Episode 3092 - The Scott Adams School 02⧸11⧸26
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 4 minutes
Words per Minute
165.17712
Summary
Akira the Don joins us in The Scott Adams School to talk about his love of all things coffee and his love for Sonic the Hedgehog. Plus, we get a sneak peak at what's to come in the future of this show.
Transcript
00:00:02.720
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I'm going to put YouTube on and just double check.
00:01:14.240
If a kid is listening on the live, he might be a little bit delayed.
00:01:29.300
We're getting Akira in from Mexico, which, you know, it took a second.
00:01:43.540
We don't want you guys to miss a second of this today.
00:01:46.640
My name is Erica, and we're here with Marcella and Shelly and Owen Gregorian.
00:02:00.440
And we have a special guest with us today, Akira the Don, who we're going to introduce
00:02:07.820
I just want to remind you guys that we welcome you to the Scott Adams School, which is different
00:02:16.760
There's thousands of hours of Scott teaching, talking, persuading, calming us down, and making
00:02:24.880
So please know that those videos are there for you always.
00:02:28.840
The Scott Adams School continues on, as Scott wished, for us to commune, have a sip together,
00:02:36.100
keep the community together, bring on amazing guests for you and lots of fun.
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So we're going to do that today, and Shelly's going to play a clip for us first, and then
00:02:46.640
we'll all hit mute, and then we'll actually leave the screen.
00:02:50.980
We'll leave Akira there if he wants to stay, and we'll come back after the clip is over.
00:03:03.220
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
00:03:09.460
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
00:03:14.020
But if you'd like this experience to rise to levels that nobody can even understand with
00:03:20.240
their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank
00:03:25.840
or chalice to sign a canteen, a jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite
00:03:32.280
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing
00:04:56.520
This is from Akira the Don, A-K-I-R-A the Don, D-O-N.
00:05:04.800
You'll find him on Twitter and all over the internet I guess.
00:05:09.360
It was nice enough to make this auto-tuned version of my theme song and I have to say,
00:05:19.800
when I first saw it I was like, this is going to be, you know, I'm not going to like this.
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I actually can't stop listening to it, it's really good.
00:05:36.760
That was so confusing, I wasn't expecting that and in case you didn't notice, like I didn't
00:05:46.120
have audio initially, I've never used Rumble Studio before.
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I'm an incredibly tech-savvy futuristic genius and I couldn't figure out that the audio controls
00:05:53.380
were at the bottom of the screen, but it's working now.
00:05:57.760
Akira, welcome, welcome to the Scott Adams School and it's so nice to finally get to meet
00:06:07.200
you face-to-face per se and first I want to thank you for making Scott so happy and making
00:06:15.200
one of his ultimate dreams come true, which was to be basically a recording artist to have a song
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and he has many and it's all thanks to you, so welcome to the school.
00:06:26.320
He has so many that will exist in the future because he wrote so many, you know, he wrote
00:06:35.920
He would do a live stream and he'd be chatting about the news, then he would drop what to me
00:06:39.920
is an incredible banger just casually in the middle of it, actually often towards the end,
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but just like perfectly formed in like little sort of like two, three minute chunks that are
00:06:52.800
Were you a Scott Adams listener, a sipper, and is that how you came to him? Because I know you also
00:06:59.760
have clips with Jordan Peterson and other folks, so tell us how you came to find Scott.
00:07:05.200
Well, I always knew Scott because Scott was always around in the world.
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You know, he was one of those sort of omniscient beings of a kind in the human realm.
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So I was aware of his cartooning work because I like cartoons and I drew my own comic books.
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And then I was aware of him as a blogger when he was blogging because I was kind of in that world.
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I was blogging and putting mixtapes and things online from sort of 2000 or something.
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And I read his book, How to Lose Everything, Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
00:07:41.120
And that was very, very influential on me in lots and lots of different ways, which I could talk about
00:07:46.800
for hours and hours and hours. And around that time, I think I was reading his blog and then he
00:07:51.120
started doing those periscopes and I would watch those. So yeah, I've been, I've had Scott Adams in my
00:07:56.400
life for a long, long, long, long time. And he was very influential on my life.
00:08:05.680
So how do you think Scott did influence you? What did you take away from How to Fail at Almost
00:08:12.560
Well, that one specifically, there was quite a lot in that. One thing that was specific to what I'm
00:08:20.560
doing here was him talking about affirmations, which I was doing. And so here's the thing. So I was aware
00:08:30.400
the concept of affirmations, which is essentially communicating a desire or will or what have you
00:08:36.080
to the subconscious. I had previously experimented with that as a young child via means of things
00:08:42.880
like prayer, which is one way of thinking about it. And in earlier years, there's a thing called
00:08:50.720
chaos magic, which I was aware of through a friend of mine, well, a guy who I was a fan of, who became
00:08:56.640
a friend of mine, a writer called Grant Morrison, who was a chaos magician. Within chaos magic,
00:09:01.760
there's a practice where you take a desire or something and to communicate it to the subconscious
00:09:07.600
mind, you turn it into a sigil. And a sigil would be say, you would take your desire, I want my cat
00:09:12.960
to go to the moon. And you would remove all the repeating glasses and you would remove the A's and
00:09:17.280
the E's and so on and so forth. And then what you're left with, you'd make into a little squiggle,
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a little glyph, and that would be your sigil. And then you would sort of meditate upon that in
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various ways. And the point of that was to communicate to the subconscious mind.
