In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Gary Clark Jr. to talk about his move from Austin, TX to LA, California and how he s adjusting to life in the big city. We talk about moving to LA and what it s like to be a musician and actor in LA. I also talk about some of the crazier things that go on in the wilds of LA and the crazy things that happen in the mountains. Enjoy and spread the word to your friends and family about this episode! I hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned for the next one. I ll be back with a new episode next Tuesday. I ll see you next Tuesday! XOXO, Gary Clark Jr. Xoxo - Gary Clark Sr. XOXOXO - Gary's Dad Gary's Sr. Gary's Brother-in-Lawrence Clark J Sr. Gary's Sister-In-law's Dad-Sister-Inlaw-In Lawerence J.J.J.'s Dad- In Lawerence's Mom- Inlaw-Lawerence Jody J. J. Sr. Jody Jr. Jody Sr. & Jody s Dad-Jody s Brother- Ingrid J.R. Sr.. Jody and Jody talks about life in Los Angeles, California, his new job in LA, and the craziness that comes with moving out west, and what he s up to in LA! . . . We hope you guys enjoy this one, it s a little bit more than the rest of the episode. Enjoy! -Gary Clark Jr - Jody Clark Sr., Jody's Dad, Jody, J. R. Jr. Jeeves Sr. , Jody R. J., J. B. R., Jodi R. S. & J. SON JODY SONGS, JODY & JODY LYNN SONJODY, JERRY SON JEANESTER, JORDAN R. BONUS EPISODESPECIKE, JYVES, JORO, JODY SONNIE, JOSH, JAMES R. RYANDS, JARED, JORGE R. LYANNA AND JOSH MEYER, JOSYNN ECHELO AND KEVIN SON, JACOB SONNY JAY & JOSH WELCOME
00:01:09.000So what made you move from Austin, which is like one of the best spots in the world, if you could pull it off, to California, which is still one of the best spots in the world if you can pull it off, but so much more complex, so much more bullshit, so much more ego,
00:05:15.000I mean, coming from where I'm from in Austin, there's a city and there's nice land around it, so I like to jump back and forth and be involved in both, but I will not fuck with mountain lions.
00:06:00.000That's definitely what's holding me back.
00:06:01.000I would have a bite-proof suit, and then I would want a big-ass knife strapped to my thigh, so if a shark did bite me and it didn't get through, I'd just fucking fight in his head!
00:08:04.000But my friend of mine, Eve Monce, she had a guitar and she had a band and she...
00:08:09.000Her and her band would practice all the time, so I would hear them.
00:08:12.000So I would go over there and check it out and I would take my guitar and she would show me, you know, like a 12-bar blues, kind of like a Jimmy Reed shuffle type thing or like a...
00:08:25.000You know, power chord, rock and roll thing, whatever.
00:08:29.000So that was kind of how I first started.
00:09:00.000I think the thing for me was I mean I love music and I mean the guitar for me was the instrument that could it could Paint so many different colors.
00:09:20.000It could be loud, aggressive, or it could be sweet, beautiful.
00:09:29.000I just thought if I could get my hands on one of those, I would try and push it to the limit and really figure out You just play with the full spectrum.
00:09:44.000It's different than playing an electric guitar.
00:09:47.000For me, there were more options than playing drums or trumpet or something.
00:12:17.000I spent a lot of my time, yeah, you should stay in school, kids, but I spent a lot of time showing up to that building and then immediately turning back around and going and doing what interests me.
00:14:06.000I think it's almost impossible to find a style of teaching or a course of study that's going to be really interesting and fascinating to every kid.
00:15:39.000And then I got back to my house, and then I got in my car to go to do whatever I had to do, and I was like, man, this is not the same shit, but...
00:17:49.000No, they don't get it to try to, like, look cool.
00:17:51.000Like, that car is such a, I'm getting it to look cool car, that it's not even yours, and they used it for you in a music video to make you look badass.
00:18:17.000Like, if you were going way out of your way to own that car, but it was breaking down all the time, and it was fucking up, that would be kind of silly.
00:20:19.000So I was just making demos and sampling records and just kind of doing whatever I wanted to do.
00:20:27.000So for this latest record, I just kind of wanted to get back into that space and experiment and vibe and challenge myself musically.
