On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe sits down with The Black Keys' Dan Kotnik to talk about the making of their new album, "You're a Black Key," and how the band came to be. They also talk about what it's like being in a rock band, and how they got their name changed from Black Keys to the Black Keys, and why they chose the name "The Black Keys". Also, they talk about how they came to the name Black Keys and what it means to be a rock and roll band and why it's a good name for a rock & roll band. It's a jam-packed episode that you don't want to miss! Check it out! -Joe Rogan and the Crew at The BlackKeys' new album 'You're A Black Key' is out now! Check out the album on Amazon and other major streaming platforms! If you haven't listened to the album yet, you should definitely do so before you listen to this episode! It's so good, it's one of the best albums I've ever listened to! Thank you so much to our good friend, Dan Kotnicka, and I hope you enjoy it! Cheers, Cheers! Cheers. -Jon & The Crew! CHEERS! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's a Black Keys Album? 3:30 - What is a Blackkey? 4:00-10: What are you listening to? 11:30- What's your favorite song? 16:00 17: What do you like about it? 18:40 - How did you think of the album? 19:00 Aftermath? 21: What kind of song do you think it's better? 22:30 23:00 Is it better than the album you're a black key? 24:00 What are the most important thing? 25:00 Do you have a favorite song you're listening to right now? 26:00 How do you want to hear it right? 27: What would you like to hear from someone else? 28:00 Can you think about your favorite piece of music? 29: What does it sound like? 30:00 Does it sound better than that? 35:00 Who do you would like to see me try to make a better version of the song again?
00:00:36.000How the fuck are you guys so consistent?
00:00:39.000You know, we learned to play together, you know, 23 years ago.
00:00:45.000I, like, literally started playing drums with him, because before that I was playing guitar, and I guess we just learned how to play together.
00:00:55.000I think we also have very similar tastes.
00:00:57.000It's all kind of very, it's very, I believe in fate after meeting, after this existence we have, because if it weren't for us growing up a few houses down from each other, we would have never met and we've become, you know, like literally like brothers.
00:01:12.000We have this We're like, our first record came out 20 years ago this week, and we've been doing this thing.
00:01:20.000And it kind of feels like a dream when I think back about all the shit we've been through.
00:01:26.000But as far as the consistency, it's like we've always been on the same pace.
00:01:35.000And we were like, you know, two dorks living around the corner from each other who had these things called four tracks, you know, like a little cassette.
00:01:43.000And you could record four different sounds.
00:01:53.00097. And then we would fuck around on our four-track, and I would take it over to his house, his parents' house, and we'd set microphones up in the bathroom to get different sounds.
00:02:05.000He just sat on the toilet, put the drums in front of him, used the toilet as the seat.
00:02:10.000And we would just have fun, and then...
00:02:15.000It was 2001. It was right around 9-11.
00:02:18.000I bought this digital 12-track recorder.
00:02:21.000It was a big deal because it cost like $1,000.
00:04:03.000It was like within a second, we named the band.
00:04:05.000We sent this thing off and we got this record deal.
00:04:07.000And then we got this record deal with a small little label on it.
00:04:12.000In LA called Alive and they basically said if you send us 12 songs we'll put your record out and we'll send you like 50 copies on vinyl and 200 CDs and they also sent this little paragraph contract which is like the most bulletproof contract we've ever signed.
00:04:45.000Yeah, it's this little really shitty house in the ghetto in Akron.
00:04:52.000It was rat-infested, and I lived there with some buddies, and I set up in the basement with this recorder, and Dan would come over every day, and we would record, trying to make this record, trying to figure out what a record was.
00:05:57.000We just guessed and we sent the thing off and got these records sent back a few weeks later and we were like hooked and we were like At that point, we were like, what do we do now?
00:06:10.000And the guy at Alive, Patrick, who runs the label, was very helpful and was like, he's French, and I can't really do the accent, but he was like, man, you got to go on the road, man.
00:06:20.000And he had this mercenary booking agent book a tour for us.
00:06:26.000And I just found, like, the original kind of route sheet.
00:07:05.000We just got a cell phone that was too expensive for us to even use.
00:07:10.000And we were in this 1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager, just driving across the country with just a Ran McNally Atlas trying to figure out how to get to these places.
00:07:28.000And there's always construction and just totally fucks you up.
00:07:32.000When we were 22, we were little kids, really, because we were also kind of sheltered, I think, for 22. Yeah, we'd never really been anywhere.
00:07:42.000I'd been to New York City with my dad at antique shows or something, but...
00:10:55.000When you think back about it now, it must seem like fate.
00:11:01.000Just the circumstances you guys meeting, the fact that the rest of the band didn't show up, the fact that you guys lived right down the street from each other, and the way you guys get along together and make music.
00:12:07.000And he goes, dude, you're going to fucking love these guys.
00:12:10.000And I've just been a gigantic fan ever since.
00:12:13.000I wish I could remember the first song I listened to, but I don't.
00:12:16.000But uh your your music is so consistent and it's not like a lot of the stuff that's out there It's very uniquely your own and I don't know how you guys are doing that.
00:12:39.000Well, that's the cool thing about seeing people discover our band.
00:12:44.000I always think back to that first record and be like, oh yeah, this would be...
00:12:48.000If I was a 15-year-old and I discovered our band, knowing that that first record was this homemade thing, you could...
00:12:58.000You know, I think that we kind of have, our story's kind of like, you know, it's like American Dream band type of situation.
00:13:04.000Like two dudes who grew up on the same street, who got bullied by the same guy, and traded baseball cards with each other, like, start this band, and now, you know, you can see, like, that first record's like a testament to us learning how to do it,
00:13:21.000you know, because it's so raw and lo-fi and fucked up.
00:13:38.000He's this really weird guy who wears dresses and shit and sings in his basement.
00:13:44.000And he set up he set up a fucking like a like a curtain and put like an old VHS tape and made his own videos and Like he's one of his songs called really big cock And he's either gay or he's bisexual.
00:14:03.000He's cross-dresses, but his stuff is really fucking interesting, but it's super low-budget, sounds terrible.
