Maynard James Keenan shares his Arizona BJJ gym, Osteria restaurant, and winemaking ventures using heirloom wheat and natural fermentation. He critiques modern wheat’s additives and defends wine preservation against pretentiousness, rejecting strict storage rules or food pairings. His diverse projects—Tool, Perfect Circle, vineyards—thrive through delegation and adaptability, contrasting with Johnny Depp’s unsustainable extravagance post-Pirates. Keenan’s philosophy: creativity demands resilience, not obsession, and shared crises (like a global 5% spontaneous combustion) could unite humanity over trivial divisions. [Automatically generated summary]
When you decide where you're going to live, when you decide where you're going to decide to spend all your time, Like, do you ever go, what the fuck am I doing in the middle of nowhere in Arizona?
First couple years of being in LA, I realized it was just such an energy sap I needed to actually literally go someplace where there were very few people.
And then once you go to his Instagram profile, go to the video that's playing in his YouTube.
There's like a link like on his Instagram page.
Connor's hilarious, man.
He's fucking hilarious.
And he was laughing and having a great time and Floyd seemed like, he seemed a little rattled by like how confident this guy is when they were going face to face and standing off with each other.
Yeah, give me some volume when they get face to face.
Yeah, go back to that.
Listen to him talk some shit.
No, go before that.
Go before that.
There you go, right there, right there.
there is good.
unidentified
He can't even afford to see you anymore.
He is fucked.
There's no other way about it.
His little legs, his little core, his little head.
I'm gonna knock him out inside four rounds, mark my words.
Wait till they get in front of each other and they start John.
It's a flagger.
An Argus McGregor line, I've got my own line of suits coming out.
All right, boys. All right, boys. Just check it out. - All right, boys. - Just check it out. - All right, boys. - Just check it out. - All right, boys. - Just check it out. - All right, boys. - Just check it out. - All right, boys. - Just check it out. - All right, boys.
So, yeah, I'm saying, you know, so that was my first look.
That's what you look at and you go, age, reach, all that stuff, size, watching what happened to McGregor up against Diaz, having that, wasn't really ready for that larger dude to hit him.
Yeah.
Is that the equation?
But then, you know, McGregor's no joke, so he's, you know...
But can he handle a guy who's done this a hundred times?
The thing about Floyd is I think you have an idea of what you can do to him until you get inside the ring with him, and then you realize how good he is.
His defense is just on another level.
He's just in a completely different zone all by himself.
His movement, the way he's able to figure out what you're going to do, the way he processes your movement, throws it into his boxing computer, and then before you know, and he's catching you before you even know what you're doing.
He's just a wizard, man, when it comes to boxing.
The thing is, Conor is a way bigger guy.
He's younger.
He's way stronger.
I mean, physically stronger, not just in terms of, like, punching power.
He's way stronger with punching power, but he's also, like, stronger physically.
Like, if he gets a hold of Floyd and starts manipulating him...
I'm very curious to see what...
Like, his trainer, Jon Kavanaugh, is a very, very smart guy.
I know he's also worked with Pauli Malignaggi, who's a world champion and one of the best boxing commentators in the business.
He's helping Connor.
It's gonna be interesting.
You know, on paper, you'd have to say Floyd has a massive advantage, but all this shit-talking wears on a man.
That's a different kind of shit-talking than Floyd's ever experienced.
Actually, my screen, the screen at my house is so awesome that it's actually, it's worth, like, I have to, I have to, literally, I have to pay a thousand dollars to watch it, so if you want to come over, it's a hundred bucks.
When the RED camera first came out, we had some friends that were using that, then they were using the Canon for a while, just filming on, and I don't know what they're filming on, I just know that over the last...
They have trail cams now that are in 4K. So like when they're looking for animals in the woods, they put these cameras up on trails and they capture, motion capture, and they take video.
4K video.
And it's fucking amazing.
Low light video.
And they show the difference.
There was something I was looking at yesterday.
It showed the difference between state-of-the-art two years ago versus state-of-the-art today in the exact same location, exact same time.
I want to see how those things last because I'm not going to invest all that money in roof tiles if all of a sudden they find in a year that they crack under Arizona sunshine.
But I think even being off the grid, I feel like you can get to a certain point in today's society where you can be unplugged from your power and your water.
But somebody's going to come for your water.
There's various places around the United States where they come after you for growing your own food on your land.
I mean, it's got to feel good when you have a glass of the wine that you've grown and created and worked so hard on, and just established this perfect time of keeping it in the barrels.
And, you know, I'm sure there's got to be, like, massive satisfaction to that.
Because, you know, it spirals out into all these other areas of understanding, again, how to grow your own food.
You start talking to and communicating with people that you wouldn't normally talk to.
Like, a Republican guy is not talking to the liberal Democrat guy and the...
And this religion is talking to that religion.
And, you know, there's all these economic, religious, political lines that get blurred because in that moment talking about growing a thing and sustaining a local community, a lot of those things tend to go away.
Just turn this thing off and get back to understanding what it's going to take to make these exchanges and do these activities.
You start to really...
Feel connected with people rather than this weird divisive crap that goes on in the world today.
Yeah, I think there's definitely like we need to figure out how to spend more time just having regular normal day-to-day conversations because it seems to me like people are worse at it than they ever been before.
People interrupt people more.
They're not good at like listening and talking because I think people are so accustomed to communicating with people through devices.
It's almost like we're rusty.
We're rusty on how we talk to people because we don't do it that much.
I don't use this to talk to people because the technology to me still isn't where it should be because I'll be in the middle of making a point with somebody and the phone call will drop and we have to start over.
They also did an article about how Travis Brown and Ronda Rousey are fading losers.
Like, it was the most ruthless article.
It's a great argument for not living in a condensed population.
Some of the articles in New York tabloid papers, they're so fucking mean!
There's something about being in an island like Manhattan where everybody's stuffed in there, where people just get super shitty with each other and they find it okay to do so.
So it could be that that, you know, those kind of newspapers are very similar to what we're seeing with Facebook as far as the immediate feedback.
And then they adjust the article and adjust the headline.
Right.
To not only make money from clicks, but also to manipulate what you're thinking about a particular subject so they can adjust your vote, adjust your purchasing patterns, those kind of things.
