Maynard James Keenan joins Joe Rogan to discuss his chaotic, rule-free creative projects—like What Is Pulisifer? and winemaking—balancing intuition with discipline since 2001. They mock the new Riddick film while praising immersive acting in shows like Sons of Anarchy, critiquing modern CGI’s emotional detachment. Keenan shares tattoo stories, including a Fukushima-linked loss, and his Army service (1982–1988), rejecting military duty to avoid Gulf War 1. The conversation reveals how adversity—whether nature, art, or bureaucracy—shapes resilience, contrasting LA’s softness with Arizona’s rugged self-reliance. [Automatically generated summary]
I like what you did, too, where you're mixing different styles of music.
You're mixing, like, legit country music.
And then some of the songs sound almost like Tool.
You know, some of the sounds have, like, your same type of vocals that you would in one of your Tool songs, but it's just got this completely different extra vibe to it.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of flexibility just because we are kind of a moving target, so when we start to kind of get inspired in some direction, we're not really confined to, you know, I love Slayer, but Slayer is Slayer.
That's kind of how we did this new DVD. There's the whole documentaries at the beginning.
When you go out and watch the DVD again, you can actually skip the documentary if you want to, but it was important to see the documentary and see Billy Dee and Hildeberger so that you understood when they came back up later in the actual show, who the hell, who the fuck is that?
If you didn't see the documentary, you don't understand who those people are.
I've got guys on speed dial that I know that are world-class winemakers from around the world.
If I have a question that I think that they've seen the answer to or seen that challenge or seen that hurdle, I will not even hesitate to text or call or write or email or something just to go, okay, so here's the challenge or here's the thing I'm going to try.
And based on, you know, the kind of fruit that we get, because the fruit we get is not like you would get in Napa or get in, necessarily get in New Zealand.
It might be more specifically like Adelaide Hills, but not necessarily the Barossa.
For the most part, you have to give it some food now and then, some kind of nutrients that are not going to cripple.
You don't want to give it steroids or anything like that, but you want to give it something that it needs if it needs a little extra dose of something.
I mean, because for me, I have my staff in the tasting room.
So basically, come to Jerome.
There's a staff of people that, of course, rotate.
But we have Chris Turner who's my right-hand man in the vineyard.
I'm not a vineyard guy.
I'm in the cellar.
So Chris has his team of people in the actual vineyard making sure that they all have their finger on the pulse of what I'm looking for in the grapes to make the wine.
We have, of course, our shipping staff and, you know, the business affairs managers and stuff.
But in the cellar, it's just my wife and I. It's just us making the wine, pressing the grapes, inoculating.
So there's not actually a staff of people in the actual cellar because that's my house.
Like, when you decide that you're going to start making your own wine, you get a piece of land, you decide where you're going to grow grapes, you decide...
How the fuck do you piece together a team to create wine?
Yeah, because every year that I'm making wine on my own, you know, previous years, like from 2004 up to about 2009, I had other, you know, people, I was kind of like looking over their shoulder and trying to be involved in doing it.
But until 2010, you know, like part of nine, but part of 10, until I was actually in, you know, doing it myself, You're only going to learn that way.
And now, how many months out of the year does it take to do that, and then the rest you devote to whatever else, like Pussifer or anything else you like doing?
You're up at, you know, I'm up at 630 doing punchdowns and just checking things out and make sure everything's, you know, not, you know, something didn't blow up or I forgot to seal something so it's leaking or, you know, there's just those tragic things that kind of happen in the cellar that you look over and the spout wasn't shut and there's, like, Pinot Gris pouring onto the ground.
Poor Matt Mitchell from Pustle Free came out to record some tracks with me.
I'm up at 6'7", out there doing my thing, and then I would come in and we'd try to work on a song or work on some tracks, and he was helping record some stuff.
And then I go, I gotta go, I gotta quickly distem this fruit, and then at 11.45, I've got to drive down the hill because I've got to go do jujitsu from noon to 1, and then I'll be back up here at 1.15.
We can do a vocal, but then I've got to press the chardonnay.
So what do these people think that have seen you pre-wine and post-wine?
Did they think originally, like, oh, this is just his new thing, he'll do it for a little bit, and then it's probably, you know, it'll last a year or so.
40, just under 40 planted, and only about 10 of those are actually producing at the moment.
Southern Arizona, my sister company, Arizona Stronghold, I have access to fruit from our vineyards down there, so there's a lot of growers all over the state, and there's growers just over the border into New Mexico as well, just over from those counties, so there's also kind of a mirror image terrain over in New Mexico with even more established vineyards than we have in Arizona.
And it all depends on what you're kind of going for.
You know, if you want to plant, like, tighter spacing and set fruit a little earlier on the plant when it's younger so it doesn't quite get big and kind of, like, almost stunt its growth in a way, you get some really concentrated fruit on a smaller vine.
But you've seen some that are, like, these huge old-school vines.
There's different schools of thought on that.
You got guys that pull out everything in 20 to 30 years or just pull everything out and start over because the vine might produce, you know, an eighth of what it was producing when it was younger.
And if it's not great, I mean, if it's like producing an eighth of, you know, that fruit and it's fantastic, just undeniable fruit, well, yeah, hang on to it.