00:14:14.000Nothing sounds crisp and clean, but there's some character to that, the fact that the way he does it that way.
00:17:32.000I mean, it's kind of truly American folk music, really.
00:17:35.000It's like, compared to some of the blues stuff that, you know, Dan and I listen to, which is also self-taught, like, some of it kind of insane.
00:22:16.000And when we first kind of realized that we both liked the same kind of music, it was kind of through this guy.
00:22:24.000Because I was listening to this band called John Spencer Blues Explosion, and they made a record with this dude R.L. Burnside.
00:22:30.000Dan was listening to RL as well and all this other stuff that was on this label called Fat Possum that we ended up signing to years later.
00:22:40.000We basically made a tribute to that music that came out last year.
00:22:43.000Part of the promo stuff was the only thing we could do during COVID was we drove down to Bentonia, Mississippi and we played a show at the oldest continually operated juke joint called the Blue Front Cafe.
00:24:34.000I always get confused when things that are really awesome lose popularity in an area while generally being still appreciated by anybody who hears them everywhere else.
00:25:57.000Can rip your face off than being in the same room with, yeah, like a great band.
00:26:02.000I was on news radio with Phil Hartman, and when Phil Hartman was, I think he was 19, he worked at the Whiskey as like some sort of like a kid that was like helping them make sure that speakers didn't fall off, like stage hands,
00:28:16.000He would do a little stand-up for the crowd when we were doing the show.
00:28:19.000But anyway, the point is, just imagine being there live, that young, and seeing Hendrix, and being in a position like, how do you get feet away from him, where you're literally holding onto a speaker?
00:28:35.000When we were first touring, we got befriended by some music journalists.
00:28:41.000That's kind of our little network that we would hang out with when we were on tour.
00:28:44.000It was like hipster writers who liked our band.
00:28:50.000And this one guy, Jay Babcock, we stayed at his house when we were in L.A. early 2003, and he had a whole box of VHS concerts and stuff, and he busted out this Black Sabbath live in Paris,
00:29:06.0001970. I think it's the best concert footage I've ever seen.
00:29:12.000And I've never officially released the whole thing, but it's the best concert I've ever seen.
00:29:20.000There's a couple songs from it on YouTube, but he had the whole concert, and it was like up for French TV. Amazing, but you can see a young Ozzy just like really just with it and just stoic.
00:29:33.000Yeah, head banging, not moving, just banging his head.
00:29:36.000The drummer, Bill Ward, is just going off.
00:29:38.000Bill Ward is insane in this show, and he keeps his extra drumsticks in his belt loop and his jeans.
00:33:10.000Well, they figured out when you're messed up, you're not thinking straight, and this is the best way to control a population.
00:33:16.000I never really fucked with that kind of stuff, but one time I was partying in New York, this was probably 10 years ago, and a friend of mine was like, it was like 4 in the morning, and we were on tour, and someone was like, you should have some of this Adderall.
00:35:51.000There's so many people just being shitty to people in that form.
00:35:55.000In a way that you would never want to be in real life.
00:35:58.000You'd have to be a terrible person to just say to a person that you don't even know some of the things that people will type out on Twitter.
00:36:21.000There's a lot of, like, weirdness where people will find these little tribes of people that think very similar to them.
00:36:29.000I mean, we were talking earlier, I got a 14-year-old girl, and I worry so much about her with social media and how just what she thinks of everyday normal life, you know what I mean?
00:36:41.000They've shown, you know, Jonathan Haidt has a great book about it called The Coddling of the American Mind.
00:36:47.000They show the uptick in girls' self-harm, suicide and self-harm that's directly connected to social media, correlated at least, because it's all the same time frame.
00:36:57.000It's like right around the time the iPhone comes out, right around the time when people had Internet access on their phone.
00:37:03.000And then they started using apps, whenever that was.
00:37:07.000You know, what is like online dating life for people either?
00:37:10.000When you're just swiping right and swiping left to meet people?
00:37:38.000It's like, if you went back to like the 1930s, you're probably like, oh, I wouldn't want to be a kid today with all the cars back when I was a boy.
00:37:45.000You know, it's been our thought always.
00:37:48.000We've always looked, you know, at the next generation coming up thinking, oh boy, I wouldn't want to be you today.
00:37:56.000When we were making this album, it was like the first time I'd really socialized outside my house in a year, because we were pretty Locked down.
00:38:08.000We'd go to dance studio and just shoot the shit and tell stories because we went to the same high school and there are a lot of stories, just insane stories from high school, how fun it was, how crazy.
00:38:20.000We were kind of like the last generation or close to it, pre-cell phone, pre-social media.
00:38:27.000We used to see the girls at our school The black girls specifically would get into these fights that were just so epic.
00:38:36.000That, I mean, it was just, it was rattling.
00:38:39.000I saw this girl get thrown through the trophy case.
00:38:48.000And, like, I think about my stepdaughter who goes to a really fancy private school in Nashville, and, yeah, like, she's never seen a fight.
00:39:03.000Isn't that weird, though, that we can look back as long as we survived those experiences?
00:39:07.000You look back at them like there's something kind of cool about it, like flavors your life.
00:39:12.000But you don't want your kids to be exposed to that, right?
00:39:16.000We made a video for our first single off this record called Wild Child, and the whole concept was that we were just going to try to...
00:39:27.000We work in some things that happened to us at high school, but kind of put it through the concept of high school today, what kids can get into, the trouble that kids can get into.
00:39:37.000But we were talking about our high school a lot.
00:39:43.000We had this health teacher who smoked a pipe while we ran the track.
00:39:50.000And the way that he taught sex ed, which is like he didn't go into any detail about anything, but he grabbed a stack of photographs of venereal diseases.
00:44:02.000It's all like a sickness that infects someone.
00:44:09.000I was just thinking about all this, the wildness of today and all the strange, it seems like more now than ever.
00:44:23.000I don't know what the fuck the future holds for the human race.
00:44:27.000More now than ever, look at all this crazy shit that's going on with Russia, and I start thinking, I don't know if we're going to make it through this.
00:44:56.000When I think about everything that's been going on the last couple years, for some reason this image keeps coming up.
