A&R guy sit around and tell us to speed a song up or whatever.
01:59:20.000But the problem is, if you get in without having some of those boxes ticked, and you get in, you sign a big record deal off the bat, some fucking dumbass who has a communications degree from, like, fucking Pepperdine is going to be sitting down next to you and be like,
01:59:55.000And it's basically what they are doing right then when they're getting it in your head and be like, You gotta change the hi-hat on the mix, man.
02:00:03.000What they're saying is, when this record fucking fails, and I can't deliver any sort of fandom to you, that I'm gonna say that you turned the hi-hat down too low.
02:00:13.000Or, I turned the hi-hat, you didn't turn it down low enough.
02:00:47.000So if someone came in that wasn't Danger Mouse, or one of the mixing engineers we've worked with, if someone came in and said the kick drum sounds like shit, we'd be like, fuck off.
02:00:59.000We know what a kick drum can sound like.
02:01:04.000And I think basically, if you can spend the time, get the time.
02:01:07.000That's why back in the day, it's like, A band takes years to develop.
02:01:16.000It took us eight years before we got us on the radio of actively making records and touring.
02:01:22.000And a lot of this stuff is set up with labels where they want a hit on the second record.
02:01:27.000I'm married to a woman who sold millions and millions of albums of songs that she wrote.
02:01:35.000And when she turned in an Americana record, Like, Warner Brothers gave her such the runaround, they shelved the record that cost 800 grand to make.
02:01:44.000Because they said there wasn't any hits on it.
02:02:47.000Dude, I think there's a lot of good records, but I also think, I think there's a lot of records that started off really good, and then some Pepperdine dude is like, remix this, you need to remix it, you need to add this, you need to do this, do this.
02:03:14.000But if you're really a producer or musician that makes records and you turn in a record, it's so frustrating when you get someone that doesn't know what they're doing coming back like, oh, maybe you should do this.
02:05:47.000If I was going to sign a band and someone offered me, they said I had a million dollar budget to sign a new band, I also wouldn't give them all the money because there's no way I'd make it back.
02:07:27.000The fact that Dan and I grew up next to each other, the fact that we were close in age, the fact that we were able to put up with each other's shit and find each other amusing after 30 years of knowing each other, it's all fucking insane.
02:07:40.000But you guys obviously have a very good balance.
02:07:43.000Well, it's been up and down, but that has to do with a lot of factors, like we said.
02:07:51.000Overtouring is pretty much the main thing.
02:09:24.000And the mere fact that we can't grasp infinity would lead someone like maybe Elon to believe that purposely that was left off in some sort of simulation or whatever.
02:10:01.000He was trying to explain to me that because of probability, it's more likely...
02:10:06.000Or very likely that we're in a simulation because of the probability of someone eventually creating it and that it's very possible that we're in it right now and more probable than not.
02:10:19.000A simulation has to be a simulation that why would it's a simulation of what from what?
02:10:25.000Well, here's something I know for sure, okay?
02:10:27.000This is what I know for sure, by my own experiences, that we are the only people on this planet that have ever gotten to 2019. This is where we are.
02:11:06.000It might be that this is a crazy situation that happens incredibly rarely where you have a planet that's this close to the Sun where these life forms figure out how to fuck with matter in an incredible way and they start flying and sending things through the air that videos that instantly get to your phone.
02:11:39.000So it's almost built in mathematically that infinity is so big, there's so many possibilities that everything that you've ever recorded has also been recorded by you in another place with infinite variations of each individual song, infinite variations of each album,
02:11:55.000that there's infinite versions and that infinite versions of each version And so it's insane, the whole thing's impossible for our little ant brains to wrap around it.
02:14:23.000I just don't understand how that's all possible.
02:14:26.000How can you dig tunnels under LA, make batteries, make solar panels, make electric cars, make rockets, shoot them into space, plan to colonize Mars, like what?
02:15:51.000No, it was based on something that sort of is...
02:15:55.000I have this dream where it's reoccurring where I'm in a house that I'm vaguely familiar with, but there's all these additions that I discover, and they're usually either really rickety and dangerous or really beautiful and completely need to be fixed up and covered,
02:16:14.000Last night I had this dream where I was in a house I used to own with my wife and...
02:16:21.000There was a home invasion, and I had something that they needed, and they basically told me that if I had it hidden, and I said they were going to come back if I didn't give it to them.
02:17:45.000People were lining up at midnight around the block.