So, you know, these clickbait things.
There could have been a word in that title that they know people like you love to see.
So they got you clicking on it, even though there might be nothing in the article.
So does that mean like one day they'll have a Jamie Vernon on a space holodeck in Arizona and they'll zoom you up to space, but then you'll still be here?
What if it's just Heath Ledger's the Joker who's actually putting this out and he's figured out a way to get all of those billionaire people to jump on the spaceship that goes nowhere.
And it could be exactly this kind of thing, this algorithmic you going down a rabbit hole in this narcissistic feedback on what you want to see, and then it tells you what you want to hear, and then it gets you to buy what you want to buy, but the thing you want to buy...
Might be this rabbit hole of leveling the playing field for everybody.
Just media, things you're reading on your social media pages, this has nothing to do with...
I read all those articles.
Well, that's not necessarily mastership.
That's not you going to a master who has spent all this time doing a thing or researching a thing and got his master's degree in a thing, and then you go to this class...
You take the time, the effort it takes to get to that place, and every step along the way is a new level of a revelation or some kind of epiphany of understanding of, oh, that's why we did this, and then now I can understand that.
And educate yourself.
So destroying an entire base of ignorance and knee-jerk reaction, clicking on links and being fed horseshit, It almost has to be like a conscious effort on each individual to step back and go, I hate that Trump supporter or I hate that Hillary or Bernie supporter because of the things I've been told and the things I believe have been fed back to me.
What if...
I am completely wrong about all of it.
So how do I empty my vessel, open my mind, and try to figure out, backtrack on what the truth is?
Is this person really that much different than me?
Are these people that much different?
Did they grow up with a bad, you know, bad set of poison in their system?
Did I grow up with a bad poison in my system?
I don't know.
So I don't know if there's any way out of it, because the solution I'm talking about requires a lot of introspection, self-evaluation, and a lot of...
Being more open than most people are willing to be.
I know a lot of people that are saying that now and it seems like a message that's being broadcast by a bunch of people that have gone sort of through the gauntlet of life and had a bunch of trials and tribulations and they reach this point where they kind of have an understanding of what it's taken them to get there and And a lot of people like you have this desire to relay this information and people are listening and there's a lot of other people that are saying the same thing that have also gone through their own separate trials.
And I think it's a more prevalent message than I've ever heard in my life and I'm almost 50. I'll be 50 next month and I feel like in my life I've never...
OMG! Yeah, I think more people are talking about, though, man.
I think it's not going to be for everybody, but I think there's way more people that are trying to do better with their life, do better with their mind, do better with themselves.
It's a very, very common thing.
So much so there's a lot of criticisms about the various methods and people kind of losing sight.
And then there's a bunch of bullshit artists that are capitalizing on this idea as well, and they're not really doing it, but they're pretending they're doing it, and they're talking about it, but they're not really in action.
But you can kind of see.
Those guys always look a little doughy.
They're not really doing it, but they're talking about doing it.
People love talking about shit they don't really do.
Like some of my friends, they'll talk about writing comedy way more than they actually write comedy.
Judd Apatow said that.
He said, don't fucking talk about writing, just write.
I was gaining weight before the hip surgery because I just couldn't move as well as I wanted to, obviously.
I mean, it was completely destroyed hip.
No cushion in there.
And then the recovery was...
And then I was on the road, which is like one of the worst ways to recover from anything.
You're trying to recover from being there in the moment.
But the thing I did, finally found my rhythm.
Because I think last time we talked, I talked about how it's hard to train on the road because I've got this thing I've got to do that night.
Finding those guys, finding the black belts that understand the low-impact flow role, putting threads together, just doing simple positional drills, all those things.
Now I've been able to train with Dave and Dan Camarillo, Henry Akins, Rodrigo Havaggi comes down, Todd Fox comes down.
I've been able to train with a lot of people on the road.
If you can't do it slow, you can't do it fast, especially if you don't understand what it is you're supposed to be doing.
And if you have a good training partner, a role player, To help you and he's giving you the exact position that you're that you're trying to train If you got one of those pricks, it's like, you know bluebell purple belt guy like no I'm just gonna check I'm gonna adjust this position No, that's not what you're that's not what you're here for, right?
Yeah, live drills are important But yeah, like dead drills are important to where a person just you just roll just roll through the the technique with them, right?
Yeah, I mean it's like I've always found it really interesting how many people find it sort of in their life and it becomes almost like a replacement for religion in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it seems like the real difficult things, whether it's jujitsu or whatever you're into, you know, I have a buddy that's into ultra marathons, that's his thing, like, it's just like pushing his body to run these crazy distances becomes like this weird sort of like centering thread in his life because he knows it's so fucking difficult that all the other things get easier.
Yeah, I've heard that there's some guys that they'll go in every couple years and have the actual pad.
I don't know if it's like a silicone pad or something that they just cut them open with a small incision, pop it out, pop their hip out.
So I guess during the surgery, they go in from the front.
My guy went from the front.
So my leg was laying across my head while they're in there So it's a full-on scooping out the hip, sawing off the femur bone, putting a spike down the middle of your femur with the ball on top, and then putting it back in, and then waking you up about an hour later going, let's go for a walk!
Yeah, but I think the bone density, what happens with the bone density is that's why the healing process is so slow because the bone is actually healing around that thing.
The one thing they don't have you do is, if you were to bend my leg back, my knee back that way, like a lunge back, and I do some kind of thing, it would pop out forward.
But it used to be the way if I put my knees up on my chest to do like butterfly, the way that they designed the hip before, it would actually pop out that way.
But now they've fixed it where it has to be this other extreme angle to get it to pop out.
Okay, so it's like, you know, it's something like that, and then I started researching going, whoa, you know, we just discovered hep C a couple years ago.
Maybe I shouldn't be putting some kind of weird foreign shit in my shoulders.
It's like you're energetic, but you're also loving.
I think there's something to what we're doing right now where I think within the next 20 or 30 years, we're going to have a real problem with people not dying.
I think there's so many other things going on that we're not paying attention to.
But it is a testament to just the level of frustrations, I think, that people have had just with government in general.