00:45:02.000And it takes place when we were on tour.
00:45:06.000And I find it to be the most comforting thing for some reason, but it was after a show in Houston, there was these two chicks that came to the show and were hanging out, and they wanted to hang out with us after the show.
00:45:17.000So we went down to their car, and all they wanted to do with us was a bunch of whippets.
00:45:22.000And we went to their car, do you remember this?
00:45:24.000And their whole backseat of their car was just filled up with whippets.
00:45:30.000My brother was there and Dan was there and just sat there and did whippets with them.
00:46:13.000Because they had those fucking big-ass jugs, because we would make the cream back there.
00:46:17.000So they had these big-ass jugs of the juice, and they would get back there and...
00:46:23.000My friend's dad was a dentist, and they used to go, I mean, he's about 10 years older than me, so this was years ago, but they would sneak into his office and just turn the nitrous machines on, sit down in the chairs, and chill out.
00:48:18.000Yeah, apparently with some people that get addicted.
00:48:20.000He went into a treatment place out in Thousand Oaks.
00:48:24.000There's another friend of mine put him in there, and I remember thinking, man, that's the stuff that John Lilly used to take when he was in the isolation tank.
00:48:30.000He used to intramuscularly, yeah, he used to shoot himself up with ketamine.
00:48:34.000He'd get in the tank, bang, hit his thigh with a fucking needle and pump it full of ketamine, you know, open the door, throw the needle out, and just go into another dimension.
00:49:39.000But in the early days, when people started making computers for gaming, you would change the speed of the computer and overclock it past its specifications.
00:49:49.000And you could do it with some, but some would burn out and break.
00:49:53.000Some of them, though, would make it better.
00:52:56.000Her job was, she was partnered up with a guy who she ended up, I guess, maybe being romantic with, but they both were agents and they were sent to China to start an art gallery.
00:53:09.000They were basically hanging out with the artists and the subculture and then selling that work to the successful business guys and politicians.
00:53:24.000I guess she was able to talk about it because they let her out of the thing.
00:53:29.000I'd always wanted to be in the CIA. That Windows thing is Operation Midnight Climax.
00:53:48.000They also ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, where Marilyn Manson, or not Marilyn Manson, Charles Manson, excuse me, was getting all his acid.
00:54:12.000Dude, the last time we were on here, like three days later, I ran into, we were playing our first arena show in years at the Pepsi Center in Denver.
00:54:23.000I reached out to you after this, but I was like sitting backstage and our production manager came back.
00:55:46.000But a part of it probably was the fact that Tom DeLonge was telling me that, like, he told me that, he was like, do you remember the blackout that happened in 2003 in New York?
00:55:57.000Which I remember because we were traveling in from Europe and we landed in Newark.
00:59:01.000We've definitely been in situations where it's like, oh, why are all these people hanging out with each other?
00:59:08.000It's like every rich and famous person hangs out and on vacation here together.
00:59:12.000And St. Bart's on New Year's Eve, it's like if you ever wanted to take over the world, you just need to take over St. Bart's on New Year's Eve.
00:59:23.000We played a show there for Larry Gagosian and Roman Abramovich years ago.
00:59:29.000And it was a really cool, private little beach party.
00:59:33.000And a bunch of celebrities were there, like Chris Rock and Rick Rubin or whatever.
00:59:39.000But then at the same time, we're flying in and we land and they're like, oh yeah, they're gonna take a boat from St. Martin's over to St. Bart's.
00:59:47.000So I get on this boat And I was like, this thing's flying.
01:03:23.000Yeah, they trained them to be essentially suicide bombers.
01:03:28.000In a global war on terror, the Navy reportedly began training dolphins to shoot potential terrorists targeting Navy ships.
01:03:35.000But a special investigator claimed that after Hurricane Katrina, a few of those deadly dolphin guards escaped, and the Navy has been looking for them ever since.
01:03:43.000So they got dolphin, armed dolphin assassins.
01:05:48.000I do kind of think, like, a cat, like, they're cute and cuddly, but the people I know that, like, are cat lovers, like, dude, it's so deep, it's so intense that they get offended when you even float that idea that, like, I've never, like, I've lived with a cat in my house now for years.
01:06:07.000I try not to trip on it, but, like, I don't...
01:06:10.000I would bet that that toxoplasmosis, the same way it tricks a rat and rewires a rat's body, it probably in some ways does exist in a way that the cats sort of domesticate us.
01:06:41.000I don't think they can cure that either.
01:06:42.000I mean, think about the stories like, my stepdad bought a house Before I met my mother, and the woman was living in there by herself with like 50 cats.
01:07:46.000I'm sitting there and I look over and I'm like, holy shit, there's like a 10-foot fucking You shouldn't be.
01:08:03.000Yeah, but I rented this house in Kiowa Island Right when I was buying this house in Charleston, the key was like a golf kind of wonderland right south of Charleston.
01:08:16.000There's like 10 golf courses and some luxury homes.
01:08:45.000She went to go take a selfie with an alligator, and she apparently took it and walked away, and she's like, that's the last time I'll do that, because it snapped at her, and it apparently went up and...
01:09:54.000I mean, it wasn't, like, some sort of organized park, and this is, oh, they've all got, they're taking care of these alligators.
01:10:00.000No, these are wild alligators, just hanging out.
01:10:02.000There's this amusement park in Ohio called Cedar Point, and there's a carp infestation in Lake Erie.
01:10:09.000You would go up there, and you could buy fish food and throw it in, but we all realized that you just spit in the water, and they jump up, eat your spit.
01:10:20.000But I thought it was really fucking scary that these fish were so ready to eat anything.
01:10:27.000But yeah, the alligator thing, man, And they're nothing compared to crocodiles.
01:15:29.000My dad had this friend that lived in D.C. We used to go visit him for spring break and shit, and he had a hot tub and a rec room on the basement floor, and my brother and I were spending the night there, and I was 16 or something like that.
01:15:43.000And I woke up, and I felt something move, and I thought his dog was fucking with my pillow.