02:17:47.000Kids don't understand that there was something interesting about going to a record store and seeing records that you had no idea what they were.
02:17:54.000You'd pick up the album and you'd look at it.
02:17:56.000You'd look at the artwork and I'm like, what is this?
02:17:58.000And you flip it over to the back and sometimes you got roped in.
02:18:02.000You know, sometimes you got roped in just by a cool album cover.
02:18:08.000Do you remember when there were certain stores that would have those little stations and you'd have a button and you had headphones and you could put the headphones on and listen to an album for a couple seconds?
02:18:17.000I feel like I spent my whole life doing that.
02:18:19.000Pat and I went from city to city, went to all the record shops.
02:18:23.000Did they let you listen to the whole album there?
02:20:09.000She's an insanely talented individual, insanely amazing person.
02:20:13.000Her audience was commercial radio, top 40. And the thing about Top 40 is it's like it's the same type of person that goes to watch whatever's popular on television or Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
02:20:28.000Like someone who watches Keeping Up with the Kardashians is probably not familiar with Gilligan's Island.
02:20:58.000When I would go through certain friends of mine's parents' records, they'd have all these records.
02:21:03.000And they're like, Oh yeah, I used to listen to that, used to listen to that, used to listen to that.
02:21:06.000And I go through Dan's dad's records or my dad's records, my dad would be still listening to that shit.
02:21:11.000The point is that these people were buying like Billy Ocean records and my dad was buying like Cream records and he was a fan of music and this person was a passive pop fan.
02:21:21.000And I think that what you're experiencing is when you try to compare pop Maybe some of this pop stuff has some sort of credibility because it's independent or whatever, but I think it's a very weird thing trying to figure it out.
02:21:35.000I think booking a festival nowadays is probably fucking really crazy.
02:21:39.000That's why the Woodstock thing, they didn't know what to do.
02:21:43.000When we were told about the festival, it was like we were going to headline Saturday night.
02:21:47.000When the lineup came out, it was like Chance the Rapper...
02:21:51.000Us, and I forget who else was on it, but there were a couple people, there were like three headliners, and we're like, that's insane.
02:22:59.000The music business is set up the way it is because there are independent people who have made...
02:23:05.000Very successful careers without having to engage the machine, right?
02:23:10.000But traditionally if you wanted to sell out Madison Square Garden, traditionally, there are people like Fish or whoever who have done it based on the backs of whatever things that they've done.
02:23:21.000But traditionally if you want to make a record and you want to get to Madison Square Garden, You need promotion.
02:23:30.000Now, almost all of that stuff you can get for free if you have enough bullshit up your sleeve on social media.
02:23:38.000And you can get enough 13-year-olds streaming your shit.
02:23:41.000You get to fuck MSG without a label, without a publicist, without any of that shit.
02:23:46.000A band like us in the situation that we're in now...
02:23:54.000We're in a position to be able to look at the music industry and be like, this is just crazy that we're paying this person this much money to do what they're doing.
02:24:24.000That's a way that PowerStruck is still set up is that if you're on a label, most bands sign these record deals, they gotta give that fucking money back to the label.
02:24:56.000That's why you'd see bands like, I don't know, fucking huge bands in the 70s, Bad Company or whoever, they would sell fucking huge ass fucking stadiums for like $3 a ticket, maybe have a bunch of support,
02:25:12.000sell a couple million records, find out the manager stole all the fucking money, write a memoir about it.
02:25:18.000It's like the tale of the oldest time.
02:25:22.000You know, it's like, I come from like an indie rock background, and it's always, it was sort of like, and Dan does too, and it's like, you know, when we were coming up, it was like, even kind of having any knowledge of the business, it was like, It was considered uncool.
02:25:51.000But it's funny now where I'm just like realizing...
02:25:56.000We took a break off the road for four years.
02:25:59.000And when we came back three years after a break to make a record, it was like we had gleaned a lot of perspective.
02:26:08.000And our conversations when we first started making this record, aside from like Watching the news and talking about that and making each other laugh and shit.
02:26:19.000This band is something really fucking special.
02:26:24.000The fact that we're sitting in this room 18 years after starting this band, And it fucking working out and we're fucking here.
02:26:34.000We need to make sure that this band is always something that's fun and not a burden and not stressful.
02:27:52.000We've made, between the two of us, something like 60 plus albums.
02:27:59.000When I finished a record I'm really proud of and I sent it to Warner Brothers, the last time I did that, they didn't even fucking respond to the email.