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So I was aware of that kind of concept. But Scott's sort of quite simple version of it,
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one of the things Scott was really good at was taking sort of esoteric ideas and making them seem
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very usual, normal, accessible to a regular human being, things that would seem woo to some people,
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he could make seems quite practical. That was one of his superpowers. Anyways, the affirmations
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thing I was trying that I was like, writing is quite difficult. And I was like, huh, I could
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put this into music. I could put things that I wanted to sort of brainwash myself
00:10:01.440
with or communicate to my subconscious mind very, very specifically and deliberately
00:10:05.280
into music. I make music. That's what I do. I know that music is very, very sticky.
00:10:10.080
I know it's a very, very powerful delivery mechanism. Everybody can remember the jingles
00:10:14.320
of their childhood, the themes from their favorite cartoons. Everyone learned to learn the alphabet
00:10:19.920
from a little song. It's not talked about much because it's mostly used by sneaky people without
00:10:27.680
our understanding to sort of hold power and influence over us. But music is the most powerful
00:10:33.920
delivery mechanism that we actually know of. We know this because prior to the written word,
00:10:39.360
the way that people would remember books, entire books, people would walk around with entire books
00:10:46.000
in them and they'd recite them around the campfire to each other. And they would do that because the
00:10:49.600
books were written with a certain kind of rhythm and melody to them that people would be able to
00:10:56.160
remember because of that. Odyssey, etc. Anyway, so yeah, one of the main things was the affirmations
00:11:04.400
idea and then thinking about putting it into music, which is one of the things that sort of led to me
00:11:09.280
creating Meaningwave, which led to me putting Scott into songs because I wanted to brainwash myself
00:11:15.200
with lots of Scott's ideas. And then that led to Scott being able to hear himself
00:11:20.880
in those songs, which was a beautiful thing. That's great. So how did you get started with
00:11:26.080
music? Were you always a musician from when you were very young or did you learn instruments first
00:11:30.400
or how did you get into that? I always loved music. We always had music in the house. My dad had
00:11:35.760
great taste in music. My mom loved music. The things I loved the most from as far back as I can remember
00:11:42.720
were music and comics, cartoons, anime, animated stuff. So I always knew I wanted to do something
00:11:50.880
in that area. I didn't play. I never, I wasn't, I didn't learn to play any instruments when I was a
00:11:56.000
kid. What I did do was weird experiments with cassettes. So I had cassette players and recorders,
00:12:02.560
and I would take one cassette and copy it to another. And then I would pull the tape out and
00:12:05.680
chop a piece off of it and stick it back with sellotape and record things off of videos or
00:12:12.240
ambient noises or bits of audio. One of the first songs I made in a music lesson at school,
00:12:19.440
I made a kind of loop beat thing. Then I sampled a news broadcast that was on the television in the
00:12:25.520
staff room or something where they were talking about war breaking out in Eastern Europe or something.
00:12:30.240
And I sort of looped that. I think it was, must've been six or seven or something when I did that.
00:12:35.440
And then computers came along and there was a thing called windows sound recorder,
00:12:38.960
where you could sample like, I don't know, 20 seconds or something of some audio. And I
00:12:43.920
started doing experiments with that. And then eventually I taught myself how to make music
00:12:50.080
and record it on a computer. All right. So my question is, are you,
00:12:56.640
is that you singing on them? Like the best part of my day? Is that you?
00:13:01.520
Well, you're making me want to cry with that one. That one just, oh, um, it's so soulful and, um,
00:13:09.680
your voice is also beautiful. And what about the illustrations that are happening? Where do those
00:13:16.880
come from? Yeah. Like I said, I always did. Um, that's you. So I was, yeah, I do everything.
00:13:23.440
Wow. Um, for the most part, sometimes I, sometimes I'll work with other people. There was, um, the
00:13:28.640
first Scott album. Um, I hired a comic book artist to do that. Uh, that was Tommy Patterson, uh, who sadly
00:13:37.840
passed last year, uh, drew the game of Thrones comics. If anyone ever read those, he was great. And he
00:13:43.840
loved Scott. He was a big fan of Scott and he really, he was really excited to work on it
00:13:47.680
because he was a big fan. But, uh, I, I tend to do most of the stuff. I write all the music,
00:13:53.520
produce all the music, play all the music, record all the music, do all the singing, do all the
00:13:58.000
artwork, font layouts, video editing, all the stuff. As Scott said, you know, it's a sort of unique talent
00:14:04.240
stack I acquired, which meant that I could do this very specifically at a very high level.
00:14:10.160
And only I could do it because it was only me that had got the specific interest, the specific
00:14:15.120
skills, the specific background, the training. I was a rapper, producer, all this stuff, all
00:14:21.040
combined to being able to do this meaning wave thing. And, uh,
00:14:24.640
And meaning waves your, your, your brand, your company.
00:14:28.640
Yeah. That's the brand. That's the name of the music. That's the style of the music,
00:14:33.360
which we worked out. Someone worked out. It wasn't me, but it's a technically a psycho technology.
00:14:38.080
Um, it's a kind of technology that interfaces with the mind.
00:14:44.160
Imagine that in the clubs. That would be amazing.
00:14:48.000
It works. It's good in the clubs. I was, I was a DJ on Hollywood Boulevard for
00:14:52.240
many years until Tom Hanks disease hits. And, um, I would, you know, high level club places,
00:14:59.200
you'd have like the Jenners and the weekend and all these people hanging around and I would sneak
00:15:03.440
in meaning of the early meaning wave songs. Uh, what's Tom Hanks disease, Akira?