And the internet and the social media has been able to polarize us all enough to where we don't talk to each other to really sort out some of the actual issues that are going on.
So you have this spectacle going on right now that It's amazing.
It is a spectacle, but I always wonder whether or not it's an orchestrated spectacle or whether we just try to find patterns when patterns don't even exist.
And what it really is is just this is just a goofy dude who loves attention and we have a fucking popularity contest to see who runs the country.
And again, like I said, you go back, you know, just back it up to see were people really frustrated with the Obama administration?
Were they frustrated with the Bush administration?
Is it connected?
Are they just looking for something different?
Because if you look historically at places that have had some success as a country, and then they have some problems, they start seeing some issues and they just, whatever the incumbent person is, the party, the group, All they want is something else something different.
We want to get rid of that but something different in and historically when that happens Shit just go sideways that just because they just wanted anything else and they got exactly what they got something worse.
Yeah Yeah, that's the problem is worrying about it the same way you worried about technology like one guy can one day create one thing and it fucking ruins everything and you almost feel like that with like a president like we can ask for Something different and then one day we get it and it fucking ruins everything.
What I worry about most is a lot of what he's doing like with this battle against the intelligence agencies.
All the shitty talks about them.
It's like if they start hiding stuff from him because they're worried that he's gonna tell stuff to Russian guys and you know and talk about certain things like like he revealed top-secret information about Isis want to use laptops as bombs.
He told the Russians that like Yeah.
versus him, you got a real serious problem on your hands then, because that attitude is going to carry on to the next administration.
Yeah.
Whether it's Pence or some Democrat or whoever the fuck comes in after him.
Yeah, so I think that's, you know, it's idle, you know, idle hands are the devil's playground.
You've heard that cliche.
I think that really is, you know.
So my prepper, that prepper side of me, is that person who, you know, what if we don't have, what if we don't have electricity for a week because of whatever.
Yeah, just, you know, just be, have an understanding of what that is so that when it's just a starter, a precursor, or just a dry run of what What happens when that rock does fall from the sky?
Because if it's isolated, because we've had tsunamis in large cities, nobody does anything about it.
It would have to be, we had Katrina, but that's down there with those people.
It needs to be something that's nationwide, that hits all of us at the same time, where we stop with this bullshit, stop with this polarized bullshit and start talking to each other.
The asteroid, though, has an EMP that hits every single feed that goes to every single camera and TV. And it wipes out every electronic device that's been watching the whole thing.
It has to affect them on some level that actually kick-starts their compassion gene.
You want a balance between your survival gene and your compassion gene.
Because, you know, you've got to figure back a long time ago the thing that helped us...
We weren't stronger, we weren't faster, we weren't larger than the things that were eating us.
We had to be smarter, we had to be clever, we had to come up with ways to create something from nothing to be able to defend ourselves against the predators that were eating us.
So that creative juice was there, and we were establishing food, shelter, and clothing as well as Keeping protected from predators.
And it was that creative side of us, that artistic side of us, that actually was, you know, that's what you have to thank, that creative side of us to keep us ahead of these creatures.
The elements, all these things.
And as time has gone on, when you no longer are threatened by these things, there's plenty of clothes everywhere, pretty much plenty of food everywhere where we live.
No disrespect to the people that get caught up in that broken nail.
Syndrome, but like that is what it is.
It's your it's tragedies are Not tragedies, right?
So we need some kind of life-threatening something that's really global and it's it crosses religious economic Social racial it has to cross all those lines to where people are like What the fuck?
Yeah, it has to expose microaggressions for the preposterous notion that they really are Like, if you get hit in the head with a meteor and someone gets mad at a microaggression, they're two very different things.
Yes, so Hayden Mills is one of the many down in Phoenix that are actually milling the local wheat.
So they're basically cultivating around southern Arizona heirloom wheat and that's the idea.
They're going back to The problem with it, of course, it's always got to give the give and take, is that those heirloom, pure heirloom wheats, they have far less complex glutens in them, and they don't produce as much wheat.
So just your production on an acre of land is significantly lower for the stuff, but it's tastier, it has more nutrients.
And then from there, the next step, of course, is people understanding thyme.
So you're taking that wheat, you're milling it, and then when you go to make your bread, any kind of fermentation in that that you're getting, you're inoculating that to...
Make your bread.
Letting this dough sit overnight, you're letting it rise for a longer period of time because that whole process is breaking down those glutens.
The fermentation, you know, the rising of that dough is almost instantaneous, and it goes right in the oven, and then people are not chewing their food, they're just cramming it in, and it's probably coming from places that are doing a lot of pesticides and all the extra stuff that's going on those crops.
The heirloom wheat movement ends up tying hand in hand with understanding the slow food movement.
Take your minute, chew your food, understand where your food comes from, try to get it organic and local.
What happened is they, over World War I, II, trying to make sure that people are going to be fed during those wars, they were manipulating the wheat so that it was much higher production wheat, but now the flavor's gone, the nutrition's not there.
It being resistant to all these things, all the glutens are very complex, and so when you're actually making the bread out of these things, or making pastas out of them, it's just, there's all this extra crap, you know, if you created a Frankenstein's monster with this wheat.
So your body, of course, is reacting to all those things that have nothing to do with actually having bread or having wheat.
A lot of people try to claim that there's no difference between the weed of today and the weed of the past.
And they also try to claim that the only people that have issues with gluten are people that have gluten sensitivity, celiac disease, things along those lines.
And my gripe with that is that I always feel that the people that say that, they don't have a good sense of their body.
I don't think they're real athletes.
Because I think when you talk to a real athlete, I'm not saying that you can't perform like a real world-class athlete by eating pasta.
You definitely can.
What I think is we want to talk about total optimization.
If you want to talk about your body like running as smoothly as possible, for me at least, I notice a difference between eating a lot of bread and gluten, which I used to do a lot.
And not doing it.
When I don't do it, I just feel better.
I have more energy.
I feel like my body struggles less to digest the food, and I don't have the big crash after the food is over.
It doesn't mean that I can't perform on it.
I don't have a gluten sensitivity issue.
I can eat it.
That's not the problem.
If someone said, oh, you're fine, you eat it, it's no big deal.
It's not that it's no big deal.
I don't think it's the optimal thing to do.