01:16:42.000They are one of the weirdest like represented animals the way we represent them as this wise Creature in the woods that would like answer questions and have solutions to puzzles Well what they really are is a ruthless fucking killer that's that flies at night and snatches other birds right out of their nest It's surreal when they fly over you because you can't hear them and yeah If you see one during the day and you make eye contact with them,
01:17:09.000they look like they're not expecting to be caught.
01:17:14.000Do you know that story, The Staircase?
01:17:18.000It was about a man who was accused and sent to jail for killing his wife, but she had talon marks on her head, and now they think that she got hit by an owl outside the house.
01:17:31.000Because there was blood, her own blood, on the stairs and like leading up into the house.
01:17:38.000And then she fell down a flight of stairs.
01:17:40.000And the thought was initially that this guy had did it to his wife.
01:17:44.000But now the new theory is that a fucking owl hit her because they found microscopic owl feathers in her hair.
01:17:52.000And they think it like that's consistent with the kind of injury that she would have had and that she had lost some blood and Came in the house like all fucked up and fell down a flight of stairs.
01:18:02.000He's fucked if that's all his defense came up with But I think they actually found the cut.
01:18:07.000No, I think owls do do that to people I think owls get...
01:18:12.000Like, other birds will whack you in the fucking head.
01:18:30.000Yeah, dude, like I said, I feel like I never saw one, but now I live just right outside of the city, just right near this big park, and dude, I see the big ass owls, one of the great...
01:20:36.000So there's this place south of Charleston called the Ace Basin.
01:20:40.000It's where three rivers connect and it's like hundreds of thousands of wetland that's protected.
01:20:45.000There's so many bird species down there, but I guess occasionally someone will say that they've seen this thing, but it hasn't been seen since the 30s.
01:20:55.000I never saw an eagle until I went to Alaska.
01:21:11.000Didn't they almost get taken out because of DDT? I don't know what almost got them, but I think lead gets them, too.
01:21:17.000Some of them die from lead poisoning because, like, say someone shoots an animal and doesn't recover it, and they find the lead pellets, they'll eat the animal, and they'll get lead poisoning.
01:21:34.000I just saw this thing that basically everybody alive between like 1940 and now has some significant lead poisoning because of the additive of lead to gas.
01:21:50.000So if you're born, I guess born before 85, there still was a lot of...
01:21:54.000In fact, some countries, they're still using leaded gas somewhere in Africa until this year.
01:21:58.000But I guess lead is actually not as common as you would think as far as being...
01:22:06.000It all stemmed from this guy who was trying to figure out the half-life of some uranium or something, and there was this lead everywhere.
01:22:14.000He realized that no matter what he did to his laboratory, that there was lead on everything, contaminated lead.
01:22:21.000And then he realized that the whole world is contaminated with With lead and that like trillions of IQ points have been lost over the human population from everybody having lead poisoning.
01:25:27.000I'm not a doctor, but I know that there's asbestos mines and stuff like in Canada.
01:25:35.000When I was a kid, I got a lot of construction jobs, and one of them I had to insulate a roof, like crawl in the attic in the crawl space, and use, what is that shit called?
01:30:52.000But, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who just does counseling and does assessments of people's intelligence for prisons and stuff, and this person was basically saying that, you know,
01:31:09.000A higher percentage of the population than you think are just complete idiots.
01:31:13.000No one really acknowledges it, but like...
01:31:17.000Apparently I got in touch with one of them for that prank call.
01:31:19.000But I think, you know, they were saying that, you know, the average IQ in, like, prison is, like, way lower than you would think.
01:31:28.000And that most people who end up in prison, you know, just, they might have lead poisoning or something.
01:32:26.000Well, I had to stop watching it after the second episode because my wife and I were watching it.
01:32:31.000But she owns this vegan restaurant called Pure Food and Wine.
01:32:35.000It was like at Union Square in New York.
01:32:37.000And she starts dating this guy who's basically convincing her to wire him money every day, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that soon they will be immortal and that her pit bull will live forever.
01:34:10.000If you give him money, and also it helps, his thing's all, he has a lot of people on there who are like, oh yeah, I gave Peter, I gave the mission $100, and then I won the lottery.
01:34:21.000Because this whole thing is like Jesus will give you rewards if you donate now.
01:34:46.000I got super fascinated with that story of that woman, Elizabeth Holmes, who made that Theranos company where they developed a blood test that didn't work at all.
01:34:56.000It just takes your finger prick and it scans you for a bunch of different diseases, but apparently it didn't work.
01:35:05.000It's like listening to the amount of people that invested in the amount of money They invested like big-time people.
01:35:11.000Oh, yeah, but hundreds of millions of dollars into this And now it's all just vaporware.
01:35:17.000It's nothing and now she's on trial Yeah, I mean I've seen different people fall for tons of different shit Well, that's how cults get started like those the cults where they brand you There's a certain amount of people that want to belong so badly.
01:35:36.000Or I wonder if it's also people with lead poisoning, or I wonder if it's also people who are medicated.
01:35:43.000I mean, making bad decisions based on what other people think, you think what other people think you should do, I think it's pretty common.
01:35:50.000I mean, when we started the band, there was definitely decisions that we were making based on what we thought other people thought we should do.
01:35:57.000At one point we got offered, you know, to put a Song in a mayonnaise commercial in the UK. Keep in mind, we might have had a couple hundred dollars in our bank account.
01:36:15.000And we were convinced fully by someone who was working with us as a manager that if we took that money and we had a song in that commercial that we would be branded as sellouts and that we would no longer have a career.
01:36:53.000Like, when an artist gets an offer to sell a song for something like Hot Dogs, but it's a shitload of money, what is the thought process that happens?
01:37:03.000It seems like it was a thing when we started.
01:38:47.000Well, what makes a hit today because of the fact that radio is not the big driver anymore?
01:38:52.000What is the biggest driver of Record sales or of streams of like how do people find out about stuff now most I mean, there's this a kind of punk garage rock musician Who goes by the name King Kong on the barbecue show.
01:39:12.000He actually has the second most tick-tocked song right now, which is amazing.
01:39:35.000I don't know, but you know what's interesting to me is how many musicians are selling their publishing.
01:39:39.000We're always told, oh yeah, record sales, no one's buying records, but then you see these people selling their publishing for $150 million, $500 million.