00:15:12.560
Oh, cause he got COVID. Gotcha. Okay. I was like, wait,
00:15:14.880
What was the original name for it? It was Tom Hanks disease.
00:15:17.120
Yeah. Norm Macdonald named it. Like, cause the rollout, it was Tom Hanks who did the rollout.
00:15:22.880
It was like, you know, people have seen a few videos of people falling over in the street
00:15:26.320
coming out of China. And then suddenly Tom Hanks steps up and he's like, I have the thing.
00:15:31.760
Yeah. I was like, Oh shit. So Norm was like, Tom Hanks disease.
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All right. Akira, it looks like you want to play some songs for us. Are you,
00:15:49.040
Oh, okay. You just look like you're prepared to, uh,
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I'm always ready. It's important to be ready. What was it? Play? So, uh, luck is when opportunity
00:15:58.400
meets preparation. So I'm always ready. Um, this is where I hang out. This is my studio.
00:16:06.240
Okay. The bit that's got a camera facing it is the DJ set up. Cause not when I do live streams,
00:16:12.560
uh, it is in the context of, of doing this and talking.
00:16:15.760
Mm. I have a question actually for you, Shelly. Did Scott play these for you? Like,
00:16:22.880
was he like running around? Oh yes. Oh yeah. He's like, Oh, did you hear the latest one?
00:16:28.800
So he would play them all the time. Uh, well, we would love to hear something. If you
00:16:34.800
could play something for us. I tell you, I could play something, which is something, uh,
00:16:39.440
uh, which is a new one, which, um, I was just finishing up last night. Uh, this isn't the final
00:16:46.400
mix, but, um, yeah, this will be the next single with Scott. First time you guys a debut. This
00:16:54.160
will be the next single coming out. So you're going to hear it first. It will be a little different
00:17:00.960
because this isn't sort of final mix and master, but if you don't know what that is, you have a song
00:17:06.240
and you make the song and then you'll do slight adjustments to sort of EQ, little sound levels,
00:17:12.320
this thing, a little bit louder, this little thing, a little bit quieter. It's kind of like
00:17:15.920
the final coat of paint on a house or something. Some people don't notice at all. And it's, I spend
00:17:20.400
as much time on the final process as the early process. I had very little knowledge of this until
00:17:28.080
I went to the, there was something called the Prince experience. I'm a big Prince fan and my wife
00:17:31.760
got me tickets to this Prince experience when it came to Chicago and they had a room in there
00:17:36.080
where you could mix a song. And so it was just like moving the levels up and down for each of
00:17:40.480
the instruments and each of the tracks. So you were playing with the master by making like the
00:17:44.960
bass louder or softer or, you know, changing the levels. And it was, it was interesting to see all
00:17:50.080
the different sounds you could make. And the crazy difference something like that makes, uh, Prince,
00:17:54.400
for example, what was the song where he just decided to take the bass out at the last minute?
00:17:58.160
Yeah, that's when doves cry. And that was a really innovative thing. I think that was the first
00:18:02.240
time anyone did that. And I don't even know how many people have done it since, but it was,
00:18:06.800
it certainly makes a big difference. Yeah. It makes a big difference. Well,
00:18:09.920
bass is like half of a song, like technically on the, uh, uh, the frequency range base occupies
00:18:19.760
almost half of the entire frequency range, um, of a song, which would be the lower half because that's
00:18:25.120
down there and you remove that. It makes a wild difference. You know, I know this, like
00:18:28.800
just, uh, DJing. I remember one time I was DJing at this place on Hollywood Boulevard and the sub
00:18:35.120
went out in the club. The sub is the bit that, that transmits the lower end of the music.
00:18:40.320
And without the sub, everyone suddenly stopped dancing. It's the sub, it's the area there that
00:18:44.800
particularly gets women just come running to the dance floor. And it particularly,
00:18:49.120
if you ever heard Pony by Ginuwine, the first note is like, bam, does that thing. You ever play that
00:18:54.480
in a club? Pretty like 90% of females in the building will all just instinctually. Yeah.
00:19:00.320
That the sub base, it doesn't work. But without the sub base, people are confused. And if there's
00:19:05.040
no base, people aren't quite sure what to do with themselves. So what they will do then is focus on,
00:19:09.440
on the top end more. So in Prince is the context of Prince, Prince is genius and Prince already had
00:19:15.520
like a billion amazing records. Uh, so he could do something like that and people would continue to
00:19:20.480
pay attention because he'd already built up the frame of, okay, it's Prince. I'm going to pay
00:19:24.400
attention to what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. It's going to be good. Uh, if it wasn't
00:19:27.840
Prince, it wouldn't necessarily work because people would be like, this shit got no base. Turn it off.
00:19:31.200
Yeah. Um, yeah. Anyway. All right. All right. We'll hit mute. Let's go off camera too.
00:19:39.440
Okay. Okay. So, well, this would be funny. I haven't done this before. This is an unmixed, but brand new
00:19:45.520
song featuring the words of the immortal Scott Adams. All right. Um, here's one. How many of you
00:19:58.960
have ever thought or maybe gagged when you heard somebody else say it that they were trying to
00:20:04.240
find themselves? I need to find myself. I need to, I need to figure out who I am. Bad idea.
00:20:18.080
Here's the reframe. Instead of being a explorer and trying to figure out who you are,
00:20:25.600
how about authoring yourself to be what you want to be, to be what you want to be.
00:20:29.520
You can author your situation. You don't have to just discover who you are.