I just think that...
It's delicious.
I don't think it's killing me.
But I don't think if you want to give your body the very best fuel, pasta, like regular pasta, isn't that fuel.
But I wonder if you can get some of that heirloom pasta if you would notice a difference.
I wonder if you would feel the difference in trying the two.
Over here I have wine, and I get hangovers, and I get sick, and I do those things.
So it must be that the Italian wine is better, or has less sulfites, or something like that.
Well, most likely what it was is over here, you're a fat pig, and you sat in your house, and you drank a bottle of wine with your buddies without taking a walk in a foreign country, because you're walking to your restaurant there.
You're having food, and you're eating over the course of three hours with your friends, and you're eating food with your wine.
You're eating less of it.
Most likely it has a lower alcohol content because it's meant to go with food rather than being this Mountain Dew with alcohol in it that you get out of California, right?
You know, it's it's they're all in California once that we did not I did not I did now for a California Arizona thing we're going on maybe it may You're fucked.
But yes, going back to having just the initiation of like understanding the conversation of heirloom wheat and understanding that there's a difference, arguing that there's a difference.
Even if there isn't, now you're looking at it, maybe you're having less of it.
Yeah, I read something about the French, how the French are always eating bread, but they do have that older wheat bread, and they eat a lot of fats with their bread, like it's constantly with butter and oil, and they cook with a lot of butter and oil.
And those carbs and that oil together, apparently it's just a better fit for your digestive system.
I feel like I have my nutrition, which is like I try to eat really healthy food 80% of the time, and then 20% of the time, I like to go to a restaurant and get linguine with clams.
It's just a It's just an experience.
It's a delicious experience.
I know it's not the best thing for me, but it's a treat.
Because one could argue that your well-being is actually increasing your life experience here and your quality of life by having this experience with these people, with these wines, that you'll actually feel better tomorrow or next week because of that interaction, because of that show, even though that's straight butter and that's straight...
Yeah, I think, I mean, in the concerts too, right?
Like, live concerts are kind of that way too, right?
Like, that's a temporary experience.
I mean, there's one thing to listen to a song that you have on your phone, you can listen to it over and over again, but when you're going to see a live concert, you're experiencing the guy, like, on stage, sing that song, you're experiencing the sound coming out of the guitar right when the guy's touching the chords.
I feel like I'm not from believe I just I embrace the storytelling.
I embrace that whole tradition of oral tradition and being able to describe to your friends that sitting around that, you know, fire after a good long day of hunting.
Well, you tell the story of the hunt and you do all those things and those family stories and other, you know, your grandfathers and your great-grandfather stories are told in that setting.
And you have to remember that you're not writing it down.
It's a tradition of understanding the details and being able to explain and expand on the details from your recollection of what you saw.
But if you have no skills of absorbing what you saw, if you rely on this thing, To capture those stories for you, first of all, nothing you're going to get at a show is going to represent what you just saw or what you were there for.
I guess as a postcard, I suppose it works, but it's not...
Stay present.
Stay with these people to be there for this thing.
That's far more important.
And, you know, also as courtesy because maybe the person behind you would like to be that person who's pulling this all in and now your shit's in their way.
So that first barrier we talked about, the ignorance, just getting past, understanding how to just get past not just what you think you know, all those things, erasing everything you think you know, get past your own ignorance, first of all.
Right.
But just then that situational awareness kind of goes hand-in-hand with that Who are you not only in your world, but who are you in other people's world?
When I'm driving, my primary mission is to get out of your way.
I want to get out of the way.
I want to get where I'm going.
I want to get out of the way.
I don't want to have you get out of my way because I'm going to a place.
I'm paying attention to where you are as I'm driving.
Because if I think like that, if I think I'm in your way, this is all going to work out better.
We're all going to get along.
If you think like that on the road, like, I am in your way.
Let me figure out how I can make sure that I'm getting where I'm going.
I'm not going to put myself out.
I'm not just going to pull over to the side of the road while you all drive by.
I'm going to get out of the way so that I make it convenient for you to get where you're going as well.
Like, when you take on something like a restaurant or, you know, opening this jiu-jitsu school or any of the numerous projects that you do, you already are so fucking busy.
Yeah, so it really does come down to understanding.
I'm really good at planning, you know, planning ahead and looking at things.
So if I think, if somebody comes along and says, hey, we're going to do a, we're thinking about doing a film, you want to be in the film, I go, well, when is it?
For example, if you're going to put out vinyl as a band, generally speaking, unless you're somebody who can make some calls and cut some corners, if you're going to deliver a master to actually cut vinyl, and nowadays you want your vinyl to come out on the day that your record comes out.
You don't want it to be a delayed thing and have it all be scattered.
So if you finally get all your shit together, and you've got your masters, you're going to do a thing, then you have to go, okay, well then, once that's there...
The release date can't be any sooner than this date.
Well, if that date is January 1st, that's not good.
So you're going to release a record in the spring.
You're going to release a record in the fall.
That's when you release it, generally speaking.
People release all summer as well, but the optimum times are optimum times.
So just knowing that, okay, well, if it takes that long to produce the record and get, you know, set up press and do interviews, you know, as for lead times in a magazine or online, you know, interviews are scheduled out.
You're always kind of looking ahead to go, well, in order to deliver that master, that means we had to be mastering that piece by here and we had to be mixing and, you know, mixing and then looking at the mixes again and fixing anything.
It's going to retract something, any kind of, you know, scrambling last minute before mixing.
That's going to take this amount of time.
Well, in order to mix, we have to track, right?
So you have to have everything written before you can actually track it to mix it, generally speaking.
So that means all the songs have to be written by this day if you're going to record all of them and mix all of them and master all of them and release them all on the same day, right?
Like, if you give yourself a deadline, like, say, if you say, you know, we have six months to complete this album or whatever it would be, and you have a song that, like, man, it's just something about the songs.
Remember that feeling when you were a kid where you'd get an album and some of the songs were just fucking amazing and then you would hear one or two and you're like, what the fuck is this piece of shit?
Is it like more of a benefit now that you're, I mean, especially, I don't know if now you're dealing with the resurgence of vinyl, but it's been pretty steady over the last few years, right?