02:28:09.000When that shit happens to you, you know what you want to do?
02:28:24.000But what we need is we need people to work with people who understand that the Black Keys is very important to us, but it's also a vehicle that we can leverage to help our other artists when we're producing shit.
02:28:41.000To have been in this business for 20 years and honestly understand the business better than most fucking managers and be treated like dog shit by this person that you've made millions of dollars for.
02:30:21.000If you just developed a podcast where you played new music and then talked shit the way you do now, it would be gigantic.
02:30:30.000If you just go on the road, just do Pat and Dan, you can call it Pat and Dan on the road, and you guys just do it from your tour bus or wherever, you just wind him up, let him talk shit about things, and then play music, like music that you really enjoy.
02:30:44.000If someone like Spotify wouldn't jump on something like that, they'd be crazy.
02:30:48.000It's a great idea, and you could use it as a platform to help artists avoid the system entirely.
02:30:54.000I'm thinking that might work, but also...
02:31:04.000If someone wanted to do something like that, it's a great idea, because you can use it to launch, like I've done with comics on this podcast.
02:31:13.000You find people that are funny, let everybody know.
02:32:20.000Where it is something that we can figure out a way to actually do the things we're passionate about, which is a lot of it is making records and even to make a record and press it.
02:32:37.000So, I guess what I was trying to say was you'd expect that someone would look at your work and respect it enough to kind of step in and help out.
02:32:45.000Because it's not like you're asking for fucking millions of dollars a year to finance some shit.
02:32:48.000You're asking for like a couple hundred grand.
02:32:52.000But that's the problem with the music industry.
02:32:54.000Is that certain labels are willing to give like...
02:33:01.000A SoundCloud rapper, like $15 million.
02:33:05.000But then they look at a band and they can't quantify their metrics, like maybe the Black Keys or whoever, and they don't give a shit.
02:33:14.000Help me out with this, because I don't understand it.
02:34:04.000If they don't think so, and they think that you want to leave, and you got two records left, they shelve that record until you go make another one.
02:35:41.000We're like in the fucking top.001% of this shit and still fucking annoying every single fucking day.
02:35:50.000The trick to the music industry is because if you really love music, like the way that Dan and I do, where it is still the thing that we're most passionate about.
02:36:05.000But yet, you have to find that fine line where you don't...
02:36:08.000When you make a record you're really proud of and no one fucking hears it, and no one that works with you even responds to an email about it, you have to find that space where you don't want to kill everybody.
02:39:59.000When I found this photograph that I just hung up on my road case of Dan and I playing one of our first shows, I'm like, oh, this is important.
02:40:06.000I should make sure I have this hung up.
02:40:09.000Because it just reminds me of all the fucking days that we spent like...
02:40:13.000Being fucking miserable in a van because we love music so much we go play a show for fucking nobody and maybe make enough money to get like a Motel 6 room share a bed get up the next day and go to Waffle House and keep fucking doing it for years and years and years and years But it does take that type of motivation and it's frustrating when you do that and then you get to a point where it is the point that we're at and you feel like you've gotten really good at what you
02:40:43.000do and you help another artist and you realize that after all that work, it's like the myth of Sisyphus.
02:40:50.000It's like, oh, after all that work, it doesn't move the fucking clock at all.
02:40:54.000Still, these same motherfuckers aren't fucking helping, you know?
02:41:00.000And then you start realizing what really has made a difference.
02:41:03.000I mean, I've heard people say, take credit for our success, say that it was because we played the Spike TV Video Game Awards.
02:42:23.000The times are fucking changing, you know?
02:42:25.000And I think that's the hard part, trying to pivot with it.
02:42:28.000And I think if you're, it's like guys our age who are running these labels, looking at these view counts and this shit, and they're all fucking getting it wrong.
02:42:36.000Well, they're getting it wrong because their business is money.
02:43:59.000The older I get, the more I realize how special that is.
02:44:02.000You know, I always took it for granted.
02:44:04.000I mean, I remember when we were trying to audition bass players, we had this one guy try to come and play with us, and I just remember it just fucked everything up.
02:47:34.000If I could go back in time and give our 22-year-old selves one piece of advice, it would be like, don't tour with your girlfriends until you have a kid and they can come out for a couple shows.
02:48:16.000The hard part is that I'm up for the work, and Dan's up for the work.