01:39:48.000Bruce Springsteen just sold everything for half a billion dollars.
01:40:31.000But the St. Bart's thing, don't you think all those super ballers, they're the only people that will understand them as other super ballers, and so they have to meet somewhere like a super ballers club?
01:40:43.000I mean, it kind of makes sense that when you get into that oligarch realm of uber wealth and you have a $1.6 billion yacht, you probably don't have a lot of peers.
01:41:08.000But it was, the weird thing was just looking out at the harbor there and seeing that there were like hundreds and hundreds of these huge, yeah, it was crazy.
01:41:18.000Did you see any eyes wide shut type shit?
01:41:21.000I definitely, there were definitely, you know what, I smoked, Rihanna was there, and she was like, do you want to hit this joint?
01:41:28.000She handed me the joint, and I was like, I don't know.
01:41:57.000So when all those very wealthy people and famous people get together, are they having fun at all, or do they still seem uptight all together?
01:45:17.000Do you think this offended the artist when they found out, like Kenny Loggins, when he found out that Danger Zone from Top Gun, original soundtrack, was on the fucking...
01:45:25.000Let's try to figure out what song it was that played when he just came out.
01:47:47.000He can quote you different, you know...
01:47:50.000Different hearings that were held, where the evidence was acquired, why the timeline's wrong in the way they printed into the evidence sheet, and how this guy couldn't have been there because he was three hours away.
01:49:09.000He would have bands come and record their songs, and it was called a Peel Session, and we were lucky enough to get to meet him and be on his show three or four times, all very early in our career.
01:49:20.000And he actually died of a heart attack after climbing Montepicchu.
01:49:24.000But the first time we hung out with him, he was like, you know, I was there when Jack Ruby shot Oswald.
01:49:33.000He was one of the press guys covering it.
01:51:09.000But people have been, you know, Putin's enemies have been assassinated openly.
01:51:14.000It's like a lead isotope, I think, or it's polonium-238.
01:51:19.000It's like a little micro, like apparently...
01:51:22.000I read that a lot of lung cancer from smoking, actually it comes from long-term dosage of little bits of polonium, because it actually, small amounts end up in fertilizer.
01:51:34.000So you smoke the fucking tobacco, little bits accumulate in your lungs, and it can cause carbon radiation in your lungs.
01:53:09.000This dude we grew up with, he got bone cancer, like, in his knee when he was in his mid-20s.
01:53:17.000And, you know, the doctor, he had this one doctor finally, he's like, dude, like, we're going to do a panel, like, on you for heavy metals because this is really strange.
01:53:26.000And he had, like, large doses of cadmium or something in his bones.
01:53:31.000And he's like, man, did you, like, grow up...
01:53:37.000And then he was talking to his mom about it.
01:53:40.000His mom's like, actually, we lived on a commune when you were a baby for like a year in Colorado that used to be a gold mine.
01:53:48.000So like they were drinking this water where they had already filtered in all the heavy metals and apparently he got like serious dosage of some rare earth shit.
01:54:18.000I wonder what happens eventually to that shit.
01:54:23.000The weird thing is that people want to say it's zero emission.
01:54:29.000This idea that that's the solution, that that's going to fix it for us if we all have electric cars.
01:54:36.000Because you've got to have to power that electricity.
01:54:38.000Until we figure out how to make clean electrical power, I mean, if you have clean electrical power, it's like modern nuclear, and it works really well, and it's relatively less toxic.
01:54:50.000I mean, you have some nuclear waste that they have to dispose of, but apparently they're pretty good at that now, and if they can make a reactor that can function and not go down, if they can do that, that's clean.
01:55:01.000And then you have an electric car, and then you're clean.
01:55:03.000But otherwise, you have to find some way to make that fucking power to juice up that battery.
01:55:09.000So it's like, how are you juicing up that battery?
01:55:11.000Because you're still using up a lot of power to do that.
01:55:15.000So if it's coming from a place that's sustainable, if it's electric and it's coming from the wind and turbines and fucking solar panels, great.
01:55:32.000Those fucking places, like, I had a climate scientist on, he was talking about this area in Indiana that has, like, a bunch of coal-fired power plants in the area, and these people, they just have, like, a thin layer of this shit on their car every day.
01:56:35.000But my dad said as a kid, they would wake up and the whole city would just be covered in soot.
01:56:41.000And so when we were starting the band, There was, like, the cheapest kind of place you could find to be loud was these old rubber factories.
01:56:49.000And there was this one that we rented a room in.
01:57:26.000It was crazy because there's the old boardrooms and we had access to this whole abandoned essentially building where we would like string microphone cables together and we'd like set an amp at one side of the room and then microphone like hundreds of feet away to get the natural kind of reverb.
01:57:42.000But the craziest thing was like around the corner from the area we hung out in, there was this just like exploded laboratory, like straight out of like Rick and Morty or something.
01:58:09.000And there's this little, so like there's the more industrial section of the building down at the other end, and there are these holes like through the floor.
01:58:54.000When you go into an area, like an industrialized area where the buildings are fucked, like Detroit, when everything's like shattered and you're driving through abandoned lots.
01:59:04.000I mean, we came from Akron, which was crazy, but the first time we went to Detroit, it was so eye-opening.
01:59:10.000There's that one building downtown where you just see directly through it because just all the windows are blown out.
02:00:23.000You're forced to watch that when you're a kid in Akron.
02:00:26.000When they're out there grilling rabbits.
02:00:29.000It's weird how you see exactly what caused it.
02:00:32.000You're like, wow, what must that have been like for someone who moved there and moved your family there and thought, this is where we live, everything's great, everything's going great, and then companies start pulling out.
02:00:42.000That's what we grew up in, because when we were kids, we would go down, my dad would take us, my dad wrote for the Akron Beacon Journal, the newspaper, which was this prestigious newspaper, started by John S. Knight, who went on to start Knight Ritter, and he had an office there, you know, this guy, the legendary newspaper guy,
02:00:58.000and this was, you know, the newspaper won, like, Pulitzer Prizes, and I just remember people just getting laid off from there.