Yeah, I think there's still that nostalgic feel of touching the vinyl and being able to have that thing and listen to it.
There is a difference, but I feel like, going back to what you had mentioned earlier about people realizing, I think we need to start looking and talking to each other again and reconnecting, and I feel like vinyl is another tip of that iceberg, of that reconnection of like, It's not long.
Yeah, so one EMP away from all that stuff being gone.
All those experiences you wasted, you were recording the fireworks rather than actually looking at the fireworks, and then you dropped your phone in the toilet, and it's gone.
Yeah, so I think that's the vinyl connection, I think.
There's a lot of guys nowadays, like Tool, for example, they like analog.
They like tracking to tape, and to really translate those things, vinyl is your perfect medium for that thing.
It's just not very convenient.
There's no record stores.
When I released the first Pussifer record in 2007, From the time we started recording that record to the time we released it, there was one number of stores when we started recording, and there was one-fifth the number of stores actually in existence by the time we actually released it.
So now this is all, it's all rolled back to where the small independent stores that weren't greedy, that really had a relationship with their customers, that enjoyed vinyl, that had all those things, those are the ones that have survived and thrived, like Amoeba.
Yeah, well, as a small project like Pustopher, you're, you know, we're writing the checks, so you don't want to overproduce these things, because then you're kind of sitting on them.
And for us, at the level that we're operating...
You always want to operate in that level where it's...
Just their process and their writing process is so drawn out.
I'm sure there's a lot of reasons that go into why the delay has been so long.
But when you have a project like that, there's always going to be time for me to do other things.
And I will definitely...
I just like doing it.
I like doing it more.
I like to release records and write things a little more quickly than those guys like to write.
So their process is...
Very analytical and I think you know at some point maybe because so much time has gone by with from the last album there has to be some a little bit of fear in there you know in your gut like how is this record going to be as good as the last one you know the anticipation now is now the pressure is huge so I'm sure there's some of that goes into play but as far as the way that Danny and Adam and Justin write It's a very tedious,
long process.
And they're always going back over things and questioning what they did and stepping back and going back farther and going forward.
And in a way, it's like they're laying a foundation.
They're putting in the footings for a house.
So I can't write melodies until the footings are in place.
until the melodies are in place.
So I can't build walls and then start decorating this place until the foundation is in place.
Because if they keep changing the foundation, changing the footings, the melodies change, and then the story, of course, isn't getting written.
So that's where we are.
I mean, there's a lot of footings that keep shifting.
Lots of awesome footings, but they keep changing.
And they keep changing their minds.
So I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
Yeah, so like, you know, when you have a lot of very strong-willed, stubborn, opinionated people that have had success, myself included, like when you give somebody some success, they're pretty convinced they're right.
You're sitting there, and you're on your fucking break, and you're smoking a cigarette, and you're farting, and you're sitting there, and you're like, fuck this song, fuck this outfit, fuck his head.
So, you know, so in my brother's defense, even Billy from Perfect Circle, he's slow-moving as well.
But he has a lot of, you know, now we're starting to work on stuff that it's taken many years for him to kind of build up the cache of things that we're, you know, we're digging into to look at things that have been in development for, you know, the last six, eight, ten years.
Well, it took me a while to, like, you know, my desire to move forward, go, go, go, and get things done, you know, I'm always butting heads with the guys in the band in Tool.
To get those things done.
It's just not their process.
So it took me a while for me to go, this is not personal.
This is just them.
This is just the way that they have to do it.
And I have to respect it.
And I have to take my time and let them take their time.
And I just check in.
I just go, I come and I see what's going on.
Hey, Justin, send me the track, see where we're at.
Is this thing done?
If this thing is done, done, done, and I can start writing...
Words and music on it?
Great.
But I've had instances where I've started to write stuff, and by the time I actually got it around and back and were actually listening and whatever, the song had gone in a completely different direction, so everything that was written melody-wise or lyric-wise was completely irrelevant.
We're definitely very strong, four very strong personalities.
You know, with Billy, working with Billy with Perfect Circle, he gets a little forest for trees sometimes, and I'm like the guy going, what?
Step back, look at it.
And then I'm out the door.
Poor guy's going, where'd you go?
And then, you know, working with Matt Mitchell and Karina and Pussifer.
We all generally work with or for other projects and other people, so when we get together, we are fucking streamlined organized.
We go, okay, I'll check in with the guys in Tool and go, okay, where are we at?
What do we got?
Are we there?
Are we going to track tomorrow?
Because if we're going to track tomorrow, I can tell you, great, then we're going to line this up.
But if we're not going to track tomorrow, and it's going to take this much time, Well, then I'm going to do this other thing while we're telling me when that day is.
When you write something, say if you have an idea, if you're just sitting around and you're like, I have a thought, do you just sit down and do you go, okay, this is a Tool song, this is a Perfect Circle song, this is a Pussifer song, does it just like...
I write to the music, because that way it's a unique island situation.
Whenever I've tried to write, I've had some poetry sitting over here that I want to write, and I try to force it onto a song for any of those projects.
I think it was Adam or Justin who had the riff, and at some point they were actually counting the riff, and it ended up being in 789. I think it was like a...
A measure of seven, a measure of nine.
I'm not sure how you would actually write that out in notation, but I think 789 is a Fibonacci number.
It might be 987. For people who don't know what the fuck we're talking about, the Fibonacci sequence is a very unique mathematical sequence that appears in nature.
It's in fractals.
It's in sunflowers.
If you look at, like, the pattern of sunflower seeds, if you look at nautilus shells, and what it is, it's an expanding fractal sort of a mathematical equation.
I don't know if I'm saying it correctly, but it's like...
The first step is zero, and then there's one, and then there's one, one, two, three, five, eight.
But that's the Fibonacci number, like the whole number, like actual number sequence.
There's the phi ratio, 1.618, anything multiplied by the 1.618, or not multiplied, the relationship.
The difference in the length from this finger to this finger as opposed to this finger to that finger, those knuckles and your digits, those are all in that relationship of 1.618, the phi relationship, so the fractals.
And then the number breakdown is, as you said, it's 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Yeah, so like 1 plus 1 is 2, 2 plus 1 is 3, 3 plus 2 is 5, 5 plus 3 is 8. And it's like everything you count, you add what came before it.