00:20:51.600
Instead of finding yourself, author yourself. That's one of the great things about human
00:21:00.640
life is that you don't have to be, you don't have to be anything, anything. You can author
00:21:10.160
yourself into almost any kind of situation. You know, obviously you can author yourself a
00:21:16.000
billion dollars just because you want to, maybe some people can, maybe some people can, but I love
00:21:23.200
these words. I love these words. Instead of finding yourself, finding yourself, author yourself.
00:21:39.760
That's very powerful if you take that to heart, author yourself, author yourself.
00:22:00.320
Because sometimes we forget that we have that power that we can turn ourselves into whatever we
00:23:30.660
A wrestler to face a robot, that will have to happen.
00:23:33.940
So whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at Wealthsimple.
00:25:04.260
Akira, we asked the local subscribers if they wanted to have some questions for you, and
00:25:12.400
So if you don't mind, will you take some questions?
00:25:17.800
So the first question is from Raphael, and he wants to know whether you're going to release
00:25:25.580
Yeah, lots of people have been asking for vinyl records, and it was always my dream to get
00:25:32.520
And it was my dream to get them on vinyl, and then to sort of go on a quest and take
00:25:38.040
them to him, and then give him the vinyl, and then he would have the vinyl.
00:25:42.100
And I always thought that would be the case, and I always assumed that would be the case,
00:25:45.200
and then suddenly that wasn't the case in this realm.
00:25:48.700
And so, yeah, one should always kind of do things as quickly as possible, if you can.
00:25:55.240
It was difficult because I got stranded in Mexico and blocked out the US after 2020,
00:26:02.220
which made it difficult to do things like vinyl and things like that.
00:26:09.800
We just this week put the new album available as a pre-order on CD, and if that goes well,
00:26:20.700
And that will be the sacred quest of getting the Scott Adams records on vinyl, where they
00:26:33.540
I always wanted to see them big and sort of open the thing up and, you know, read all
00:26:40.260
So, yeah, you can get the Almost Anything Could Happen Today CD at meaningwave.com now.
00:26:47.260
And then if that goes all well and people like that, then we will work on getting vinyl.
00:26:52.300
We'll make sure to drop the link after the show or in the chat of where they can get that.
00:26:57.640
So, you guys, let's get this going so we can do vinyl for us.
00:27:04.780
Are your creations, including by, I don't know how to pronounce this, but been aural beats?
00:27:14.160
I mean, not usually deliberately, sometimes accidentally.
00:27:18.040
I kind of developed my own system with regards to frequencies and all that sort of a thing.
00:27:22.560
So there's lots of, yeah, it's an esoteric area of audio.
00:27:28.240
But you can put music at different frequencies and some people think it gives different results spiritually and so on and so forth.
00:27:36.000
So, yeah, a big part of what I'm doing is essentially deliberately utilizing audio for specific results.
00:27:56.380
I don't even know how that came through the computer when it's on the phone.
00:28:26.960
I guess it's not a name, but it's gone, I guess.
00:28:29.200
What is your creative process structured with creative exercises?
00:28:40.540
How do you decide which message or which lesson to focus on?
00:28:48.280
And if your mom gave you that name, then she's wonderful.
00:28:51.920
But there are many rooms in the mansion, as it says in the Bible.
00:28:55.000
And there's a thousand different ways this occurs.
00:28:57.300
I remember once Jordan Peterson talking about reading the Bible and sort of teaching himself
00:29:03.980
to read the Bible and sort of teaching himself to understand the Bible.
00:29:07.280
And he said something along the lines of sometimes he would find a passage and it would finally
00:29:13.080
And I find that with audio, I'll hear something and it sort of glitters.
00:29:18.160
And I instantly know that it's a song and I instantly know what it pretty much what it
00:29:24.260
Sometimes I'll take a thing and I'll go for a walk and then I'll kind of hear the shape
00:29:27.860
And then the job will be to get what was in my head into the world.
00:29:31.740
And that's something I've gotten better at over the years as I've done more and more
00:29:36.000
and more and I'm, you know, there's now, I've been doing this meanie wave thing since 2017
00:29:42.660
But before that, I was, I was producing and rapping and what have you for many years and
00:29:50.340
But yeah, I basically, I, I'm constantly reading, listening, paying attention to things.
00:29:56.240
And when something glitters to me, I then, I hear it and I make it.
00:30:09.580
I have an arching plan of what I'm working towards with regards to what ideas and messages
00:30:14.020
and people and wisdom and what have you, um, I'm sort of transmuting into this form, but
00:30:21.120
For example, that author yourself one, uh, I had been, uh, in the UK visiting family for
00:30:29.860
I came back here to Mexico and I just ran into the studio and it was literally just to get
00:30:35.900
And then 45 minutes later, I'd written that song.
00:30:43.200
It was very much the kind of getting smacked in the head by a lightning bolt.
00:31:14.460
You're the guest that, uh, of all the guests that we had that I've been the most excited
00:31:32.680
But, um, I really wanted to, to, to, to talk to you because, um, uh, what you said about
00:31:38.480
music is exactly what Scott always explained, how powerful music is throughout history and
00:31:55.720
That's why I didn't watch the Superbowl because I don't want bad drugs in my system.
00:32:03.660
And you are my favorite drug, uh, of all, uh, uh, your music, because it's like, uh, Erica
00:32:10.420
was saying, uh, you, you made all this music, you, you condense Scott into, into this chance,
00:32:17.020
And, uh, like the Gregorian chance that Owen was talking about yesterday, that they're
00:32:21.760
just impregnating to people's psyches, even without having to think that's what I love
00:32:26.960
so much about your music, because it's a lot like, uh, what Scott did with his books.