Do you find that this whole process, you know, The whole process of creating this new thing and then getting involved in this completely new endeavor, does that do anything to the rest of your creativity?
Do you find that it opens up new possibilities for other things that you create?
I mean, yeah, it opens up other stuff because it's a whole different kind of creativity.
When you're in the cellar and you're just hovering over some of these wines, you're having to be kind of, you know...
You have to have the technique down.
You have to understand the process that you're going through.
But you also have these opportunities to go, okay, I have to make a creative decision right here.
There's a challenge that's come in.
Something comes in extremely ripe that you didn't expect it coming in extremely ripe because the numbers were just all over the map.
The sugars are extremely high, and it's just probably not even finished fermenting.
It's so ripe.
And then you have something come in that's completely underripe, and you go, hmm, if I put these together, they're right at the right number that I want, rather than trying to finish something that's not high enough sugar and something that's way too high sugar.
You know, there's little moments like that that happen that you just didn't expect and you can't plan.
It's just chaos, and you just have to just navigate the chaos.
But I was into wine a little bit, you know, back in, I lived in Boston for a while, so I, you know, I enjoyed wine with my friend Kurt.
He worked at a nice Italian wine shop, so he'd always bring stuff home on the weekends, and we'd, you know, he would grill, and I would drink this wine, and, you know, years later I'd go, oh, wow, that was pretty, I think we're drinking some pretty awesome wine.
If you know somebody that owns a cool shop or has a nice tasting room like Matthew over at Coval, just go talk to Matthew about what they have on their list or go to Silver Lake Wine or talk to Randy or April or George to go, okay, what's open when you have their tastings?
And they just take notes on...
You have stuff in front of you.
Okay.
Write down, did I like it?
Did I not like it?
Did I not like it?
Just write down what you liked and what you didn't like and why.
If there's just a couple words like, I didn't like that because of this.
Or I like that because of this.
Write it down.
And then you just show them, like, write down, have them write down what the wines were that you had.
And not so much for you, but for them.
And come back again and do it again for some other flight or whatever.
And once you have some notes down, they're going to start to figure out what you might like.
And then they're going to go, okay, try this or try this and then come back and tell me if you liked it or not.
But that's that one that just like, no matter what, no matter who owns that spot, there's always going to be people gathering in that spot for a cup of coffee or like some kind of, you know, sunrise kind of event.
A brunch.
If it's not called brunch someday.
Just like something.
Even if it ends up being a donut shop, there's always going to be something there where people gather in that spot.
And you kind of have to assign some kind of value to...
That energy you're talking about in Sedona to like those little, we'll call them vortexes.
Right.
There's some kind of gathering vortex at that spot.
And I think, back to our Sedona conversation, it's probably some version of that, where those spots just kind of have that...
And, you know, just in general, I was driving to L.A. from kind of the Sedona, Prescott area, and I forgot that the Yarnell fires, they kind of had the road closed off, so I couldn't go that way.
But I thought, you know, a month had passed, and I figured everything wasn't fine yet.
So I get to a certain spot and there's of course a guy standing there going, psych, you can't go this way.
So I had to backtrack and then I kind of took another route that took me farther kind of back-tracked west-ish and kind of came back in.
There's an area out in that way where it's basically it's that kind of Sedona place where you go there, but there's no people.
There's no cell signal.
There's nothing.
It's just these crazy moon rock You know, setting with these Joshua trees and cacti just as far as the eye can see.
And it's like these crazy rolling hills.
It was like the coolest hour and a half, you know, added hour and a half to my trip.
It was completely worth it.
And when you see that kind of place, you can go, you can see how somebody who, you know, when Sedona isn't there yet, you can see how somebody would go, I want to start something here.
There's an energy here that I want to, like, you know, Did you see that video of those dopey Boy Scout guys who tipped over those hundred million year old rocks?
Did you see this?
You know, I think it's called Goblin Canyon.
There's an area of Utah that has these incredible...
But the point is, it was one of these really cool ancient structures where it's this...
This giant like top like a mushroom cap almost and it's just all this wind and sand has eroded it to the point where this is like this little peak that's holding this thing in place and it was so fucking cool looking and these tools just decided to tip it over.
There was actually a mixed martial arts fighter, former UFC champion Evan Tanner, who went on this sort of vision quest in Death Valley and wound up getting disoriented, lost his water, and died.
He was the type of guy that, you know, he was a...
Whether or not it was a smart move, it was a typical Evan Tanner sort of self-discovery type of a journey.
And he did a lot of those.
And most of them he came through.
But some of them, you know, this one obviously didn't work out for him.
He was a fascinating guy though.
Really interesting, very deep thinker, like a deep original thinker.
It's just, you know, these guys are always trying to test themselves, not just inside the cage, but in life period.
And for him, it was, I think, a bit of a vision quest to go out there in one of the most extreme environments known in North America and test himself or see, find himself.
I mean, you know, it's all a matter of perspective and, I guess...
It's a microcosm, macrocosm kind of situation where if you're in a big city like this, you're going to see a cross-section of a certain kind of people.
My friend Todd today was just talking about the talking in reference to just any kind of infrastructure or hierarchy.