Well, also facial structure, which is really fascinating.
There's something about human facial structure that uses the Fibonacci sequence, and I read somewhere about why people recognize plastic surgery while it disturbs them.
Like, when someone has a uniquely small nose and their face, you know, they might have a long, like, Ari Shaffir-type face, but then they have this, like, shrunken down nose.
But, you know, in a way, a song like La Torella's with the Fibonacci thing, I feel like I kind of pulled a very pedestrian, sophomoric move by including those numbers in there, because in general, music is...
The Phi Ratio.
Everything that, all nature, all these things we're talking about, it's already here.
By pointing it out, like, staring at it and pointing at it with those numbers present and the way that the numbers and the lyrics are, I feel like that, you know, it's good to let people know about it, but I almost feel like it was kind of a, it was kind of a dick joke, in a way.
He drove me as hard, if not harder, than his other students.
He didn't show any favoritism.
But one of the things that was always his thing on the mat, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, but basically you either win or you learn, especially in that high school or college setting.
You're You're learning about yourself.
If you went out there and you got your ass handed to you and you just got beat and didn't learn anything, well, yeah, you're a fucking loser.
You take the moment, reflect on it, build on what you did wrong, and now you're actually, in a way, you've won.
Now you know more about yourself.
You know about more your limitations or what you need to improve and expand your talents or your limitations.
So...
I guess whenever I'm doing a thing, I'm always looking at it from a learning perspective.
So there aren't necessarily mistakes unless they're fatal.
That really is the right way to look at everything.
You win or you learn.
You know, you have great experiences because you're successful, or you have very beneficial experiences because you realized what went wrong.
It's just one more wrinkle, one more piece of information, or one more experience that you can add to your database of knowledge, and it'll make you better at everything you do.
It's one flub joke or one one premise that you botched and just Yeah, you wake up.
I'll wake up to pee and go fuck, you know, just I have to go downstairs and get in front of the computer And just start writing again, you know, just get angry.
I gotta fix this fucking thing I gotta figure out what's wrong with it.
I gotta make it bulletproof and Yeah, you're a unique guy in that you're all these different things that you're doing.
I feel like they kind of like work synergistically.
I'm a storyteller, so I'm involved in a lot of life.
I'm doing things on many levels because in order to tell a full, more complete picture, a better story, having more information, a good actor is going to do his research on the character beyond the character.
He's going to find out about the region the character is supposedly from and their family's history.
They're going to add all these things in so that when they have their one line, all that history is behind their eyes.
So I feel like that's, you know, for writing, for winemaking, they're all crossing over together.
They're all feeding each other to make it a whole presentation.
Yeah, when you're managing the You know a crop of grapes and putting together a wine and you got a restaurant going on you're working on your jujitsu and then you're writing songs You're living all these different experiences.
You have so much feeding into your consciousness There's so many variables that you're attending to that it just keeps your mind sharp and fresh and and it creates I mean, not necessarily like conflict, but issues.
There's live things that need to be figured out and solutions need to be created for problems.
It's not like there's something that happens to certain people, they get too locked into one thing, I feel, that they just run out of juice, they run out of things to discuss, they run out of perspective.
I mean, you know, during the 70s, 80s era of music coming out, first two records are probably, those people spent their whole lives writing those two records.
With comics, it's usually you have one or two good specials and then there's a big drop-off.
You know, I think it's guys run out of stuff to talk about and usually you work for like Ten years before you do anything before you release anything.
They're the best guys It seems like they worked like ten ten years and then they put out an album Or a comedy special or whatever it is and then you just your your life is about performing your life is about doing that thing and you don't have enough Options outside of that like a lot of comics turn to airline jokes and you know and things like Hotels and you start talking about that like that's your experience.
It's constantly being on what's what you're exposed to talk about what you know right what you know Yeah, and that's what you all you know now is a fucking delayed flight But I don't know anybody else who's doing it like your way, like rock-style way, also runs a vineyard, also regularly-trained jiu-jitsu.
And he's just sharpening his chops on the theater stage because he's a true, that guy's a real deal.
But he's on CSI to get PAID! Yeah, I guess initially, I think most likely when that whole new era of TV was coming out, it probably seemed like a good idea for him to kind of just, you know, he probably had some bills to pay and he wanted to get on there, thinking it was going to be a couple seasons and he's going to get out of there, but then you're under contract and they're going, we'll keep you around if you do this, but I want to do this theater thing.
I want to go do, you know, Shakespeare in the park.
You know, Johnny Depp, when he started doing those Pirates of the Caribbean movies, you know, it's interesting, like, Johnny Depp at one point in time, and I'm a Johnny Depp fan, I think he's a great actor, seems like a wild dude, and he's buddies with my friend Stan Hope, and Stan Hope loves him, so he's got to be a good guy.
He did a lot of really cool weird projects and then he did the Pirates of the Caribbean and that fucking group of movies has been so wildly successful that he's just made ungodly amounts of money to the point where he was spending so much fucking money they had some breakdown because he's involved in some lawsuit with his former manager.
He's suing his former manager.
He was spending $150,000 a month on private security, 24 hours a day.
Among his most extravagant expenses listed in the countersuit were $3 million spent to blast Hunter Thompson's ashes out of a cannon and $30,000 a month spent on wine, the New York Post gossip column Page Six reported.
Yeah, well, they're the same cunts that said that Ronda Rousey and Travis Brown are washed-up losers.
Yeah, but like, you know, just that whole politically correct thing, but then the anti-intellectualism that comes from what I would consider the lower right.
Yeah, there's a far right that it does go anti-intellectualism, and then there's a far left that even though they might be more well-read and maybe intellectual, they put up these blinders.
I mean, there's not a lot of, like, across-the-board objectivity.
There's a lot of people formulating these preformed patterns of opinions that, you know, conservative opinions and just clinging to it or liberal opinions and clinging to it.
I think most people really share, like, ideas that are conservative and liberal.
And I think what's really important, we should be able to discuss these ideas without digging our heels in and just, like, being fully committed to one team or the other team.
That's where the problem lies.
People are so tribal.
Whether it's conservative or liberal, even libertarian, they go real tribal.