00:20:35.000Just playing out on the road every night or whatever for a few years, kind of playing the same songs and trying to bring new life for those in a certain way was different than...
00:20:49.000I felt like I was kind of stagnant, like I wasn't playing drums like I was every day.
00:21:23.000Like, I mess around and some of it works, but I play drums, I play bass, keys, harmonica, percussion, you know, just kind of the foundation.
00:21:38.000And did you take lessons for any of these?
00:25:11.000Because I don't want to get down some rabbit hole that I can't prove, but this guy who was a musician himself, he was with The Animals, I believe.
00:25:19.000You know, what was that one hit song they had?
00:25:27.000I forget the song, but he was actually a musician himself, and it didn't work out for him, and he started working as a bodyguard for Hendrix and working with this manager character who was apparently universally known as a really bad guy, like real shady.
00:25:43.000Back in the day of music, you were dealing with a lot of mob characters, right?
00:25:48.000A lot of organized crime characters, a lot of creepy people, a lot of dangerous people like Phil Spector, that crazy fuck.
00:26:01.000I mean, it doesn't get any crazier than that guy.
00:26:03.000And if you don't know who Phil Spector is, you'll Google him and you'll go, well, how come his hair looks like this in one picture and his hair like that?
00:26:09.000He wore a bunch of crazy wigs when he got arrested for shooting a woman in the mouth just a few years ago and killing her.
00:26:16.000He picked up some woman at a bar on Sunset, took her back to his mansion and shot her in the mouth.
00:29:49.000Yeah, like, uh, speaking of Cadillacs and stuff, I used to, you know, drive around, and I don't know if y'all got, like, the chopped and screwed stuff, but, like, I used to listen to DJ Screw, and, um...
00:31:23.000Which, by the way, if you use that, kill yourself.
00:31:26.000If you're even thinking about going down on a girl and you have to throw a fucking tarp over it first, you've made some terrible choices and you're probably never going to recover.
00:32:13.000Well, it's getting closer and closer to being legal, man.
00:32:16.000I mean, they just released some new financial stats on the amount of money that they're making off medical marijuana.
00:32:24.000If they can really establish that this is a nationwide way that people can make a ton of money off taxes and Turn economies around like they have in Denver.
00:32:33.000I mean, they turn the economy in Denver around.
00:34:24.000So economically, it's a great thing for the city.
00:34:27.000And once that sort of sets in that we've been lied to about that, and then all these new studies are coming out about the benefits of different psychedelics for PTSD... John Hopkins did a long-term study on psilocybin.
00:34:41.000They're doing new studies on psilocybin with people that are terminally ill and people that are they're getting towards the end of life you know older folks and it's just an alleviated tension the worry and fear of death and in a beautiful way and then they'll realize like hey you know we can profit off this shit like this is this is more money that can be generated from To help the school systems,
00:35:02.000to fix the roads, to hire new cops, to change the way, you know, we address and interface with these things and stop criminalizing them.
00:35:13.000I'm not as educated on all that as I would like to be, but I feel like, you know, once that door gets opened up, it'd be a lot more beneficial than it is, he said, to be You know, hurting.
00:37:04.000The right crowd, you know, the ones your mom probably told you should hang out with, they're on fucking antidepressants right now, freaking out.
00:37:11.000Hitting midlife, wondering what the fuck they're doing with themselves, having children, being trapped in some job where they're, you know, most likely, the people that go the way that everybody wanted us to go, whether it's a lawyer or a successful businessman, they're stressed the fuck out, working long crazy hours.
00:37:32.000I mean, I feel like regardless of or despite the...
00:37:40.000The tension that I had, I mean, I grew up kind of like very strict, very, you know, I was raised like Baptist, you know, very straight, very strict family, military.
00:37:54.000So any of that was, you know, completely taboo.
00:37:58.000And I would, that would be my ass if they found out anything about it.
00:38:01.000But for some reason, I felt like I wanted to break out and And discover on my own, you know what I mean?
00:38:06.000And not be locked into what was just laid out for me.
00:40:18.000Well, I have a theory on all that stuff.
00:40:21.000I think that every generation gathers up the information of how the previous generation fucked up.