You got your 10% that are kicking ass.
You got your 80% that are just kind of coasting.
You got your 10% that suck.
So you're going to end up, if it's LA or if it's like a 400 population town, you're going to have similar percentages.
There's going to be 10% that care and know what they're doing or want to know what they're doing and then 80% that are just there and then 10% that you just want to run over.
Do you feel a responsibility for that or towards that as an artist?
Do you ever feel like because of what you're doing, because you're so motivated, you get so much done, you have so many different projects going, do you realize the impact of that?
Because a lot of people are inspired by not just the work ethic that you have, but how much quality shit you produce, whether it's wine or music.
I have a lot of people around me, especially within the music, within the film, within the animation, all those things, but especially In the vineyards and the restaurant stuff, I see people that are just, every day, I'm inspired by their work ethic.
Because, you know, we were talking about a restaurant.
Like, that's not a whim.
That's not something you can kind of just start on a whim and not expect to be responsible for keeping the boat floating.
That's like, you know, I see there's a restaurant in...
In Arizona called F&B, Pavle and Charlene, and just watching what they go through, but not go through, that's the wrong way to put it, but just their process and their motivation and their fire.
Their drive just it's very inspiring And then a lot of the winemakers that I know in the state as well They're just you're watching them go through their changes and you're watching them go Where they discover a new thing about a new potential of what they can do and how much better they can make it and You know just see you just see that process.
But this one he has more control of, and now it's on CNN, it's got a bigger budget.
But the show, the one that he had on the Travel Channel, was the first experience that I had ever had with chefs.
Like, I knew that I liked good food, and I kind of understand that it takes a special person to make good food.
But I'd never understood how intensive the process is or how creative the process is.
I mean, he explores some really boutique restaurants where these guys grow their own food, hunt their own meat.
And there's one place in Spain, I think it was.
I think it's closed.
It was called El Bulli, where this guy was, this head chef was this legendary guy who brought in all these amazing chefs.
And they would just create these fucking intense works of art these small plate works of art that were just so Unique and inspiring maybe want to write jokes, you know, maybe make maybe want to expand my comedy routine, you know, and You know, but at the same time, as intense as they are about those unique dishes, you'll also catch them eating a bowl of popcorn.
Well, when, yeah, when we have javelina around Arizona and as soon as the javelina are coming and we're near the vineyard or near their yard, the dog is up.
I mean, you know, if we have a day where we can go in and train and we have like a nice day off or a day off, you know, two days off, then I can risk it.
But, you know, to go in and just, there's what time, you know, when would you do it on a show day?
I got injured in like 2003 or 2002, actually before that, and then it just kind of compounded, and then I had to just stop around 2003. That was the back thing, right?
That's what they take and heat up and then spin in the centrifuge.
I'll let you know how it works out, but I've been dealing with a back injury for the past...
All together for about four or five years now, but pretty bad over the last year and a half, on and off, and started to get numbness in my hands and things along those lines, where I was realizing that my nerves were getting impeded and smushed, and I realized I had to do something about it.
So I don't have any of the symptoms anymore, but this is supposed to do an amazing job.
If you've watched, like, really high-level guys go at it, one of the more fascinating aspects of it is it looks like there's very little effort being applied, you know, especially when they're sparring.
A little bit more so when they're competing.
When they're competing, you know, they're going after it.
But when they're sparring, like, a lot of times these guys are just sort of rolling around, it seems like.
Never give the guy a position where he could sprint to the finish line.
Always make him, he's got four or five steps before he can sprint, because a regular person won't see the difference between that, between what looks like casual rolling, and even though they're casually rolling, he's always going to be two or three spots away from the finish line.
Yeah, it really is, and that's something that I've found when we're talking about things that inspire you creatively.
I get inspired by people who have a lot of discipline for jiu-jitsu.
I get inspired by people that are constantly creating and putting a new slant on that.
Jiu-jitsu is very much an art form.
I mean, the word martial art, it seems wrong to people that don't participate in it.
Like, the word art seems like the wrong thing.
But when you do it, you realize, like, if you watch it and you see, if you have an aptitude for it, you understand it, and you see what's going on, then you watch someone who's really good at it, it becomes beautiful.
And then it does become an art.
It is something, not just an art as far as, like, something creative, but an art, like, as in something visually beautiful.
And it's also another one of those things that I think, like creating wine, like putting together a band, like putting together a comedy act, like writing a novel, like these things that we do when we put our thoughts and our creativity into something, they sort of, they don't just exist in a vacuum, but they sort of enhance all the other aspects of our life, too.
And just in general, I mean, there's just that whole physical aspect of making the blood go through your system and being in shape.
You just start thinking more clearly.
You're more creative.
You can kind of you can kind of solve puzzles better if you're just if you're if I notice if I just I just need a break and I just start slouching off It starts to kind of compound if you don't get back into Something walking running.
Yeah, I need to do more That's one of those things that I just feel like it's that that's the that's the on the to-do list that I just keep being embarrassed about having to put it on the next to-do list and Yeah, that's one of those things that everybody always says too.
Yeah, I have a couple good DVDs that I slap in the laptop on the road.
That's a very satisfying thing to do, to work out in a hotel room completely alone and do just a whole yoga class through a laptop when you get through it.