And they just, like, lock onto those ideas, and this is right, and that is wrong, and, you know, and it just, people don't want, they don't want to give in.
And so then they fight, and they dig their heels in, and they, you know, they fight their opinion.
Yeah, Dr. Bentley's case and several hundred others like it have been labeled spontaneous human combustion, although he and other victims of the phenomenon burned almost completely.
Their surroundings and even sometimes their clothes remained virtually untouched.
Well, that's just fucking bullshit.
What website is this?
Listen, bitch, if you're on fire, you're fucking...
Clothes are gonna catch fire, too.
Unless someone's using pixie magic on you.
Did you get hit with a magic wand wielded by an elf, you cunt?
If spontaneous human combustion isn't real, then what really occurred to the many pictures that exist of charred bodies, a possible explanation is the wick effect, which proposes that the body, when lit by a cigarette, smolding, ember, or other heat source, acts much like an inside-out candle.
A candle is composed of a wick on the inside, surrounded by a wax made of flammable fatty acids.
The wax ignites the wick and keeps it burning.
In the human body, the body's fat acts as a flammable substance, and the victim's clothing or hair acts as the wick.
As the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing and acts as a wax-like substance to keep the wick burning slowly.
Scientists say this is why the victim's bodies are destroyed, yet their surroundings are barely burnt.
Whoa.
So they're so fat that we become like a big greasy candle.
But most scientists say that there are more likely explanations for the charred remains.
Like, your wife fucking hates you, she hit you in the head with a frying pan, lit your ass on fire, threw you in the tub, and say, I don't even know what happened!
I think it's one of them Ripleys believe it or not things!
And then, you know, she's seen in the embrace of the hardware store manager.
It's kind of insidious, though, if you really look at it objectively.
Like, it's okay as long as they peacefully suck the vitality out of your body with chemical-dipped plants wrapped in paper that they trick you into sucking on once you light them on fire, and your body becomes accustomed and addicted to it.
And we're like, hey, it's a stress-relieving choice.
New York City is smaller than this fucking earthquake.
Earthquake.
This iceberg.
That's insane.
So it's separated.
Do they have a satellite image of this thing?
It's separated and floated off and it's gonna come slamming right into the Santa Monica Pier.
Look at that.
You can see it as they fly over it.
Oh my god.
Look at that photo.
That's fucking insane.
The photo is someone took it from a plane.
You're looking down with the wings.
And where was it?
Was it in Greenland?
Where did it break off?
Antarctica?
Antarctica.
Is that the ice wall that separates us from the flat earth?
There's all these assholes that say you can't fly over Antarctica online.
You absolutely can, you piece of shit.
Not only that, Anthony Bourdain just filmed a show from there.
He was in Antarctica, you dumb cunts.
He filmed the show.
He landed in Antarctica.
He talked to the people that work in the science department there, whatever the fuck they do, running experiments, trying to keep the Russians from invading.
You know, I think that's one of the unheralded factors in people's obesity is not just the diet, which is a huge factor for sure, but also the requirements that you're asking of your body.
Bodies are not used to sitting around doing nothing.
I think they're going to schedule it again for the event that is after the end of July event.
I think it's 2-15 they're going to schedule it for.
But then, you know, like Dana White said, now Amanda Nunes would never headline an event again.
I just don't think you can force someone to fight if she really did have a significant injury.
Like, they said that the doctors cleared her to fight.
You know, a significant illness, I should say.
They said the doctors cleared her to fight, but she chose not to.
That was like the company word.
But if she was that fucked up, I just can't imagine she wasn't that fucked up.
I mean, it's got to suck if you spent millions of dollars promoting a fight, and then here it is, and then people bought the pay-per-view, and then it falls apart, and you've got to give refunds, and I don't know what the fuck.
Welcome to the music industry when it was at its big peak in the 90s and people were writing big checks for stuff and like, oh yeah, we're going to get Mariah Carey for millions of dollars.
And, you know, with fighters, one little dumb thing, walking up the stairs to the octagon, you can pull, you know, your ACL fucking separates from your body.
Kevin Randleman was backstage preparing for a fight once, and he stepped on a pipe and slipped and fell on his head and was concussed.
Yeah, like right before the main event.
Right before the main event, he was walking backstage, he stepped on something, slipped, his leg went up on him, he hit his fucking head, and he was concussed, and they canceled the fight.
And then for a fighter, there's so much about who they are is dependent upon their confidence and their state of mind.
And if she hears that the UFC has pissed at her, she had to pull out of the fight, and then they say that they'll never have her headlined at an event again, I mean, she goes from being this Superstar with two spectacular performances against the most popular women's fighters of all time.
Those two, between Misha Tate and Ronda Rousey, I would say, arguably, they're the most popular women fighters of all time.
Coincidentally, they're both the hottest.
How weird.
If you're going to be a chick and you've got to be a fighter, it helps a lot if you're hot.
I got yelled at, like, what do you have against people that are, you know, like, transgender, like, you know, you're giving up your junk if you lose to Rhonda, like, that's a bad thing.
It's, okay.
In a bet, here's how it works.
You have something that you want to hang on to and keep.
I have something I want to hang on to and keep, whether it's money or whatever.
And the bet is that if you lose, you have to give up the thing that you want to keep.
You don't lose a bet and then give up something you were willing to get rid of anyway.
You can't have balls in a jar and make it seem like it's a bad thing if someone identifies with the type of person that wants to have their balls in a jar.
It's what you want under the seat in front of you.
Great.
Ooh, your other bag is too big, but that's my carry-on bag.
Yeah, but now that you're bringing a dog on, that is your carry-on bag, and that bag you have doesn't fit under the seat in front of you, which is where my dog's gonna be.
So the point is that if I had a personal item, that goes under the seat in front of me, and the rolling bag goes up in that upper space that you have paid for.
Right.
But they're telling me, like, no, the dog is now the carry-on bag.
So you want me to put my dog in the overhead bin?
No, it has to go under the seat in front of you.
But you told me that carry-on bags go in the overhead bin.
It's all this, like, red tape, catch-22 crap.
But is your dog an ESA? Is it an emotional support animal?
It can be.
Does it have to be?