00:32:34.200
It was the choice of every word in every, in every, uh, every, uh, every phrase and
00:32:42.560
So, uh, uh, my question is, okay, let me get to my question.
00:32:46.020
Um, I would love to see, I don't know, you read the religion war and God's debris.
00:32:52.720
They're, they're on my, they're, I have them on portable.
00:32:59.400
Maybe, uh, I would like you to read it, you know, because it's like, I think this is the
00:33:03.420
most amazing story ever, especially with the religion war.
00:33:10.340
So we do a thing on my live streams, uh, where we do a kind of book club where I will
00:33:15.120
play an audio book and then I kind of live score it while it's happening.
00:33:40.540
I love what happens when I'm going to my question is that.
00:33:45.120
Uh, when he gets back is that Scott wanted to make a movie, right?
00:33:51.900
And, uh, and it would be great if, uh, he could do the soundtrack.
00:33:55.920
If Jay could do in like a, like an anime, like a cartoon style.
00:34:14.060
I mean, I'm more of a fan than a, than a talk guy, you know?
00:34:44.880
You guys, what other questions do you have for him too?
00:34:49.680
And I love how many of you said you needed to hear that right now.
00:35:11.400
Well, you guys, do you have any other questions for him?
00:35:14.020
You know, if he comes back, we want to make sure we answer your questions too.
00:35:17.900
Um, and also I think that we should really support him because, you know, this is his
00:35:26.540
So, um, I saw a couple of people drop the link to the album and hit in the chat.
00:35:34.240
If someone could drop it into YouTube also, and we'll also post his links on the socials
00:35:42.960
Um, and also you can, I believe, subscribe to him.
00:35:47.760
Um, so, you know, if you want to do that, but I say support him because music is the
00:35:55.020
And as you see, there's a lot of really dangerous music out there.
00:36:00.040
Um, I'll say it's satanic and it's evil and why not pick something that feeds your soul
00:36:09.400
I think that's, um, the way to go and even like play it in the car.
00:36:14.040
If your kids are in the car, we have Akira back, but that, you know, that's, um, it's
00:36:18.820
beautiful, inspirational, and it feeds your soul.
00:36:22.500
And it's also the words of people like Scott or Jordan Peterson that bring life.
00:36:30.680
Somebody wanted to know why you got stranded in Mexico.
00:36:35.940
Hey, hey, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
00:36:52.440
Um, so anyway, just to finish the previous one, I was, yeah, I had an idea of, um, later
00:36:56.980
this year to do a, uh, Scott Debris trilogy, uh, book club thing where we would play
00:37:03.120
the audio book and I would sort of live score it in real time, uh, on live street.
00:37:17.160
Akira was, uh, a fundamental, the Japanese anime anime was, uh, I remember I was talking
00:37:24.360
He was telling me about how, when he was a little kid, his mom took him to see 2001,
00:37:30.620
And he went back and watched it like seven times.
00:37:32.580
And then after that, he had a very clear idea of what his life was going to be, uh, as a
00:37:37.600
And I had a similar thing with, uh, Akira in that, uh, I was like 10 or something.
00:37:43.140
I already knew what, like what I wanted to do, but I, I ordered that movie from the back
00:37:47.440
of a magazine with my paper round money and waited till my parents were asleep and sneakily
00:37:51.920
watched it on a, on the, on the VHS and, uh, and was just awed by the potential of human
00:37:58.540
creation and knew that I would, that I wanted to do something that powerful and it changed
00:38:05.160
So I took the name Akira as a sort of rap name when I started rapping and then I got really
00:38:09.920
good at freestyling while we were on our first tour, where we would only communicate
00:38:13.720
in rapping, even when ordering sandwiches at gas stations.
00:38:16.440
Um, so in one sort of freestyle thing with my band, I declared myself Akira of the Dawn
00:38:23.360
and then that became my name, uh, from then forth.
00:38:26.500
And then I kept it cause it's, it sounds like a good sort of powerful sort of a name, even
00:38:30.420
if it is mildly preposterous, you know, I called my son Hercules, uh, there is great power
00:38:36.580
Uh, you will tend to sort of live up to whatever was bestowed upon you in that regard.
00:38:42.820
Uh, my nephew's name is Maximo and, uh, and he's a wrestler and he's a maximum.
00:38:52.780
Um, that was it, uh, thank you quite someone else had a question when I joined.
00:38:58.420
So yeah, the chat, the chat wanted to know how come you were stranded in Mexico.
00:39:04.220
So it's cause, um, the V the visa I was on, which is the O one artist, sorry, alien of
00:39:11.360
extraordinary ability visa, which is the best named visa that there is, uh, on earth to
00:39:18.160
And I was in the USA for like eight years or something, uh, living with my wife and son
00:39:22.660
and we, uh, built, uh, you know, a life and a business and a studio and all that type
00:39:27.380
Um, you have to get like the visa rebooted every three years and, uh, the reboot period
00:39:32.280
happened just at the, around the early part of Tom Hanks disease.
00:39:36.420
And so we had to go out of the country to get the new visa, uh, signed an embassy.
00:39:44.760
And then while we were out getting it signed, uh, the Biden regime declared that you couldn't
00:39:49.920
reenter the country if you were a legal immigrant, if you weren't vaccinated, uh, which
00:39:56.540
And, um, and my family was not, so we weren't allowed back in.
00:40:00.300
So then we had to sort of restart our lives, uh, where we were, happened to be, which was
00:40:05.660
Mexico, which is where we'd gone to get the visa.