It's a real feeling of accomplishment.
Because I could have just ate Doritos and watched TV instead.
I was out of town, so when I'm in a hotel out of town and my wife, wherever she is, it's my opportunity to watch all those stupid movies that she just won't watch while I'm around.
Laughing at myself, knowing that she's probably laughing, knowing that it sucks so bad, and here I am watching the whole thing and just laughing at myself for watching.
LAUGHTER There's something going on now, man, with science fiction movies where there's so much CGI and they can get away with doing so much on the screen visually that I'm detached.
I went to see Star Trek, the last Star Trek one, Into the Darkness, whatever the fuck it was.
And I was like, this is just a bunch of things happening.
I have no connection at all to any of these people.
Taking even a mediocre script and just running with it.
When you see an artist kind of taking those, being able to tell those stories to where you just believe it.
I don't know if I used this example with you last time, but I just saw it again this season of Sons of Anarchy, watching Kim Coates fully get an erection over Alton Goggins in drag.
And it's just, you know, it's, you know, Walton Goggins has fake tits, and he's, you know, like, a mask, and he's trying to get his son back, and, you know, the lipstick's all smeared, and, and, like, you know, Kim Coates is trying to figure out how he's gonna date this dude.
It's just such an awkward, but they completely sell it, like, like, all the way, you're, you're convinced, like, that, he loves her.
And it's like, not a her, it's Walton Goggins, and a, and with fake boobs.
Or you hear a rumor of like, watch this fucker unravel.
Because you can...
This particular actor is having some issues, so you'll want to watch the show to watch if you can see if you can get a whiff of the crazy coming off them.
Yeah, and it's hard to, you know, I have a lot of friends that go through that kind of stuff, and that's one of the hardest things to get out of your system.
You'd probably rather, you know, you're better off trying to get off heroin, because the pills just go deep.
And they prescribe them like they're giving out free gum.
I mean, it's amazing how many people are on prescription painkillers in this country and how many of those painkillers are opiates and how many of those people are addicted to those opiates.
We're fucking weird when it comes to that, man, without a doubt.
That's one of the most disturbing aspects of our society, the amount of pills that people consume.
You know, it's dark, and when you see someone that you care...
Yeah, the only concern that I have, the big concern, is that Children today are growing up with so many more variables than we ever did and Also much more potential for quicker learning because of the internet and and with that Again more potential more more possibilities more variables more things to think about it's like more more that could potentially be overwhelming right and I think most kids are I think there's like you know just my father
was a high school teacher and by the time he retired it was basically because They kind of pushed him out to get into a new person who wasn't going to question the curriculum.
He was very adamant about making the people who came into that classroom.
You had to make an effort in his classroom to pass the class.
You couldn't coast.
It wasn't anything.
It was like a...
Multiple choice questions.
You were answering the questions.
And you had to know the material.
And you had to be on time.
You had to put in, over the course of the year, you were also doing homework and coming in with completed thoughts that counted towards your grades.
And if you didn't complete all aspects of that in his class, you didn't do well.
Yeah, if there's any one thing that you can instill in a child that's going to guarantee them a healthier existence is an appreciation for work, an appreciation for accomplishing things, setting and accomplishing goals.
So few kids are ever indoctrinated into that sort of way of life.
I used to look out that window, and if I saw a foot on the car outside, I'd be like, fuck yeah!
And then you would call that number.
It was a number.
They would list off the different towns where school was canceled.
And if they got to Newton, I would go, fuck yes!
It was just this huge free day.
Yeah, that was a beautiful thing.
It was also the thing that I really appreciated a lot about growing up in a really fucking cold place.
Despite, on top of learning that, you know, there's a good to having really fucking cold, snowy days, and that's you really appreciate the sunny days with a different vigor, you know?
When you're out there and it's like a full-on snowstorm and there's just a foot and a half of snow on the ground, the trees are covered with snow, you don't hear shit.
Yeah, I grew up in this area that was across the street from a river, and it was a fairly rural area, and this giant park and a river was across the street from my house, and the street was pretty steep, and every time it would snow, or especially if it would rain, the street would become a hockey rink.
And I would watch cars drive down the hill and just right when they got to my house, they'd be losing control.
Just bouncing off curbs.
I think there's something to learn about that.
And there's something about dealing with weather that I think is healthy for a person.
In, you know, decades, like, for any length of time.
But in Jerome, we get snow in the winter.
And it's amazing to me how people just cannot drive in it.
We get it every year, you know, a little bit, sometimes a lot more.
But having to, like, I immediately just get in my Jeep and I go up to a point in the town where it's the problem spot and just park and wait because there's somebody that can't get up the hill or around the bend because they just can't understand not to slam on the gas.
Well, you know, I go up there to help them out just because I know if I don't, there's going to be like 20 cars behind them that can't get where they're going.
So it's just more a matter of bringing a plunger to the shit show.
That was a weird, that was a strange experience to be, you know, I was all, you know, like Steve Martin the jerk out in the backyard with my dogs in front of me, like, you know, like, Hearing the trees just like creaking.
Around and all the car alarms, like a symphony of car alarms going off.
It was crazy, like hearing the glass shatter everywhere.