Yeah, because if you have that, then we don't charge you anything, and you can actually bring on all three of those items.
Your dog, your carry-on, and your personal item.
Bring three bags on if your dog is an emotional support animal.
There's a restaurant that I go to that one of those ladies used to be hot back in the Disney, and now she used to be on that Desperate Housewives show.
Now she's kind of getting up there in the years and getting a little wackier and wackier, I'm sure, as time goes on.
She brings in a full-grown golden lab.
This silly bitch.
This dog is like sitting down where everybody's forks go.
It's dirty assholes touching the ground where people accidentally drop their spoon.
It's such a big dog.
It's so gross.
There's like something about a little dog sitting in someone's lap at a restaurant that's like...
It seems stupid, but maybe not so bad.
But a lab, a fucking 70-pound big-ass dog laying on the ground, and this crazy bitch is putting everybody else, imposing her situation on everybody else.
Your body has a certain amount of flexibility to it.
But the way they've done it...
Well, here's a perfect example of how much biodiversity is.
Where it comes to your body's ability to absorb carbohydrates and how it reacts.
Rob Wolf, who is a scientist and a big paleo researcher guy, he's got an interesting Instagram page.
I think it's Das Rob Wolf.
Instagram.
But what he does is he'll eat something and he'll have his wife eat something and then they'll do these tests, you know, like blood tests to find out where their ketones are and whether or not they're in a ketogenic state.
And his body is like way more fragile in terms of like it's getting knocked off of ketosis than his wife's body.
His wife just rebounds better.
She has better genetics for it.
They obviously live together.
They're eating the same foods.
There's a lot of variables involved in how your body processes carbs.
It's like some people have celiac.
Some people are gluten sensitive.
Some people have no problem eating a big bowl of rice and they stay in ketosis.
And with some people that just knocks them right out of it and their body goes right back to burning carbs.
It depends also on how strict you've been in the ketogenic diet and how long you've done it for.
But there's a lot of critics of that diet, too.
There's a lot of people that cry bullshit on that.
I don't know if they're crying.
I think some of the people that cry bullshit, though, they don't really have much of a science background, and they're also been shown a certain way.
I tried to stick as closely as I could to the ketogenic diet, but it probably wasn't a ketogenic diet.
I was just basically making sure that I wasn't eating any sugar any fruit any carbs yeah that I you know that I know of I was eating within a 10-hour window.
So if I got up at 10 a.m.
And I had anything to eat I didn't eat anything after eight And I was trying to work out, you know do something for an hour a day.
Yeah, I agree, but what I've found is that raw milk and raw cheese, in particular, both those things, I seem to digest them way easier than I do the pasteurized and homogenized versions.
I think the trick when you get into that, you start getting into that gluttonous activity with your world.
It's the moderation part because you get caught up in like more is better and cramming it in and just being able to slow down and actually enjoy those experiences without just...
And some places that are paranoid about where that wine is going and how long it's going to be sitting in a truck and maybe it's not going to be refrigerated, they're probably adding a little bit too much.
And there are some places that are actually adding, you know, other weird stuff, you know, enzymes and stuff into their wines.
In the process.
But in my cellar, it's basically, it's the yeast holes, it's the yeast, and at the end it's SO2. We're not doing any other weird additives.
So the idea that there's like all these chemicals and all these extra things we're jamming into our wines is ridiculous.
But, you know, wines, in theory, there's places that just the natural structure of that place, the pH, the acid balances of those places.
And depending on how well or not well the winemaker got out of the way to make sure that that wine made it into bottle, it was proper.
The storage of it, the cork, how that went.
There's so many, so many, so many variables.
But when you're talking about the track record of a particular site and a producer, there are wines that you just expect.
If I'm going to buy this Latour, I'm going to buy this fine Burgundy, you expect that that wine has been held to a standard for a long period of time, like throughout decades, millennia.
They have been consistent.
So you expect that I should be able to lay this wine down for 50 years and it should be okay.
It'll be different in 50 years, provided none of those other variables, like somebody didn't pull it out and leave it on the counter in the sun for a week and then put it back in the cellar and 50 years later you open it and it's crap.
That's why some guys buy a case or two cases of a wine that they know they're going to like, and they're trying them over time, and they're figuring it out.
And then they'll have that wine, and they'll go, hey, guys, I just had the tenth bottle of wine from those 24 bottles, and it's starting to go over the hill.
So there's a little forum or somebody calling each other back and forth going, hey, I think this particular wine has seen its best day.
And they'll get back online and somebody will go, no, mine's fine.
There'll be arguments about that.
But generally speaking, it's that communication of guys saying...
Yeah, again, everybody wants to, everybody's trying to find their way in life and try to find what makes them better than or different than or separates them or elevates them.
Yeah, still water, but also, you know, if you have in a situation where you have, like New Orleans, complete devastation of the water table, there's like decomposing bodies everywhere, and you can't drink the groundwater, you can't trust what's coming out of your well.
Yeah.
Fermented juice is what you...
We drink because it's safe because it's gone through a fermentation process, a process of purification, just like vodka, the water of life.
It's the water that doesn't freeze, so you can go through the tundra.
If you try to eat snow, you're going to freeze to death.
If you try to melt the snow you're building, if you do have a fire, but the actual water of vodka doesn't freeze, then you can actually survive.
You have to have water while you're walking through this frozen tundra.
And then people started drinking mead and then mead culture changed the way people, alcohol culture, which is like a regressive, you know, losing inhibitions, wild culture.
Is there any movement to bring back those leather wine sacks?
Well, they do growlers, so if you walk into a beer bar, I think they allow you to bring in, if it's measured out, what that volume is, and you can refill your growler with beer.
So like, you know, the TTP gets all weird and the liquor department gets all weird because like, well, the bottle has all the labeling on it that I need to make sure that you're, are you pregnant?
But you don't want to put it in your fridge because it's going to get too cold.
It will?
Yeah.
If you're going to drink it fairly right away, if you go to the store and you're going to get a bottle of wine, you want to cram it in the fridge for the day to open it up that night, that's fine.
But if you store your wine in the fridge, that's a little too cold.
Well, this producer uses a lot of natural fermentation and they, you know, they definitely do it, you know, with their feed and like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.