00:40:08.320
Uh, and we'd luckily like met some nice people and, you know, figured this could be a nice
00:40:23.680
And I literally, you know, I'd only left the USA with, um, you know, some hand luggage
00:40:30.220
And I had to basically rebuild the entirety of my sort of, well, life wielded of our lives
00:40:37.440
And I had to go bit by bit Amazon order by Amazon order wire by wire.
00:40:45.920
Uh, you know, I had planned in 2021 to go on tour and, uh, do all sorts of stuff, but you
00:40:51.040
know, man plans and God says, uh, things are feeling a little less human these days, aren't
00:40:56.940
But isn't the whole point of progress to make things more human?
00:41:00.980
That's why at TD, when we design a product, whether it's an app for making trading easier
00:41:06.120
or monitoring your account for fraud, we ask one simple question.
00:41:12.920
That's how we're making banking more simple, more seamless, and more intuitive.
00:41:18.220
But most importantly, that's how TD is making banking more human.
00:41:23.240
Alan Watts, by the way, I have an Alan Watts laughing button on my button thing here.
00:41:33.660
Someone actually, someone actually said that they wanted more Alan Watts.
00:41:40.460
Well, a new Alan Watts album literally came out, uh, last week.
00:41:47.180
Just over a week ago, a brand new, uh, Akira the Don and Alan Watts album, um, created in
00:41:52.380
collaboration with, um, uh, Alan's son, Mark, um, who sent me the audio that I turned into
00:42:01.440
And then I spent a year working on, uh, mostly going to the beach and walking along the beach
00:42:10.280
Uh, lots of people are saying it's the best album yet.
00:42:13.000
And lots of people are saying it's the best Akira the Don and Alan Watts album.
00:42:15.480
And yeah, certainly, uh, if you go and look at the comment section, um, and yeah, so your
00:42:22.840
I'm assuming you weren't aware of that because you're very greedy of each one another one
00:42:30.260
I'm not sure why they didn't know that, but, um, but I'll, I'll post it so that everybody
00:42:39.620
I made one post on Instagram and I've posted it on Twitter a few times and I'll upload
00:42:42.860
a video like 0.0002% of the people that actually like you would have seen that, let alone the
00:42:51.400
Uh, it really is the case that no matter how much marketing you're doing, it isn't actually
00:42:56.520
And it, and it fills me with great, with great horror and sadness when I think about
00:43:01.500
Uh, but there's only so much time that one has to create and then to tell people about
00:43:06.700
So I tend to spend most of my time doing the creating, uh, under the, with this sort
00:43:11.580
of like idea that word of mouth will get it to the people that want it, that it would
00:43:17.480
But you have an amazing group here that is like, we, we love you because a Scott told
00:43:27.540
He loved what you were doing and we all became fans and, you know, coming on the Scott
00:43:34.680
Adams school, I think it's beneficial to everybody that's come on because you have an army of
00:43:39.100
people that support and love what you're doing.
00:43:41.040
And we want to see it, you know, to keep going.
00:43:46.220
Like they, they all were saying they were going to download the album.
00:43:53.160
And, you know, I think you're going to see a nice bump because probably a lot of people
00:43:58.680
who haven't met you yet, maybe they weren't on Locals or they didn't know much about you
00:44:04.160
And I think it's important what Sergio said too about, you know, like I'm going to keep
00:44:09.380
reiterating, feeding your soul with something positive when you have a choice of what you
00:44:14.100
can listen to, listen to some positive affirmations built into an amazing beat and, and feed your
00:44:24.740
Well, the binaural beat question made me think of another, maybe esoteric music question.
00:44:38.000
I use the, well, I, I move around between slight frequency adjustments depending on what
00:44:46.300
So it's usually in the contemporary Western standard, but then sometimes I will deviate for
00:44:58.140
Have you noticed a difference in terms of how, how you think it sounds?
00:45:00.800
Cause I mean, for people who aren't aware, there's a theory that 440 Hertz is like kind
00:45:06.820
It refers to what a is tuned to and 432, I think is meant to be kind of more naturally
00:45:17.400
I've done the sort of Pepsi taste test thing on this.
00:45:20.080
I've not seen anything observable, but I've got some tests running in the background that
00:45:27.180
I'm not going to say what they are because then people will know.
00:45:29.160
So there's some tests and I'll be able to sort of extrapolate after a period of time if there's
00:45:36.240
actually been any difference with the one that's one and one that's the other type vives.
00:45:42.480
Yeah, but back on that thing, it is very much the case that if you're not deliberately
00:45:49.080
programming yourself, something or someone else is, and they don't necessarily have your
00:45:54.340
best interests at heart, The Devil Will Find Work for Idle Hands to Do is a Morrissey
00:46:02.940
But when I first learned that from the Morrissey song, and I thought about that a lot when
00:46:09.100
So if I'm not actively, busily doing things, the devil will take control of my body and
00:46:15.840
There's a reason, for example, they call boo spirits.
00:46:18.900
The whole idea of what my nan used to tell me, if you get blackout drunk, then the devil
00:46:28.580
And, you know, Carl Jung said the world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know,
00:46:32.780
There's a million ways of saying the same thing, which is basically program or be programmed.
00:46:36.800
And you have complete dominion over your own being, and you get to decide what the inputs
00:46:43.360
And you can reverse engineer a desired outcome to which inputs would get you to that outcome.
00:46:49.320
And then essentially, you know, that's what that song was about.
00:46:53.040
That's what beloved Scott is talking about there.