And there was that feeling about, like, Los Angeles then, where people were humbled.
You know, they were, like, a little nicer to each other.
And I felt it again in New York right after September 11th.
I remember I lived in New York in the early 90s, and then...
When I went back to New York, I remember, like, California, I'm thinking that people in California were, like, a lot more mellow and nicer than people in New York, and people in New York always had that sort of hard edge to it.
But when I went after September 11th, that edge was gone.
There was this warmth to people in New York and a friendliness that I hadn't ever experienced here before.
I was like, this is really interesting.
I'm like, there's a real tangible positive impact That this tragedy has had.
It's that people are appreciating each other more.
What a perfect place to put the factory of all things fake.
If you really wanted to think about a great way to fuck up a culture, just take a spot where the weather never changes and then put cameras on people and pretend they're interesting.
Pretend they're amazing.
Give them lines to say that they're way too fucking stupid.
Oh yeah!
Convince them.
Give them cocaine.
Give them tons of money for pretending.
Confuse the shit out of everybody.
Make it so that they get in line first at the clubs.
Everybody lets them in.
They throw velvet carpets down and they walk on them and everybody cheers.
Yeah, I have no personal experience, but I have one friend that did it and said that he was In an apartment building and he was listening to people talk that were easily five blocks away.
And he was listening to every word out of their mouth.
And he couldn't believe that he could hear it, but he was absolutely sure that he could hear it.
No, he woke up trying to figure out whether or not it was a dream.
That's the problem with those hallucinogenic experiences.
Even if it's an incredible, beneficial experience, there's that wrestling match where you're like, was it real?
What was that?
And I try to get people to look at psychedelic experiences as this way.
Whether it was real or whether it wasn't real, the experience was exactly the same.
So if you took mushrooms and truly did go to another dimension and communicate with ultimate knowledge and tune into the love of the universe, tune into the frequency of life and of progress and Or, whether it happened in your mind, it's still the same experience.
But, you know, if people are going to do those things, I think it goes back to what you were talking about before, about understanding, you know, preparation for this thing you're going to do.
Just, you know, they're just not, they're never going to, just because of the whole nature of how it breaks down some of those barriers between your left and right brain, just metaphorically, you know, just how you think about your creative processes.
They can never quite get their feet back on the ground to understand what it means to actually do a thing, rather than just, you know.
Whatever journey you took, even if it's not on the psychedelics, even if it's just some entire...
You're going to go for a month to be silent in some...
You know, some spiritual place and introspection and, you know, do a fast or whatever.
You don't want to do that like, you know, 12 months out of the year.
They don't have any contrast with anything.
Just go do it, get intense about it, prepare for it before you go, and then be ready to take a while to come out of it when you are coming back, and then you live your normal life.
Do you feel like when you're creating wine or when you're putting together a DVD or when you take on a project that you're kind of on a journey like that as well?
Yeah, I mean, you know, everybody has a way to trick themselves into thinking they're right, or, you know, kind of consistently put a particular process in to get some result back that reinforces the behavior.
But, you know, aside from that, if you're just preparing...
There's definitely a satisfaction coming from even the happy accidents along the way, things you learned that you didn't think you were going to learn, stuff that was actually a challenge that you hadn't prepared for but you managed to get through.
Those are the kind of things that really make those results satisfying.
Not intentionally, but just, you know, I'll be reading a book or an article or seeing a film and somebody will use a word that resonates on some level and I go, ooh, I'm going to write the word down.
I mean, if you're into physics and just geometry and general chemistry, there's these structures that are already there in terms of the relationships between numbers and shapes and angles and just molecules.
And they're very similar in respect to just emotional experiences, just life experiences, even just the journey from an infant to an elderly person.
There's very common angles and structure and commonality between those experiences that can resonate.
So if I see a word That for some reason resonates with me at the age of 35 or 40. I write it down right away because most likely there's some kind of geometry or resonance with that word that's speaking to me at this age in this stage of my life that I should pay attention to.
So I'll write it down and I'll see, I'll explore more to see if it is in fact something that wouldn't be relevant when I was 20, might not be relevant when I'm 60, but it's relevant now.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing about getting older and the ideas that you come across, these ideas are sort of cross-referencing with these other experiences that you've had in your life up to this point now, and now it resonates.
Now it makes sense.
Whereas at 21, it didn't mean a damn thing to you.
A documentary on a guy making sushi when you were 21 would be like, what the fuck am I watching?
But when you're 41, it's like, oh, okay, this guy's kind of obsessed with this art.
There's something to this.
This guy's making swords.
Look, he's folding the metal.
I watched a whole documentary on this guy making traditional-style samurai swords and the incredibly intensive, laborious process involved in folding steel, hammering it down, folding it, hammering it down.
Yeah, you have to have a couple already made and, you know, that's the way you're eating.
That's the way these fucking people are going to eat.
It goes back to those subsistence shows that I'm absolutely fascinated with.
There's this one that I've been watching now.
It's called Life Below Zero.
And it's just these different families, families or individuals who live up in Alaska and then go from one to the next and follow these people in this one tribe that's...
A man and a woman.
And the woman is a native Inuit woman.
And the man is American from the lower 48. And they have children together.