00:40:27.000And as long as there's no cataclysmic disasters and we're not living in Mad Max times where it's like desperado days and everyone's fending for themselves and it's just about survival, then things just keep getting better.
00:43:14.000If we don't blow ourselves up, if we don't die from disease, if we don't get hit by an asteroid, we're going to be able to figure out a way to trick the mind into thinking it's experiencing things that it's not experiencing.
00:43:26.000How long it takes is just subjective, but whatever the amount of time it is in the history of the universe or the history of this planet, it's a blink.
00:43:36.000And in one blink, you're not going to be able to tell whether reality is real or not.
00:43:40.000You're going to be able to plug into something, and you're going to be able to have artificial experiences.
00:43:50.000When scientists study artificial reality, and they study what they call computer simulation theory, the real mindfuck is, it's hard to tell whether or not this is a simulation.
00:44:04.000And that it's very likely that it could be that our entire universe could be some sort of a massive simulation that we're experiencing.
00:44:12.000It might not even be like a computer simulation.
00:44:14.000It might be some sort of a simulation that's going on like at a cellular level, like some sort of a mass hallucination.
00:47:23.000And you can decide if you want to go with DJ A or DJ B. And so there's a bunch of people just like dancing in a silent room with headphones on.
00:48:09.000Because it's like that one asshole in your block who has a party, but his music taste sucks.
00:48:16.000There was this party that they had near my neighborhood about 10 years ago, and it was the most fucking depressing, like, trapped in the...
00:52:08.000If you want to make a fucking documentary or a biopic about arguably the greatest guitarist that's ever lived, you gotta use his fucking music.
00:52:16.000And you gotta give his parents the money or whoever, whoever's alive, give him the money.
00:52:35.000Because me, on a much lesser scale, I'm not a professional pool player, but when I watch someone in a movie and I know they can't really play pool, it's very obvious.
00:52:43.000You see the way a guy's holding a stick, the way the stick moves in their arm.
00:52:47.000It's like, have you ever seen someone hold a cigarette that doesn't really smoke?
00:53:52.000Unless you're bullshit, and unless it's, like, a crazy kung fu movie.
00:53:55.000Like, obviously I have a connection to martial arts where if I know someone's doing something that's not really going to work, it'll drive me crazy.
00:54:03.000Like, fucking pulling people's hearts out and flying through the air and throwing sidekicks through buildings, I'm willing to suspend disbelief.
00:56:50.000And you're like, I wish somebody would.
00:56:51.000I know, but I just, I mean, I was a kid, so I, you know, I loved that.
00:56:56.000Speaking of being inspired, man, you know, one of my favorite things that I love to do, which I haven't done in a while, was, you know, catch up and watch the UFC, you know, and get into that.
00:57:09.000And I was sitting around and Starting to kind of feel like a piece of shit drinking too much and whatever and so I was you know looking at these guys you know training and doing what they do so it kind of inspired me to get on my bike and get the heavy bag and get on the weights and do my thing and I was really into it I haven't been been keeping up for a while and I kind of got the gut to show it and I'm working on it I need to get back on my game is what I'm saying.
00:57:38.000Do you want to train while you're in LA? Is that what you're saying?
00:58:09.000There's so many different techniques and so many different strategies and so many different moves and counter moves that your build is perfect for jiu-jitsu.
00:59:02.000If I had to say, if there's one build that has the most definitive advantages, I would say tall and long, because it's harder to hit you because you're further away from me, you could hit me in a place where I can't hit you.
00:59:19.000You're dealing with eight extra inches.
00:59:20.000So there's eight extra inches between, like, your head and my head, which may or may not translate as far as, like, how long your arms are, how long your legs are, but definitely there's at least a few inches of advantage.
00:59:34.000Which means, like, if we were both throwing punches at the same time, you would hit me before I would hit you, and I probably would never hit you because of that.
00:59:41.000Because you would hit me, like, as I was throwing a punch and I'd get fucked up, Like, that's a big advantage.
00:59:46.000Like, Jon Jones, the UFC former light heavyweight champion, he's, like, the best at using, because he's a big, tall dude, and he's the best at, like, using that advantage.
00:59:54.000It's one of the best advantages of being long and tall.