00:46:57.480
Yeah, your music is a reframe that is coming alive in people's bodies, you know, especially
00:47:04.680
Like, the sub is the drum that make people sacrifice their lives to go to war and defend
00:47:13.800
You know, that drum got everybody going, right?
00:47:18.220
And that's why he started learning the drums in front of us.
00:47:21.920
You know, he actually started doing it in front of the whole process.
00:47:24.960
I was messaging him at some point, asking him if he could send me some drums.
00:47:41.040
There was a question on locals that they are hard of hearing, and they wanted to know
00:47:52.300
Yeah, if you go look up, if you go on the YouTube channel, all the videos have got captions
00:47:57.800
Certainly all the ones in the past couple of years.
00:47:59.620
In the early years, it took me a while to realize that captions would be useful.
00:48:07.940
There's a difference in watching a movie or listening to something in the experience when
00:48:13.740
you have the words in front of you and when you don't, right?
00:48:16.700
But I find it's the case with a lot of pop music.
00:48:19.000
Like, you don't really, you get maybe 20% of what they're actually saying.
00:48:22.780
But it's like, if you look at the lyrics of a lot of, say, 80s pop songs, which you've
00:48:25.600
just been singing all your life, oftentimes you're like, wow, wait, he was saying that?
00:48:31.020
Why is that Wang Chung boy guy talking about taking a baby by the ear or whatever?
00:48:36.800
But anyway, yeah, if you check out the YouTube, there's captions on all of the albums and
00:48:43.300
videos for everything made in the past couple of years.
00:48:46.100
And also, there's the lyrics to basically every single song is on meaningwave.com in
00:48:54.640
And also, if you listen on streaming services like Spotify, the lyrics are also in there
00:49:00.400
So I spent a lot of time and effort and resources getting the lyrics done.
00:49:07.860
At one point, I was outsourcing it, but people would make mistakes.
00:49:10.380
Um, so now for every single release I put out, I do the transcription and then a very
00:49:15.840
tight timing to the song so that when it appears on the video or anywhere else, it's exactly
00:49:30.720
He wants to know if AI is affecting your industry or you.
00:49:35.420
Um, it's affecting me in the way that, like, it's a tool that I can use for various things.
00:49:42.040
Like, for example, on the captions thing there, it used to be the case that I'd have to do
00:49:46.340
the captions and then I would have to open up a text file and edit a load of code in the
00:49:51.360
back end of the text file and then copy that into a thing and this, that, and the other.
00:49:56.320
And now I can get an LLM to do that in 30 seconds.
00:49:59.660
Um, so in that regard, there's lots of tools, uh, in music, people have been using AI for
00:50:06.080
a long time and nobody knows because like the people have been, there's like LLM technology,
00:50:11.600
uh, in various plugins that people have been using for ages, like EQs and stuff like that.
00:50:17.120
So contemporary EQs for years now, we'll be able to, you'll put an EQ on each channel.
00:50:22.740
That's like a thing where you can adjust the level of the bottom, the bass or the at the
00:50:28.300
top and it can listen to the other ones and tell you where frequencies are and things of
00:50:34.720
There's like the billion, I guess the real question people, cause everyone's all like,
00:50:44.860
Um, it is certainly the case that it's very easy now to press a button and generate something
00:50:50.960
And, uh, the world has always been full of very mid stuff.
00:50:54.640
If you, if you watch an old broadcast of a chart show of a music chart show from any
00:50:59.640
year, you always, people are always like, Oh, music was amazing in the sixties, dah, dah,
00:51:03.020
But if you watch one of the weekly chart shows, 95% of the stuff is awful.
00:51:08.040
And then there'll be like, you know, something good.
00:51:11.520
Uh, it used to, people are all concerned about AI cover versions or what have you.
00:51:16.200
And if you go to any kind of, uh, what you guys, like a swap meet,
00:51:20.960
garage sale or what have you, there were all these albums in the sixties and seventies
00:51:25.640
that would cover versions of whatever the popular songs were at the moment that would
00:51:29.520
be made sort of cash in on the existing thing and not have to pay for the license.
00:51:34.140
Um, you know, there was music in elevators and so on and so forth.
00:51:37.440
It's always been the case that like most of what you hear is mid and doesn't have a huge
00:51:42.520
amount of care or love put into it, but that there's all, there's amazing stuff.
00:51:46.260
If you go look for it and if you have taste, so people who have taste and want amazing stuff,
00:51:51.720
And people who don't care, we'll have, uh, AI generated playlists in coffee shops that just
00:51:57.140
generate whatever the particular mood required is.
00:52:01.280
I didn't, you know, um, that, that different experientially.
00:52:07.100
I, I do have to ask from our friend, Mike Burt, who Scott deemed our jester.
00:52:13.040
He terribly wants to be immortalized and he wants to know if the clips that he has sent
00:52:19.300
you about his role, um, have any possibility of becoming a hit with you.
00:52:29.900
Um, it certainly is the case that, you know, there, uh, uh, there are so many things that
00:52:40.920
I have that I want to do with regards to making songs.
00:52:48.200
Um, people are like, Oh, you should do that thing that that politician said in that thing
00:52:53.000
It's like, yeah, I'm not here to make hilarious little meme songs or what have you.
00:52:56.960
I'm trying to make like useful art that will be beneficial to people for decades, hundreds
00:53:02.460
of years, thousands of years, or what have you.
00:53:04.880
People still read meditations by Mark Storius, you know, that was a good use of a life there.
00:53:10.740
You know, he put things down and they're still useful thousands of years later.