02:01:06.000Us going downtown and downtown Akron when we were kids, there was a pawn shop and a porn theater.
02:01:26.000That whole area used to be one of the richest cities in the country.
02:01:30.000That's what was cool for us, because we got to exploit that in terms of musical equipment.
02:01:38.000Because there was such a middle class there in the 60s and 70s, that by the time we got into music in the mid-90s, everyone had grown up and sold their instruments.
02:01:47.000So you go down to the little music shop, and you could find a vintage Fender guitar for a couple hundred bucks.
02:04:58.000And so once those tires were first manufactured in the South, then they manufactured in Mexico and other places, and it got rid of all the manufacturing jobs, you know?
02:05:09.000But if they had it, I guess tires would be like $1,000 a tire now or something.
02:05:20.000How bad is it fucking up their environment?
02:05:22.000Oh, my friend worked for Ralph Lauren.
02:05:26.000Doing a gene, signing jeans and stuff.
02:05:29.000And they did all their dyeing and stuff in Texas, or in China.
02:05:33.000He said it was like fucking so toxic and like the waste and he said the conditions of the factories are just so crazy and you know like suicide watch on people and That's one of the wildest things, is that all of our phones come from those places.
02:06:21.000I don't really remember exactly what went down.
02:06:23.000I do know that LeBron, I heard from someone that works with him, he pulls down tens and tens of millions of dollars a year from Chinese sales of basketball shoes in China.
02:06:34.000Not just the manufacturing, but in China.
02:08:11.000Are we fucking poisoning some part of the world?
02:08:15.000Instead of just having ethical manufacturing?
02:08:17.000I don't know, man, but buying this house in South Carolina, you know, you start realizing, like, how, you know, it's like the first time I've really, you know, seen, like, you know, how extensive slave labor was in the U.S., you know, it's insane.
02:11:37.000The people, like, they would, like, in Portland, Oregon, like, they would, people at the bar, they would, like, slip them a mickey, and they'd have, like, these trap doors at the bar, and, like, pssh!
02:11:47.000Spanish fly, open the trap door, boom, they'd wake up, they'd be on a boat to China working, forced, and they call it getting Shanghai'd.
02:15:25.000Andrew Huberman said that alpha-lipoic acid seems to show some promise in alleviating some of the symptoms of not having a sense of smell or taste.
02:16:26.000I was like, I've never fucking heard of that.
02:16:28.000My dad can't smell and the reason why he can't smell is because he walked into a door and broke his nose and then the doctor went to correct it and like severed a nerve and he's never been able to taste since.
02:16:42.000That's the only person I ever knew who couldn't smell was my dad.
02:16:45.000And you know how the way the doctor tested my dad's sense of smell is he picked up his ashtray and said, you smell that?
02:18:16.000That's what was like crushing, like, my friend was the CEO of a hospital near Nashville, and it was all people from outside Nashville with pre-existing conditions taking up all the beds.
02:18:42.000I have a buddy who lived in Brooklyn for a while, and he was trying to grow vegetables in his backyard, but he's a really smart dude, so he dug up the soil and had it tested and just filled with lead.
02:20:10.000It was just Robert Plant posters on people's walls, and everyone knew how to do the little different insignias and put them on your notebooks.
02:20:20.000I had a Led Zeppelin poster on my wall.
02:20:24.000My friends used to give me some shit about liking Led Zeppelin because it was like classic.
02:20:48.000I have a 65 Mustang, and I'm constantly thinking about how the car is only 15 years older than me, but it feels like it's from another era.
02:23:59.000I just drool over all these videos, man.
02:24:02.000So they put BBS wheels on all these cars?
02:24:04.000Well, that's just what they're called, but they put just, you know, accessories from the era on there.
02:24:11.000One car that was fucking incredible from the 1990s that doesn't get its just deserve is the original Acura NSX. That little tiny aluminum car that Acura made.
02:24:24.000That's a 90s car that needs some respect.
02:24:27.000It was like a 90s Acura response to Ferrari, because Ferraris were making these sleek little sports cars.
02:24:36.000And so Acura decided, we're going to show you what a real one is like.
02:24:40.000We're going to make one that doesn't break.
02:24:42.000We're going to make one that you could drive every fucking day.
02:24:45.000So it's like your car, except it doesn't break every 10 minutes.
02:29:15.000Usually, I mean, yeah, there's definitely certain cities.
02:29:18.000On this tour, we're doing 32 shows, and there's some cities that didn't make the cut for whatever reason, routing, that we'll have to go back to.
02:32:13.000There's something about it, like the freedom of that.
02:32:16.000I always think of the beginning of that Hunter S. Thompson documentary where he's talking about the edge, and he's riding the motorcycle on the Pacific Coast Highway, and he's just...
02:32:28.000And then talking about how he gets to a certain speed where it feels like he hears music and everything just seems to come together for him.
02:36:52.000Because they've been making some weird stuff to show at CES and stuff.
02:36:56.000The difference is, I bet, that if you drive one of your bikes, that it's a lot like driving a 1965 Corvette or something like that, that you feel something when you're driving it.
02:37:06.000It's like there's an excitement to having this rolling old art under your ass.
02:37:13.000I just, I look at the clothes they're wearing and I'm just wondering like, you know like in the 50s and I tried to like show what the future would look like and then the 70s come around and everyone's wearing like really ugly bell bottoms.
02:37:24.000I went to the clothing store today and my wife had to buy some shoes and like Dude, all the jeans are designed to emphasize the fupa.
02:39:50.000I think the future is going to be genderless.
02:39:52.000I think what we're seeing now with all this bizarre classifications of things and pronouns and all this craziness with people, I think we're on our way to becoming aliens.
02:40:05.000What that thing is in our head, that archetype of the big head and the little tiny body, that's the future.
02:40:11.000We're going that way and we're gonna go that way because of a fucking an implant or some sort of technological advance But along the way our bodies are gonna get accustomed to this idea of the male and female dynamic is like it doesn't count anymore It's like there's there's a 98 different genders and everybody could be whatever the fuck you want at any given time and it'll slowly make it easier for us to accept becoming aliens and Genderless,
02:40:36.000fucking genital-less, just little spindly bodies moving everything with our minds.