01:01:48.000Your dedication and your focus and then the expression and the results of that dedication and focus in a way where, like, if I watch someone pull off a move that I don't know how to do, it's particularly beautiful to me because I'm like, oh, shit, look how he did that.
01:02:03.000Like, there's certain moves that I'll have to replay, like, over and over and over again.
01:02:08.000Certain setups like over and over and over again till I get it into my head and And I didn't this so many different ways to move the body that there's a lot of like I've been doing jujitsu since 1996 and there's still a bunch of moves that I don't know I don't understand and I have to go.
01:02:26.000But today like we're talking about like with Google we're so lucky that we could just go to YouTube videos and One of the beautiful things about jujitsu is It used to be that martial arts were like a secret.
01:02:45.000The reality of jujitsu is almost every move people are dying to explain to people because people love learning new shit.
01:02:53.000People that are jujitsu artists love learning new stuff, so people that are jujitsu artists that have a new move love to put that move online.
01:03:19.000But there was a lot of moves, like triangles, and things along those lines.
01:03:23.000Where I had friends that would take classes at certain schools, and they would say, hey, you know, Hoist Gracie tapped out Dan Severin with a triangle.
01:05:47.000Like sometimes people can get really far on a bullshit personality.
01:05:50.000And a lot of bravado, and a lot of bragging, and a lot of false stories, and then the actual application in life is they've sort of skirted through with all the dance moves and all the personality.
01:06:02.000But they don't have any real substance to it.
01:06:04.000That doesn't work in Jiu-Jitsu, just like it doesn't really work in comedy.
01:06:08.000Comedy-like personality accounts for a certain amount of the audience accepting you, but...
01:06:14.000Ultimately, if your concepts aren't there and if you don't have a good setup, if you don't know how to deliver it in a way that people are going to easily enter into their mind and they're going to carry along, then it either works or it doesn't.
01:06:28.000There's some parallel truths in that, in martial arts and in comedy in that way.
01:06:38.000Yeah, I'm very intrigued by all of it.
01:06:48.000Well, all complex systems, whether it's music, writing, creating a movie, anything.
01:06:55.000Complex things are fascinating to me, too, because I've never made a movie, but when I see CGI animators, I go watch this documentary on guys making animated scenes for films, like special effects scenes,
01:07:11.000and I think to myself, wow, that is fascinating.
01:07:15.000And inside that artificial world, they have these creatures moving and they have these people that have to put on these motion capture suits and go through the motions pretending they're interacting with these things that aren't even there.
01:08:05.000Well, as an artist, does that inspire you when you see, like if you go to see a great movie or read a great book or something like that, does that inspire you to want to create?
01:08:18.000Yeah, it doesn't inspire me to write a book.
01:08:30.000But yeah, I'll definitely go see a movie or read and it'll get my creative juices flowing and inspire me to be To just be better and try and contribute.
01:09:01.000I still can't describe what it is that makes this creative thing click or explain how I do what I do, but definitely seeing movies or hearing...
01:09:18.000You know, great musicians, great guitar players, you know, it'll freak me out.
01:09:25.000And I'll go, oh shit, my ego gets involved a little bit, you know what I mean?
01:09:53.000He's one of the greatest blues guitar players in the world.
01:09:56.000Played, backed up Muddy Waters, Albert Collins, Albert King, everybody.
01:10:03.000He's like in the house band at Anton's, this club.
01:10:08.000I hadn't seen him in a while, so I go back home and, you know, I got my little reputation and, you know, people are like, oh, you know, this, that, that.
01:10:16.000And I'm, you know, I'm like, all right.
01:10:18.000I know my strengths and weaknesses, but I was feeling good about myself.
01:10:22.000And then I got up on stage and let this, you know, this guy was just ripping it.
01:10:27.000And I just, in that moment, I was like, fuck.
01:10:33.000It's like, I ain't got shit on this guy, you know what I mean?
01:10:36.000It was a nice reality check, so I immediately went back and started shedding, and I've been kind of doing it since.
01:10:44.000Yeah, that's a beautiful thing about being around inspiring artists.
01:10:47.000It's one of the cool things about being in a place like in LA or Nashville, or if you're a musician, if that's your style of music, or Austin, or anywhere where there's a good group Of people that are also doing the same thing.