And, you know, like they've lost family members because they fell through the ice and died.
I mean, this is like, this is real shit.
This woman who's, they're walking across the ice and they're like knocking holes into the ice to make sure that it's Deep enough for them to walk with their children and they're gonna put this net down underneath this ice and feed it to each other on the other side of the river and they're gonna catch fish and that's how they're all eating.
And there's no other way to eat.
And this is what they do.
And that's their life.
And there's something about it that's so fucking terrifying to you.
Intense spiritual connection with their food that way.
You know, when they're pulling these fish out of this water and they're grabbing hold of it and making sure it doesn't fall back under the ice, like, there's this intense connection between this animal, this creature that they just caught.
We don't really ever get, and when they eat that animal, there's also this intense feeling of satisfaction that goes with that, this substance living.
You know, this marble is way smarter than we are, so when it decides that there's any even, you know, if the kids get a little too cocky, it'll toss a few tidal waves or toss a few meteors at it.
Just to reset.
It'll just reset, and you'll go back to having to figure out what to do with your time not having your PDA. Yeah.
Eventually, how dependent we are on just everything digital and electrical, just a simple, naturally occurring electromagnetic pulse will just fucking ruin people's lives.
There are only a couple of things I've released with Full Surface that haven't come out on vinyl because they're just digital, but pretty much everything.
Even the remixes we do, we'll do vinyl for it too.
And I'm not being like, you know, Grandpa trying to hang on to his...
Macs or 8-track tapes or anything like that.
I mean, I honestly just like, I keep, when I download stuff off iTunes, I have like a hard drive and I just can't let go of the idea of like, just deleting it all and getting it later when I want it because, I mean, are we really going to watch those CSI Miami episodes again?
Yeah, and also the latest revelations that the NSA tapped into the Google Cloud and basically accessed everything that was up there, which is, you know, Google's all pissed off, but come on, you didn't see that coming?
You know, aren't you guys at the front of the line?
Yeah, and it's all about him having been the engineer of this computer that was predicting national threats.
And it takes everything.
It takes every camera, it will access any camera that's in the system, the cameras on your phones, every microphone, and it puts together all of this data looking at all the digital information.
And predicts, like, international threats.
But the trick, you know, the whole trick of the story is, like, nobody really knows about this thing at all.
It's so self-contained that it inserts this information into studies or, you know, when they're looking at somebody.
It's funny because everything about what this show is all of a sudden came out with all this NSA spying.
They're like, that's what they're doing already.
So this show is like kind of being a cutting edge thing, like going, oh, there's this supercomputer doing all this stuff, and they're looking through the cameras, and they're gathering all the information, and all of a sudden you go...
Yeah, I agree in that personally, but I also see it as something that's very different than I think what people are realizing.
I think everybody's worried about their personal privacy and people are worried about...
Not just their personal privacy but the government being able to access their personal privacy and to be able to look into their photographs and read their emails and I get all that but I think that ultimately what we're dealing with is a dissolving of boundaries between people and information and that it's going to be some there's going to be some breakthrough one day Whether it's some ability to read minds or some new
way of connecting people, some new way of separating boundaries, that's going to make this seem like a joke.
That this is just basically one more step in this never-ending trend of dissolving of boundaries.
I think the people that are doing it too, that's one of the weirdest things.
This Edward Snowden thing, when it came out, it was...
They were trying to discredit him, and they're like, this high school dropout, Edward Snowden.
And you're like, wait a minute, man.
Didn't you guys hire him?
Like, you're making fun of him now, but this is your fucking employee, man.
And he's telling everybody that he had access to everybody's email.
Not just encrypted, but could actually fucking read them.
It wasn't just metadata.
He could actually go and read your emails.
And he was a high school dropout?
Like, who else is working for you guys?
Who gets these jobs?
How do they get these jobs?
The questions...
The questions are just leading to this weird ultimate reality, which is that the trend seems to be, across the line, this dissolving of boundaries between people and ideas and people and information.
And then eventually everyone's going to have access to everything.
And again, I think that that's, you know, I get caught up in the idea of like, Well, maybe this is part of some, you know, this might be just our tendency to do things.
You know, this is what we do to control people, you know, just through the ages.
But at some point you have to wonder, like, so is that choice and the dominant, you know, whoever's in charge, that's a tendency of whatever we are, whatever makes us up.
Is that an extension of what, again, going back to the marble, Is that what the marble wants?
In some way, is that consciousness just trying to sort some things out and take us to the next step?
I try to look at it as someone who's analyzing the human beings as a complete alien outsider, looking at us collectively as a group, which is what we move as a group.
We act as a group.
And I would say, well, look, here's this thing that works collectively to make technology, but thinks it's an individual.
They all think that they're individuals, but essentially all they're doing with their manic desire to acquire goods and to acquire material possessions, what they're really doing is just pushing innovation because they need the biggest, baddest, newest, craziest.
They constantly need the latest and greatest.
They're pushing for these innovations, and these innovations are constantly, within three, four, five months, the exponential increase of these things is making every new step far more powerful than any step before it, and it's happening faster and faster and faster.
It's happening exponentially.
And I don't even think the creatures even realize they're doing it.