00:53:14.180
He acted with a deliberateness of purpose and turned his life into a masterpiece that would
00:53:21.060
And we can all do that, but we have to be very, uh, if we want to, but we have to be deliberate
00:53:25.120
about where we're putting our time and our energy and what we're, you know, I agree.
00:53:36.420
And, you know, it's fellow are not doing wonderful things out there and I haven't seen
00:53:41.640
And maybe when I see it, I'll go, Oh my gosh, Oh my goodness.
00:53:54.880
It was Scott talking about the role of a jester, not him per se.
00:54:00.140
And I also wanted to say before, when you're talking about Hercules, I was going to mention
00:54:11.240
I read Cerno's book and Scott's book back to back.
00:54:20.900
Uh, you guys, Cernovich, we're going to hope he's coming on here one day soon.
00:54:28.760
Self-talk in his book, which was a concept I'd never even thought about.
00:54:32.120
And now I always tell people, I was literally talking to someone yesterday.
00:54:34.600
It's like, if you're having a bad time or you're feeling bad or down or what have you,
00:54:38.060
a really useful exercise is to just speak out loud.
00:54:42.240
And you know, you could put in a, in an earphone or something to just go for a walk.
00:54:45.580
And people will think you're talking to your mom or something and you can just say what's
00:54:49.100
in your head, allow it to come out of your face and you will realize how ridiculous so
00:54:53.380
much of it is and how self-pitying or self-flagellating or unnecessary.
00:54:58.140
And you can very quickly transmute it into something useful and positive if you do that.
00:55:02.300
And that idea came to me from reading Guerrilla Mindset and Mike talking about just the idea
00:55:08.360
of self-talk and how people can just have this conversation going in their head all the
00:55:12.500
It's completely unuseful and negative and mean.
00:55:17.960
What you tell, what you tell yourself, you'll believe.
00:55:29.080
I don't know if Shelly wants to share anything with you.
00:55:49.520
I love how you work with him and that song, Good.
00:55:55.100
So how do you, with Joko Willing, what is it that, how do you pick people to make songs?
00:56:04.660
I would, like I said earlier, it's just a case of if it glitters.
00:56:09.260
You know, sometimes the message can come from many different places.
00:56:14.860
Something I was doing in the early days was I would sort of meditate upon a sort of idea
00:56:18.660
and then I would find a bunch of different people essentially talking about the same idea,
00:56:23.680
And then you'll find that there's commonality between some very different people.
00:56:28.020
So, for example, you might not think that Alan Watts and Ayn Rand have much in common,
00:56:32.880
It turns out that there's a place where Ayn Rand and Alan Watts and Marcus Aurelius
00:56:44.440
By the way, I wanted to say this, thank you for everything that you've been doing.
00:56:51.800
I think about you often, particularly because one of the songs I did is that song Soccer
00:56:56.680
where Scott is talking about when he looks back upon his life, what would be important
00:57:05.000
He talks about watching his stepdaughter play soccer and that aspect of his life
00:57:10.680
and how easy it is for us to sort of get caught up in the striving
00:57:14.060
and got to get this done and do this bit of work and so on and so forth
00:57:16.960
when around you the most important things in the world are just right there in front of you.
00:57:24.760
And that record was really important for me to make
00:57:31.120
a really fundamental and useful and just crucial aspect of existence
00:57:46.160
I mean, like Eric said earlier, he would play it over and over and over and over again
00:57:54.640
So you were really special to him and did some great work
00:57:58.680
and I'm glad that he got to see that and appreciate it.
00:58:12.900
Akira, I have to ask you, will you come back again?
00:58:36.180
This is a song from the new, I'll say it's new because it came out in December.
00:58:42.340
Time feels weird to us now, but this is from the most recent album
00:58:46.960
with Scott Adams, which is called Almost Anything Could Happen Today.
00:58:58.660
The usual frame, the old way of thinking, is that if things are going wrong,
00:59:09.120
Have you ever thought, my God, the whole universe is acting against me.
00:59:19.280
Very, very suboptimal way of seeing your world.
00:59:32.320
If you had a bad, if you had a bad childhood, the universe owes you.
00:59:51.840
If you had a bad divorce, the universe owes you.
00:59:56.440
It is almost impossible for anybody to have bad luck all the time.
01:00:06.200
So if you have a string of bad luck, it is the surest sign that some good luck is on the way.
01:00:22.420
In any small period of time, they might have extraordinary luck or bad luck.
01:00:26.680
But over time, it's definitely going to go back to something like average.
01:00:31.080
So if you're in one of those, man, I can't believe how bad this is.
01:00:36.420
It's the surest sign that the universe owes you.
01:01:39.020
Akira, if you want to give yourself one last shout out for me so I don't mess up where everyone can find you,
01:01:45.520
I will post links after so people can support you.
01:01:53.320
We want to talk philosophy also with you, okay?
01:01:59.060
And thank you for everything everybody's doing.
01:02:02.340
And, yeah, as always, let me know if I can help with anything.
01:02:08.800
And wherever you listen to music or watch videos or what have you,
01:02:11.440
you should be able to find me and the various things that I work with,
01:02:18.500
So, yeah, just look for Akira, the Don, wherever you might be.
01:02:26.760
And you can get things there and find out what the latest records are.
01:02:31.680
For example, if you go there, you'll see that there was an Alan Watts album out last week.
01:02:39.640
Shelley, thank you for letting this continue and being our queen.
01:03:01.420
Everybody, thank you for tuning in every day and being so kind.
01:03:11.800
And we'll see you tomorrow with Brian Romelli to Scott.