01:11:00.000It's like you use those people and they use you and everybody's like fuel for each other.
01:11:53.000Yeah, in Austin, there's this spot every Sunday, they'll have a blues jam, you know.
01:12:03.000So yeah, you would either go sit in with people that you don't know or haven't played with before or whatever and try out some new chords.
01:12:14.000Maybe you learned something fancy like a transition chord to go from the One to the five on the turnaround and the slow blues, whatever, and the key to C, whatever.
01:13:12.000Or is there a specific creation process from the moment you get an idea to putting it to paper or to remembering it and making a song and putting the beat to it and putting the sounds to it?
01:14:53.000That's a real common thing that you said, that a lot of people say, that once they had a kid, they realized that their free time is actually precious.
01:14:59.000So, because kids demand so much time, babies demand so much time, and you really don't have much, you start going, okay, the kid's asleep, let's get to work.
01:15:12.000Because you have children than you did when you were free.
01:16:05.000Yeah, well, creatively, I guess, for me.
01:16:08.000I mean, we spend so much time out on the road, like we're gone a lot.
01:16:12.000So, I kind of need my quiet time, and there's not really a lot of quiet time with a bunch of dudes hanging around, you know, smelling like ass.
01:21:02.000The animals that I'm out hunting, if I don't get them, a wolf's getting them, or a coyote's getting them, or a mountain lion's getting them.
01:21:36.000It's not a cruelty to animals thing and this is something that I used to think of, when I thought of hunters, I saw some television show where this hunter had a dog, and he's petting his dog.
01:21:47.000I was like, how does this motherfucker differentiate between this dog and some deer?
01:22:13.000Not everybody wants to, especially in the world that we've grown up in with cities.
01:22:18.000Something that took me several years to sort of get into it and really understand what it's all about and educate myself.
01:22:24.000And then once I did educate myself, one of the most compelling things was how...
01:22:29.000Ignorant most people are about the facts of hunting, about the facts of wildlife, about wildlife management, and about just where their food comes from.
01:22:37.000And even about how many animals die making grain.
01:22:41.000When people say, you know, I only eat quinoa and fucking alfalfa.
01:22:48.000That shit's getting chopped up in a combine, and it's chewing up bunnies and fawns and rats and mice and sparrows and ground-nesting birds and...
01:22:57.000And you're removing the habitat when you're growing food like that for a lot of different wildlife.
01:23:02.000The wildlife gets displaced, and the displaced wildlife wind up getting preyed on.
01:23:06.000There's a lot of factors involved in gathering food.
01:23:10.000And when we're living in cities, we're living in this bizarre, natural environment.
01:23:16.000And when I say cities are a natural environment, they are a natural environment, because they're everywhere.
01:23:21.000They're a natural environment for people.
01:23:23.000Like anybody says, the cities aren't natural, man.
01:23:25.000Well, how come there's so many of them?
01:23:37.000That's the same goddamn thing people do.
01:23:38.000We create these super complicated beehives, we call them cities, and we create them all over the world.
01:23:43.000It's not like there's one city and we're like, what the fuck is that?
01:23:46.000The cities are everywhere there are people.
01:23:49.000When people figure shit out and they have electricity and they have agriculture, then they have surplus, And then they put up fucking walls and make buildings and then boom, we got a city.
01:24:00.000I think there's just some strange detachment from where our food comes from when it's shipped in in trucks all the time.
01:24:13.000Education into the world of hunting a big part of it was like to try to figure out like I Try to figure out bizarre things like things that don't make sense to me I try to figure out I try to figure out all sorts of weird misconceptions and misunderstandings I this what fascinates me about people that are involved in cults so it fascinates me by people that have bad conceptions or bad thoughts about psychedelics that are untrue and People think that certain things are going to make you go crazy and lose your mind.
01:26:01.000He's a convenient, moral, high ground asshole who's just trying to let everybody know he's better than you because most of the time he doesn't eat meat.
01:31:24.000I mean, they have a whole business called hella hunting where they take people up in helicopters and they're shooting pigs because it's the only way to eradicate them from farms because there's so many of them.
01:31:35.000And they do billions of dollars worth of damage just in Texas in crop destruction every year.