02:43:57.000So if you do have sleep paralysis and you're in the middle of a fucking half-assed dream and you really think there is a demon on your chest?
02:44:03.000I've had it like four or five times every time I've had it.
02:47:54.000I mean, but the hypersonic missile, I mean, that's probably what those UFOs, quote-unquote UFOs from the videos that were circulating a couple years ago are just like, you know, because those things are fucking crazy, man.
02:48:42.000Essentially, it takes a whole tank of fuel to get that thing just up and go in Mach 1 or 2, and then they have to refuel it to get it ramming or whatever.
02:49:33.000I think that's probably a lot of what those UFO sightings were.
02:49:35.000I think a lot of the other ones are drones.
02:49:39.000The famous one is that Tic Tac one that they found off the coast of San Diego, I think in 2004. A commander, David Fravor, saw this object that they had tracked.
02:49:47.000They even recalibrated their device, apparently, to make sure that it was accurate.
02:49:52.000But they've read this thing at more than 50,000 feet above sea level, and it got down to 50 feet in less than a second.
02:50:00.000And they don't know what it is, and they followed it around with their jets, and then the people on the Nimitz said, yeah, we've been seeing these for a couple weeks.
02:50:07.000These, like, super credible naval pilots.
02:50:10.000Guys who really understand, like, what's possible and not possible.
02:50:13.000And they're watching these things dart off and just vanish with the kind of speed that, like, is just impossible.
02:50:49.000And you're like, oh yeah, it's not us.
02:50:51.000We don't have any hypersonic fucking UFO-looking Tic Tacs.
02:50:54.000It's like back to Phil Hartman when he does the unfrozen caveman lawyer.
02:50:57.000He's like, I'm not familiar with your modern ways, this legal system, but I do know my client's entitled to 3.5 million in punitive damages.
02:51:29.000Honestly, what he was describing was like satellites tapping into all of our phones and listening to everything we do, which is, I think, actually happening.
02:51:37.000Yeah, but they don't even need satellites to do that.
02:51:41.000They can listen to everything you say.
02:51:44.000Gavin DeBecker, who's a security expert on my podcast, was explaining that you used to have a clickable link.
02:51:49.000It used to be a thing you had to click, and then you would accidentally, without your knowledge, download some sort of a software that would take over your phone.
02:52:03.000Dude, imagine the stupid conversations that these people have to listen to.
02:52:08.000Yeah, well, it makes people more aware of how fucking stupid your conversations are if you think they can come up in a trial with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
02:53:12.000And sometimes we all want to automatically assume, like when someone accuses someone of something, automatically assume that this person did it.
02:53:19.000Especially if we'd like to, if it's a famous person.
02:53:21.000In this situation, it seems like there's a lot of wackiness.
02:53:25.000I think it's good to let people look at this kind of stuff and go, okay, there's crazy people everywhere.
02:55:51.000Dude, all the money that's being made by the advertising and clickbait should be put into a slush fund and then the winner of the case should get them.
02:56:38.000Someone tweeted, like, when did Johnny Depp start looking like a strip club DJ? Pretty accurate.
02:56:47.000I wonder if they're going to put him back on Pirates of the Caribbean.
02:56:50.000If Disney wanted to reclaim all the stock that they've lost, all the market share they've lost over the last couple months, I guarantee you say, fuck it, we're on Team Johnny Depp.
02:57:02.000That would probably pump up their stock market price.
02:57:53.000The real Johnny Depp and the real Amber Heard get remarried during the making of this movie because they fall in love again while pretending to be in love for this movie.
03:03:32.000Those old theaters like that, you go into those old vaudeville style theaters like, it's just a feel, like you feel the experiences almost burned into the walls.
03:05:01.000It's so crazy to think about all the crazy shit that's been built and torn down.
03:05:05.000I've watched this thing about the Vanderbilt mansions in New York.
03:05:11.000Dude, these crazy opulent houses that would have cost like a billion dollars to build, just tear it down and put like a Dwayne Reade on it.
03:05:35.000There's certain places that why don't they qualify for like historical protection like there's certain places like if you if you go to the like if you go to Hollywood and you pass by the Comedy Store the Comedy Store is like a historical place it should be like in a book somewhere like you can't fuck with it like leave it alone like that's a historical place there should be a few of those we need like a few bars a few perform like the whiskey imagine they turn the whiskey into like a drugstore You'd be like,
03:06:29.000I think that's where Kinison filmed his first HBO special, too.
03:06:34.000Dude, we used to go into the rainbow when we first started going to L.A. And Lemmy from Motorhead would just always be at the little video game machine in the corner.
03:06:45.000Just sit there and watch this rock star just to pound Roman Cokes, just playing this game.
03:12:35.000I mean, to be in the studio, to walk the stairs, there's one tiny little staircase that you have to go up and down to go to the control room.
03:12:42.000So you'd play, run up the stairs to go listen to playback.
03:13:42.000Countless hours of that, decade after decade, with different kinds of musicians, and different backgrounds, and different fucking styles, and burned into the walls.
03:13:53.000I definitely kind of like to believe in that.
03:14:12.000Like, especially certain instruments, you know, like it's not like it's like, there's a, you hold it, you can tell it's something, you know, or some freaky ass fucking furniture or something.
03:14:24.000I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't not believe in ghosts.
03:14:29.000You know, if there really were ghosts, like if it's a very rare occurrence that something pops over from the dimension of the dead for a quick second or two and freaks you out and pops back over, I don't think that would be weird.
03:14:43.000The fact that we come out of vaginas, the fact that we have a finite lifespan, the fact that we're hurling through infinity on a spinning rock, all those things.
03:14:53.000How the fuck would ghosts be any weirder than the reality of life?
03:14:56.000Like, every now and then, when someone dies, they leave, like, behind an echo.
03:15:00.000And that echo, you see it, like, running across the field, and you can't believe your eyes.
03:15:12.000You know, I do feel like whenever I've been around something that felt like kind of supernatural, the memory of it just gets distorted and changed very quickly.
03:15:22.000It's like, what the fuck did I just see?