That, you know, if you spun a quarter around the top of the funnel, it would take a long time to go all the way around the circle.
But as it gets lower and lower, it's getting faster and faster and faster and faster until it reaches what he thought would be a point of ultimate novelty.
But he thought it was going to be December 21, 2012. But I think, you know, he had a...
He's a dude.
He's a guy.
At the end of the day, as brilliant as he was, as fantastic as his mind was, he's still just a person with an idea.
We grab ideas sometimes and ride those bitches right into the rocks.
But, you know, if you look at those beautiful chaos equations that kind of make those cool kind of paisley-looking things, but you look really close and you see, like, oh, the detail becomes...
He might ultimately have been right in some sort of a way that December 21st, it might not have even been that exact day, but that era, the era between 2012-2013, which is the era we're living in and experiencing right now, it might ultimately be this new Opening for this new future and this what we're talking about whether that's that TV show or the Revelations about the NSA that could be just the first steps and opening up this new door of perception this new door
Yeah mix and it makes you know makes a person When I'm you know trying to write songs or trying to make this wine or you know doing you know doing whatever writing doing comedy bits or whatever It almost makes it feel weird.
You almost feel kind of in an odd, like, self-conscious way of, like, what am I doing?
Like, you go to a show and you see, like, the dude up there dancing around in front of the people that are, like, watching him dance around.
That, when I look at that, and I think about it like that, like repeating the word to the point where it doesn't make any sense anymore, that thing just seems so strange, standing...
So, I'm going to imagine, like most people, at some point in their career, whatever it is they're doing, they all of a sudden kind of go, what the fuck am I doing?
Yeah, if you're paying too close attention to ballet, if you're locking into a ballet, you can enjoy it if you're in the moment and you're just appreciating the movements, but if you look at it too closely, then you start to step back and pull back and look at it in the perspective of this planet spinning a thousand miles an hour in a circle around this gigantic nuclear explosion.
You're like, look at this asshole in tights.
Throwing his body through the air.
This is so preposterous.
Why does anybody give a fuck whether or not you can sing the words to your play?
My wife was taking Spanish, or Italian, rather, and one of the things that she did in her class was they took everyone to an opera.
So we went to an opera.
And so we're sitting there with the rest of the people in her Italian class watching this opera.
I'm like, this has got to be one of the dumbest fucking ways to entertain people I've ever seen in my life.
You're singing in this language that nobody understands.
Everything is like, everyone falls in love immediately, so I can't buy it.
There's no reason why these people are in love with each other so quickly.
They're ready to die.
This is preposterous.
This is made in an era when people didn't have books.
Like, they bought into this because they were dumb as shit.
I mean, you always kind of take that out of perspective like...
Somebody comes to this culture, and then there's this thing where you stick rocks in your ear, and that's like this thing you do, and there's like, oh, there's better rocks than other rocks that you stick in your ear, and then people start stumbling around and bumping into a wall.
Okay, so you pick up a rock, and you put it in your ear, and there's different kinds of rocks that feel different and give you different effects, and there's certain rocks that are really expensive, and some that you can just pick up and stick in your ear, but you just basically bump into a wall afterwards, and that's cool, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
There you have it.
Good luck.
Yeah.
It just seems so absurd.
When you kind of take the words and replace them with, you know, other objects or things.
You know, wine, food.
I mean, you know, food is food, but like singing a song.
Or a person who goes through that kind of process of self-discovery.
You did something and it went in the hole you wanted it to go in, and you had that positive reinforcement and that encouragement from that behavior.
Then you follow it more because, like, you got some kind of accolades either from yourself or from someone around you, so you start pursuing that thing, and it has more about your ego developing in terms of, like, the praise that you got for doing that thing.
So, you know, so you end up, you can see how things get to that level.
You know, watching, you know, watching your, you know, English footy.
I was never...
A footie fan until I had somebody kind of walking me through what was happening.
And then I recognized something and I was, you know, patted on the back for recognizing this thing that I still don't have any fucking idea what I was talking about.
But, you know, I'm watching it more because I want to see where this goes.
And you're like...
Six total goals tops, and that's what we're watching here.
But, you know, at the same time, now that I've got sucked into the rabbit hole, I completely enjoy what that is.
And there's probably a bunch of English dudes right now outside of the studio ready to kick my ass for even mentioning that that might not be something that's interesting.
So I guess going back to what you were asking about the Pussy for DVD, the flexibility of everything that we do, I guess that's kind of what that is.
And the guys that I work with, realizing how absurd some of the things are that we do anyway with our other projects or with this project.
But we do it anyway because we're just really enjoying, we're in the rabbit hole, we enjoy seeing how far we can take a particular absurd obsession with something.
And that's absolutely what I loved and appreciated about it.
Besides the fact that it was funny and besides the fact that the music was good, I loved and appreciated the fact that I could tell that this structure was wholly your own.
I don't know if you saw some of the shows that we normally have.
Table and chairs that we set up at the front of the stage.
Depending on the show, there will be different kinds of tables and chairs.
We always have some wine and some stuff on stage because we have friends that have either opened for us or are coming down to see us or are actually playing in this particular band that while they're not doing anything, they sit down and have a glass of wine on stage at the front of the stage with us.