01:32:02.000The one who her husband, the chick who was fucking her brother in the Game of Thrones, the hot blonde lady, her husband died because he got killed by a pig.
01:34:25.000So if he's behind it by just six or seven feet and the camera's on the ground, they're shooting it at eye level, it makes it look a lot bigger than it really is.
01:36:35.000And that's why when you go see wild pigs, like domestic pigs, they get loose and they become feral and then they start breeding in the wild.
01:37:24.000There's this girl, she works at this hat shop, and I walked in, and she's got this pet fucking pig, so I can just imagine that thing, like, getting loose for a couple of months, like, have you seen my...
01:37:38.000Was it a pot-belly pig, one of those little ones?
01:39:21.000and all domestic dogs we don't really know we there's a lot of speculation and they believe that wolves became friendly with people because we're feeding them and then they become more docile like there was a Radiolab podcast that talked about breeding foxes and within a decade they had killed they were breeding foxes and they would kill any fox that showed any sort of aggression or any and that there was trying to be dominant The growl at people,
01:39:48.000any unfavorable characteristics, they killed them.
01:39:52.000And within 10 years, the genes changed to the point where all the foxes had droopy ears.
01:40:12.000That this is what happened with wolves.
01:40:14.000And that wolves being around campfires with people, like primitive, primitive people, like tens and 20,000, 40,000 years ago, that we slowly but surely started having relationships with these animals where they would protect us from the other wolves because we would feed them.
01:40:28.000And so they would become more docile and more dependent upon us.
01:42:03.000In a way, I mean, it's some sort of a strange change in the body.
01:42:08.000And I don't mean this in any disrespectful way.
01:42:10.000I'm just trying to be completely objective about the physical form of these people.
01:42:13.000You know, I'm not saying that people purposely make dwarfs, but I'm saying that the physical characteristics, the differences in an English bulldog and a wolf And that's very, like, the difference between Carl Malone and Brad Williams.
01:42:28.000I mean, those are both humans, and they both could impregnate the same woman.
01:42:33.000Like, if a woman had a baby with Carl Malone, and then a woman had a baby with a dwarf, like, right afterwards, she still, I mean, she can get pregnant from both of them, and have a baby from both of them.
01:42:42.000And potentially the same genetic characteristics could be passed down.
01:42:48.000Less likely with the dwarf, but I mean, it's incredible when you think about the variation of human beings.
01:42:53.000We can get a little tiny, like a 90-pound Asian lady, and then you can have Serena Williams, this super athlete with giant muscles and just ridiculous explosive ability.
01:43:16.000And that's why, like, really nutty conspiracy people believe that human beings are created by aliens, and that much in the same way that human beings engineered dogs and changed the shape and selectively bred them to the point where they became these little chihuahuas,
01:43:33.000That's what aliens did with human beings.
01:43:35.000They came down, they found some chimpanzees and some lower hominids and started injecting their DNA into them and slowly but surely created a series of different styles of human being.
01:45:51.000Well, because I'm thinking about all the times where I busted ass and, you know, I was just like walking across the street and I step into what I think is snow and it's like underneath is like a foot of water and, you know, I'm just walking around and,
01:46:08.000you know, I got one wet foot and I'm supposed to be going to some fucking event or something or go to dinner or do whatever.
01:50:05.000I mean, booze happens everywhere, but I feel like people really have a good time.
01:50:11.000Well, when I started going on the road a lot in the 90s is when I really understood NASCAR. Like, I never got NASCAR. I'm like, who the fuck is watching this?
01:50:21.000It's not that I didn't like car racing.
01:50:22.000It's like, who the fuck is watching these people go around in a circle?
01:50:32.000And then I did a radio station I want to say it was in Atlanta.
01:50:38.000I don't remember where it was, but I remember it was in the South, and the guy was like, did you see the race this weekend?
01:50:43.000Man, Dale Jr. is really fucking putting it to them.
01:50:47.000I was like, what are you talking about?
01:50:48.000And they're like, NASCAR! Tony Stewart!
01:50:51.000And he starts naming all these people.
01:50:52.000I'm like, I don't know who the fuck you're talking about.
01:50:54.000And he was flabbergasted that I didn't know who these NASCAR people were, and that I didn't know who won the fucking Tala Cuscaloosa 555-60 race.