02:48:19.000And when we're on tour, I go through periods of time where I get phone calls and be like, what the fuck are you doing, motherfucker?
02:48:26.000You know, or, you know, like, I miss you, like, that guilt, or it's just like, I'm, like, literally in the back of a Ford Econo van, like, with, like, a torn-up copy of TV Guide, reading it for the fifth time, because we don't have any money, no cell phone,
02:48:41.000or, like, with a Nokia phone, like, getting the guilt trip and stuff.
02:48:47.000It's like too real to even talk about.
02:48:49.000Our first tour, I remember Dan having to stop at the payphone.
02:50:38.000I think that the best thing that ever happened to us is that we didn't experience success until our sixth album.
02:50:46.000It is, because if we would have got that when we were 23, we would have never been able to sit down and realize what the fuck was going on.
02:50:54.000Everything about us has been just sort of...
02:51:23.000I mean, there are a lot of friends who start off playing music, but most of those stories end in either just failure, giving up, hating each other, or some shit version of that.
02:51:40.000The simulation, there has to be a simulator to play the simulation on, and that's the problem.
02:51:46.000It could just be we're confused about what reality is in general.
02:51:50.000It might be the reason why we think it's a simulation is because it exists in so many different planes and it's probably always shifting all around us all the time and some of the way you think does have some effect on the world itself.
02:52:03.000Well, I used to wake up in the morning and Like, drink a cup of coffee, smoke a cigarette, play a video game, jam on my drums, drive around, hang out with my friends.
02:52:16.000Now I wake up and I do so much shit, and none of it is necessarily stuff I want to be doing.
02:52:24.000That I do think that there's no way we're in a simulation, because I would never fucking have simulated that.
02:52:36.000But if you just decided that it was a simulation, and you said, well, I don't like this course, I want to shift some things about it, it would probably be easier to do if you knew it was a simulation than it would be to shift them in your own life.
02:52:49.000If you're like, I'm doing too many things, I'm just going to take these, I'm going to phase these out and piss these people off.
02:52:53.000Yeah, no, that's why I think we're not living in a simulation, because every time I do make a decision to change something, it gets better.
02:53:01.000So you're learning and growing in real time.
02:54:40.000It's that thing where you get to that age and you get forced to just drink Slim Fast all the fucking day.
02:54:46.000It's a bummer to think that someone's getting divorced at 85, but then part of me goes, well, is it more of a bummer to be in a terrible relationship when you're 85?
02:58:56.000Actually, Dan's brother, it all takes place in this town called Nilbog, which is even one of the best parts is that it takes place in a town called Nilbog and the little kid sees the sign in the rearview mirror and is like, Nilbog is goblin backwards.
03:01:14.000No, see, if you were gonna hack the CEO of the biggest fucking social media platform in the world, wouldn't you think there'd be a goddamn ruthless investigation?
03:01:23.000They would send the Masada after those kids.
03:04:04.000Well, people will also say that you're bullying if you retweet it because you're sicking your Twitter mob on them.
03:04:09.000Yeah, but like you can spin anything however you want to do it, but my Twitter mob was like fucking, at the time, was like 3,000 people in Ohio.
03:04:26.000But then, you know, the Justin Bieber thing happened and it was like, I just, I realized at that point, like, it's a real, like, A, these are all kids.
03:04:36.000A lot of these people are just fucking idiots.
03:05:51.000You know, that, of course, would never go on now, and I could see how somebody fight offended, but at the time, when I saw that for the first time when I was six or seven, like, you know, that was a different time.
03:06:03.000Do you remember C. Thomas Howell's Soul Man?
03:08:38.000Dude, I don't know, but then I realized something.
03:08:40.000I was like, not only was he a doctor, but every night after the day, he would sit down at his computer and do his journal.
03:08:49.000Which is, I know for a fact, I don't know for a fact, but I'm pretty sure that the whole basis of Sex and the City's It's based off of that.
03:09:11.000The elevator doorman or something real strange.
03:09:15.000Why was I just rattling off different cartoons?
03:09:16.000Perfect Strangers is supposed to take place in the same universe as Family Matters, but I do think Sucks in the City takes place in the same universe as Doogie Howser.
03:11:23.000The thing is that the manager is still getting the same cut of whatever you're making.
03:11:28.000You're just spending all of your cash.
03:11:30.000The most genius thing you can do in the music business, if you're a manager or business manager, is to get your client to spend all their money because they just have to work more.