We've done a lot of shows like that where we've had Like, you know, two drummers and two bass players and a couple extra guitar players and then like that rhythm section just sits down for five songs and just having wine and cheese at the front of the stage just kicking it and then they get back up and do it because it just felt, it just feels more casual.
Even Karina Round will sing a couple songs and I'll sit down and just kind of, you know, watch the show from the stage.
I'm sure that has to have been done at some point.
I've been trying to put this other show together with no luck.
Where we have several bands kind of come up and do a very similar thing, but they play, you know, four songs, and then they sit down, and maybe there's some kind of segue where one of those guys is playing with that other band, and then, like, a band does, you know, four songs or five songs, and they sit down, and the other guys come back up and say, just keep rotating.
You know, rather than doing your whole set and, like, here's who I am, and this is what I do.
You know, just kind of, you know, do it almost like a very well-rehearsed Rehearsal, you know?
A little glimpse into what it was, you know, a little bit of the chaos of those guys getting up there to do their next three songs, and it's not like them in their rhythm and in their element of like, you know, start to finish, this is our set.
This is more like, we're going to get up and do these three songs, and then...
We kind of have to, and it's not like, you know, some guys have to get a full-on boner to go do their set and do the whole thing and, you know, we fucking nailed it, man, or whatever that is.
But just the idea of getting up and performing those songs in a couple of ways and putting them and putting us in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar environment that kind of helps us Just look at it again and re-enjoy what we remember doing when we started doing it, in a way.
I was going the wrong way, pushing the wrong way, and I had my hand out the wrong way, and he went the other way, and his whole body landed on my hand.
Now, that's another art form that over the last, say, two, three decades has really come into its own in a very strange way that didn't really exist before.
It's really interesting because they're the ones who created such beautiful, these beautiful full-piece body designs, those body suits that are actually just one long, flowing piece of art.
That's the origin of that, but not respected in the country where it came from.
Where there was this weird feeling of distrust for the government's assessment of the damage and the dangers.
And we had this long conversation with this taxi driver because he had to drive us from the venue all the way down to Tokyo and it was about an hour's drive.
And so he spoke pretty good English and he was saying that for the first time people are openly starting to question whether or not the government's being honest with them about whether or not they can eat vegetables.
Whether or not their ground is radioactive and their fish are edible.
There was a couple of years ago, there was a news report where these people were waking up in the middle of the night, these horrible cracking noises, and they realized that their houses were sliding off the side of this hill down into this valley.
Yeah, it just gives out.
You know, you decided to put a foundation in the ground that decided to not be there anymore.
We put in grid coordinates for like the tank batteries to pull in and you know if you're gonna if you're gonna shove a big missile in a tube and launch it somewhere you had kept you have to know where you are and To know where it's going basically, so that's what we would do is we would put the the survey points What branch of the military are you in?
Yeah, people that have gone through that, it's very interesting to see.
I had a friend who was real lazy and kind of shiftless and never got anything done, and then went away, went to boot camp, came back, and this motherfucker always folded his napkin after that and sat up straight and got shit done, and I was like, wow.
They turned this dude around.
Like, they really did.
I wouldn't recommend it today, because joining today, you have a high likelihood of either being forced to assassinate someone for the government, or finding yourself in a position where you really wouldn't want to be, and people are shooting at you that don't like Americans.
Unless it's your calling, I wouldn't really recommend it, but god damn.
And then I got appointed to go, I got through a long process, but basically got handed an opportunity to go to West Point by going to the preparatory school for a year.
And got to the end, like when I finally got my appointment to go to West Point, they said basically you have to forfeit your army college fund to go to art school.
And I didn't really go in to be a career military person.
I kind of went in to get college funds so I could go pursue the arts.
But you know, again, my behavior was being reinforced as far as the way I was excelling in the military.
So it was very tempting to go, I could be an officer.
Let's do that.
And then, you know, I got to that moment where I had to, like, I had to make that decision.
In that moment, you have, basically, I had, like, three hours to check the yes box and accept my appointment or check the no box and, you know, go back into the regular army and then go back and go to art school.
Wow.
And I chose art school.
And if I had not done that, I would have, provided I made it through West Point, which is not a guarantee, if I had made it through West Point, I would have been in the first Gulf War as a lieutenant.
I had a friend who is a cop and he was in the Army Reserve for 20 years and had less than a month to go until he was out for 20 years and they shipped him to Iraq for a year and a half.
The law enforcement friends, I bet, understand your friendship with the crazy hippies and liberals more than the crazy liberals understand your relationships with the law enforcement people.
I mean, literally that was with Laura and me in that costume.
We were like...
That came out for the weekend.
I'm like, what are we going to do?
And Mike, her husband, was like...
Just had a new camera he wanted to try out.
I think it was the Canon 5...
D or whatever.
It's just trying to like, you know, let's just get some footage, see what we get.
And we just did all that and we went, did we just do that?
Like, no script, just kind of went, well, let's do this.
Let's do this.
And then, you know, went to Walmart, like actually spent like two hours in Walmart grabbing stuff just for that day to see what we could come up with to come up with costumes.
That Halloween shirt and everything was just like on a quick trip to Walmart to see what we can come up with.