03:15:25.000And then you diminish it in your mind.
03:16:36.000Like, I thought first, I saw a gray moving quickly, and I thought maybe it was something behind those trees and larger, and I was only seeing a piece of, no, it was running on the log, and it was just gray.
03:17:42.000A giant percentage of these stories come from either people that are asleep in a car or fall asleep in a car or people that are asleep at their home.
03:17:50.000And I think there's probably something to all these chemicals that your brain produces that create dreams.
03:17:56.000And that people, when they're going into that little realm, when they're sleeping, there's some fucking sketchy times in there, and you can convince yourself that you're getting transported through fucking walls.
03:18:28.000Look at this fucking disaster they have going on here.
03:18:30.000Oh my god, they're over the fucking brink of war for almost nothing.
03:18:34.000Or if you're intelligent enough to hurl yourself light years away from your own planet, you might show up here and be like, man, everyone's a complete idiot.
03:18:45.000But then again, we like to watch that on TV. And when I say the brink of war for almost nothing, what I mean is that it didn't have to happen.
03:18:55.000This is like Russia doing that, invading Ukraine.
03:22:30.000When all this stuff happened, when Tom DeLonge came to our show and really freaked me out, I ended up getting in touch with someone who worked for the Department of Energy.
03:22:40.000Basically, they were like, the amount of money that the government spends on technology is so astounding that there's technology created every year that's harmful because it will destabilize the world.
03:23:20.000But they were like, you know, if you have to figure like that there's like, you know, 500 billion or whatever it is, dollars spent on military and, you know, like 60% of it or something is like black projects.
03:23:35.000And if you think about the amount of money that we've spent on military, it's like, it's kind of insane.
03:23:41.000But then that's when I realized like, oh yeah, like, The world we live in, and that's where I kind of had this thing where I was like, oh, no shit.
03:23:49.000We tax ourselves to pay the money back to ourselves.
03:23:52.000It's like we've created our own inferno of cash to keep the economy where it is.
03:24:01.000We have such a large economy because we're spending our own money on our own shit.
03:24:12.000I'm very concerned about where all this goes because I wonder if like our reliance on technology as well as like these these weapons that they're developing that can go faster than the speed of sound by many times it could take turns and who knows what else they have who knows what antimatter weapons with fucking Dude,
03:27:46.000That's what I'm worried about with all this Pentagon UFO type stuff.
03:27:50.000It's really just some drones, some things they've been developing.
03:27:56.000My favorite thing was, like, you know, people were talking about, like, Russian disinformation propaganda on social media, and I'm like, wait, the whole thing is fucked with.
03:28:38.000I just feel like people are compelled to, like, you know, some sort of algorithms compelling people to, like, I don't know, take sides, get involved with shit.
03:28:47.000I think that that's all part of it, you know what I mean?
03:28:49.000Like, to really feel strongly about something, like, that maybe someone otherwise wouldn't be.
03:28:54.000Like, someone I've never mentioned, I've heard mentioned, like, Ukraine or something now, like, posting the thing, wearing the pin, like...
03:29:50.000Yeah, we can barely keep it together over here.
03:29:51.000We're holding on tooth and claw to democracy over here.
03:29:56.000Yeah, that's why I've always felt like, you know, it's just like it's so easy to be a hypocrite.
03:30:01.000Not to the point, I don't want to be like too cynical, where it's like you shouldn't feel anything about anything, but like there's always another side to it.
03:30:06.000There's always something else going on.
03:30:08.000And when you see something like Russia invading Ukraine, It's hard to then also look at, you know, the human rights violations are all around the world, you know, and that we're buying our phones from places that are,
03:32:46.000Yeah, they were telling you they'll give you money if you snitch on your neighbors who are having parties when they're not supposed to have parties.
03:32:52.000Like, what kind of fucking Orwell world are you willing to accept Just for this one thing, like if this is a test run to see how people respond to a real pandemic, a real terrifying one, like the Spanish flu or like the Black Plague or something crazy,
03:33:24.000It's not as bad as bubonic plague and all these different fucking diseases that ravaged humanity, smallpox, killed 90% of the Native Americans.
03:33:35.000I mean, if one of those fucking hits us, shit.
03:33:38.000With all this democracy as we know it, it's going to evaporate.
03:33:47.000If you go to L.A. tomorrow for the first time in a long time, LA's making a comeback.
03:34:15.000Tom DeLonge said to me, I just remembered.
03:34:18.000He said to me, he's like, within 60 or 90 days, this is like early October 2019, he's like, in 60 to 90 days, something's going to happen that's going to change the world forever in a very, very profound way.
03:35:36.000Well, that's what freaked me out the most about communion.
03:35:38.000The idea that they could be so intelligent and so, like, so able to avoid our detection that they could just capture you at any time and take you and no one would know and everyone's paralyzed and everyone, you know, everyone's memory gets erased.
03:37:24.000He had top secret clearance because he was working at S4 on some propulsion system he claims that was back engineering a UFO. To have the kind of clearance that he had to work on that, they had to constantly monitor his phone.
03:37:36.000They found out that his wife was having an affair, so they had to terminate his employment.
03:37:40.000He couldn't get an answer as to why they terminated his employment.
03:37:43.000So then he would take his friends, like, look, I'm telling you, I was working on fucking UFOs.
03:37:47.000So he takes his friend to this mountain.
03:38:44.000I want to think that something way smarter is watching us the whole time and things beyond your imagination are taking place in the cosmos.
03:39:50.000After more than 20 years of research and tinkering, it was time to celebrate Stanley Alan Meyer, his brother, and two Belgian investors raised glasses in the Grove City Cracker Barrel on March 20, 1998. Meyer said his invention could do what physicists said is impossible,
03:40:07.000turn water into hydrogen fuel effectively enough to drive his dune buggy cross-country on 20 gallons straight from the tap.
03:40:17.000He took a sip of cranberry juice, then grabbed his neck and bolted out the door, dropped to his knees, and vomited violently.
03:40:23.000I ran outside and asked him what's wrong.
03:40:25.000His brother Stephen Meyer recalled, he said, they poisoned me.